I discussed the main three omni- things that people like to describe God as: Omnipotent (almighty), omnipresent (ubiquitous and eternal), and omniscient (knows all). There is a fourth term, omnibenevolent, that isn’t usually listed among them. That’s because the term was coined only in the past four centuries. But Christians have taught its idea, and repeat it regularly: “God is good, all the time.”
Problem is, no matter how much we say this, not everyone believes this. They have a hard time believing that God is almighty and good, and yet we live in a world where evil exists. Because if they were God, evil would cease to exist: They’d use their almightiness to stamp it out. No more evil, no more pain, no more sickness, no more death. Like New Jerusalem, (Rv 21.3-4) only now, not later.
Hence people have come up with theodicy, the defense of God whenever terrible things happen, where we try to make the argument that God is good and would never be behind such things. Or that if He is, He has a good reason for it; one that’s good in the end, even if right now things look awful.
I won’t delve into theodicy too much, ’cause I did that already. Instead let’s look at goodness.
Goodness as defined by God.
Goodness is a fruit of the Holy Spirit, and of course fruits of the Spirit are characteristics of the Spirit: His followers are good because He is good.
Most of the time people define “good” as “whatever is beneficial [to me].” I put “to me” in brackets because people don’t always say them, but people almost always mean them. Even when we’re thinking about something that benefits another person, we’re either thinking, “This is good for them because I would appreciate it being done for me,” or more selfishly, “This is good for them because it benefits me.” Self-interest is either the gauge or the outcome. And while there’s nothing at all wrong with it being the gauge, (Mt 7.12) the benefit to society—but mostly the benefactor—is pretty frequently aimed at, and though goodness can come out of it, it’s really just incidental.
That said, is good the same as beneficial? No. Because sometimes evil is beneficial. If I owned a slave, it would benefit me, but certainly not the slave. We can debate how being a slave-owner, and justifying all the evil done to my slave, would corrupt my character; but if I unknowingly took advantage of slave labor—as most Westerners do—I would still benefit, and it would still be evil.
Nope; the terms aren’t interchangeable. While good things are beneficial, not all beneficial things are good. Obviously the moral quality is part of it; and its moral quality can’t purely come from how practical or pragmatic it is, otherwise we’re back to equating good with beneficial. And Christians believe the moral quality has to come from God. God determines what’s good.
Now: If God is the standard for what’s good and what isn’t, and points to Jesus as the standard for how good is to be lived out, then good is the same as God’s standard. Which means God is only good if He lives up to His own standard. In fact, when people in the scriptures have tried to talk God into something, that’s usually what they point out to Him.
The LORD remained with Abraham. Abraham approached Him and said, “Will You sweep away both the righteous and the wicked? Suppose You find fifty righteous people living there in the city—will You still sweep it away and not spare it for their sakes? Surely You wouldn’t do such a thing, destroying the righteous along with the wicked. Why, You would be treating the righteous and the wicked exactly the same! Surely You wouldn’t do that! Should not the judge of all the earth do what is right?”
And the LORD replied, “If I find fifty righteous people in Sodom, I will spare the entire city for their sake.”
The LORD said, “I have seen how stubborn and rebellious these people are. Now leave Me alone so My fierce anger can blaze against them, and I will destroy them. Then I will make you, Moses, into a great nation.”
But Moses tried to pacify the LORD his God. “O LORD!” he said. “Why are You so angry with Your own people whom You brought from the land of Egypt with such great power and such a strong hand? Why let the Egyptians say, ‘Their God rescued them with the evil intention of slaughtering them in the mountains and wiping them from the face of the earth’? Turn away from Your fierce anger. Change Your mind about this terrible disaster You have threatened against your people! Remember Your servants Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. You bound Yourself with an oath to them, saying, ‘I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars of heaven. And I will give them all of this land that I have promised to your descendants, and they will possess it forever.’ ”
So the LORD changed His mind about the terrible disaster He had threatened to bring on His people.
As angry as we can make God, He ultimately won’t be inconsistent with His character, and He is really easy to talk Him into things when 99.999 percent of our argument is based on God knowing that in the end, He won’t be anything but good.
It’s what Jonah found so frustrating about Him.
When God saw what [the Assyrians] had done and how they had put a stop to their evil ways, He changed his mind and did not carry out the destruction He had threatened.
This change of plans greatly upset Jonah, and he became very angry. So he complained to the LORD about it: “Didn’t I say before I left home that You would do this, LORD? That is why I ran away to Tarshish! I knew that You are a merciful and compassionate God, slow to get angry and filled with unfailing love. You are eager to turn back from destroying people. Just kill me now, LORD! I’d rather be dead than alive if what I predicted will not happen.”
The LORD replied, “Is it right for you to be angry about this?”
So, a lot of Christians don’t really debate about whether God is good. They take it as a given. If God defines good, and God exemplifies good, then of course He’s good. What else is there to compare good with? They equate God with good, and good with God. God is good? All the time.
The folks who debate whether God is actually good do it from one of two points of view. Either God isn’t consistent with His own standard of goodness; or either God’s standard of goodness isn’t truly good.
Those who say God isn’t consistent.
Most of the time, the argument that God isn’t consistent comes down to this one: “First God says ‘Don’t kill,’ (Ex 20.13 = Dt 5.17 KJV) then He turns around and has the Hebrews genocidally kill the Amorites. Throughout the bible, God authorizes some rather nasty, violent bloodshed; and yet we claim that this vengeful God is the same as the father of Jesus, and that God is love. What’s up with that?”
Foolishly, a lot of Christians actually buy this argument, and try to defend the nasty, violent bloodshed by saying either, “Well, ‘don’t kill’ is actually don’t murder, (Ex 20.13 = Dt 5.17) but that just means we can’t just kill on our own; there needs to be due process. Like a war. See, God is love, but God is also just, and justice dictates….” And since the American justice system has completely confused many Christians as to what “justice” means in the scriptures, they go astray. To our straw man, it sounds exactly like they’re arguing how God is love, yet isn’t love, at the same time. It’s doubletalk: Not only is He not consistent, but neither are we. We’ve proved them right.
The correct response is that God is just, meaning God is fair: He takes what’s wrong, and sets it right. The Amorites were Ba’alists: They practiced human sacrifice. They made their children into temple sex-slaves. They exploited the weak and raided their neighbors. They had centuries to repent of this, and refused to. Which makes more sense: Coexist with such people and tolerate their behavior, or stop that behavior before it spread? It’d take a war. And as we can see from the bible, the Hebrews actually didn’t wipe them all out, and wound up practicing those very things themselves—just as God had warned, and tried to prevent. Like the Amorites, it corrupted the Hebrews, and made them oblivious to the untold suffering of Ba’alism’s victims.
Those who claim God isn’t consistent simply don’t know enough of their bible and history to make that claim. The very few that do know their bible might have some valid concerns—but in my experience, they’re usually misinterpreting either bible or history, and sometimes deliberately so, because they don’t want to follow God, and any excuse will do.
Those who say God isn’t the standard.
Which brings me to the other argument: What God says is good, isn’t necessarily. Those who argue this point to commands they consider impractical (God says to cancel debts every seven years, Dt 15.1, but that would overthrow our economy) or commands they consider immoral (God says you can buy foreigners as slaves, Lv 25.44, but slavery is evil; look what Americans used to do as a result of following this verse).
Again, Christians foolishly buy this argument, and some of us argue that those are Old Testament commands, and don’t count anymore, contrary to what Jesus teaches.
The correct response is that again, these passages need to be looked at in their proper biblical and historical context. If the whole of God’s commands were followed, slavery would look nothing at all like what was practiced in America: Slaves would be treated as dependents, not property, and Christian slaves would be recognized as sisters and brothers in Christ. And if debts were canceled across the board every seven years, and the economy was adjusted to accommodate this, people wouldn’t in essence become slaves to the banks. God’s system can work when universally applied, but human greed has always got in its way, and following it piecemeal—and in our own understanding rather than trying to reflect God’s ideals—will indeed produce evil, just as it did with American slavery.
Believing God is good.
G.K. Chesterton wrote in What’s Wrong with the World, chapter 5, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.” People would much rather go their own way and assume that is good, and try whatever bits and pieces of God’s way that sound reasonable to them. They don’t attempt to practice the whole. They don’t believe that God is good all the time. It’s a faith thing, but they lack faith. “God is good all the time” is just a thing they say, but don’t believe.
But part of developing our faith is to test whether these things are true. Is God good? We learn He is by assuming He is, following Him, and seeing whether He really does sort things out for His followers. (Ro 8.28) We only know it’s true when we’ve acted on our belief; and you can take the first step from there.