Chapter 7
“The Lord Is Good”
“O taste and see that the
Lord is good; blessed is the man that trusteth in him.”
Have you ever asked yourself what you honestly think of
God down at the bottom of your heart whether you believe Him to be a good God or
a bad God? I dare say the question will shock you, and you will be horrified at
the suggestion that you could by any possibility think that God is a bad God.
But before you have finished this chapter, I suspect some of you will be forced
to acknowledge that, unconsciously perhaps, but nonetheless truly, you have, by
your doubts and your upbraiding, attributed to Him a character that you would be
horrified to have attributed to yourself.
I shall never forget the hour when I first discovered
that God was really good. I had, of course, always known that the Bible said He
was good, but I had thought it only meant He was religiously good; and it had
never dawned on me that it meant He was actually and practically good, with the
same kind of goodness He has commanded us to have. The expression, “The goodness
of God,” had seemed to me nothing more than a sort of heavenly statement, which
I could not be expected to understand. And then one day I came in my reading of
the Bible across the words, “O taste and see that the Lord is good,” and
suddenly they meant something. The Lord is good, I repeated to myself. What does
it mean to be good? What but this, the living up to the best and highest that
one knows. To be good is exactly the opposite of being bad. To be bad is to know
the right and not to do it, but to be good is to do the best we know. And I saw
that, since God is omniscient, He must know what is the best and highest good of
all, and that therefore His goodness must necessarily be beyond question. I can
never express what this meant to me. I had such a view of the real actual
goodness of God that I saw nothing could possibly go wrong under His care, and
it seemed to me that no one could ever be anxious again. And over and over, when
appearance have been against Him, and when I have been tempted to question
whether He had not been unkind, or neglectful, or indifferent, I have been
brought up short by the words, “The Lord is good”; and I have seen that it was
simply unthinkable that a God who was good could have done the bad things I had
imagined.
You shrink with horror, perhaps, from the suggestion
that you could under any circumstances, even in the secret depths of your heart,
attribute to God what was bad. And yet you do not hesitate to accuse Him of
doing things, which if one of your friends should do them, you would look upon
as most dishonorable and unkind. For instance, Christians get into trouble; all
looks dark, and they have no sense of the Lord’s presence. They begin to
question whether the Lord has not forsaken them, and sometimes even accuse Him
of indifference and neglect. And they never realize that these accusations are
tantamount to saying that the Lord does not keep His promises, and does not
treat them as kindly and honorable as they expect all their human friends to
treat them. If one of our human friends should forsake us because we were in
trouble, we would consider such a friend as very far from being good. How is it,
then, that we can even for one moment accuse our Lord of such actions? No, dear
friend, if the Lord is good, not pious only, but really good, it must be because
He always under every circumstance acts up to the highest ideal of that which He
Himself has taught us is goodness. Goodness in Him must mean, just as it does
with us, the living up to the best and highest He knows.
Practically, then, it means that He will not neglect any
of His duties toward us, and that He will always treat us in the best possible
way. This may sound like a platitude, and you may exclaim, “Why tell us this,
for it is what we all believe?” But do you? If you did, would it be possible for
you ever to think He was neglectful, or indifferent, or unkind, or
self-absorbed, or inconsiderate? Do not put on a righteous air, and say, “Oh,
but I never do accuse Him of any such things. I would not dare to.” Do you not?
Have you never laid to His charge things you would scorn to do yourselves? How
was it when that last grievous disappointment came? Did you not feel as if the
Lord had been unkind in permitting such a thing to come upon you, when you were
trying so hard to serve Him? Do you never look upon His will as a tyrannical and
arbitrary will, that must be submitted to, or course, but that could not by any
possibility be loved? Does it never seem to you a hard thing to say, “Thy will
be done”? But could it seem hard if you really believed that the Lord is good,
and that He always does that which is good?
The Lord Jesus took great care to tell us that He was a
good Shepherd, because He knew how often appearances would be against Him, and
how tempted we should be to question His goodness. “I am a good Shepherd,” He
says in effect, “not a bad one. Bad shepherds neglect and forsake their sheep,
but I am a good Shepherd, and never neglect nor forsake My sheep. I give My life
for the sheep.” His ideal of goodness in a shepherd was that the shepherd must
protect the sheep entrusted to his care, even at the cost of his own life; and
He came up to His own ideal. Now, can we not see that if we really believe that
He is good, not in some mysterious, religious way, but in this common-sense,
human way, we shall be brought out into a large place of peace and comfort at
once. If I am a sheep, and the Lord is a good Shepherd, in the ordinary
common-sense definition of good, how utterly secure I am! How sure I may
be of the best of care in every respect! How safe I am for time and for
eternity!
Let us be honest with ourselves. Have we never in our
secret hearts accused the Lord of the characteristics that He has told us in
Ezekiel are the marks of a bad shepherd. Have we not thought that He cared for
His own comfort or glory more than He cared for ours? Have we not complained
that He has not strengthened us when we were weak, or bound up our broken
hearts, or sought for us when we were lost? Have we not even actually looked
upon our diseased, and helpless, and lost condition, as a reason why He would
not any longer have anything to do with us? In what does this differ from if we
should say out plump and plain, the Lord is a bad shepherd, and does not fulfill
His duties to His sheep. You shrink in horror, perhaps, at this translation of
your inward murmurings and complainings, but what else, I ask you, can they in
all honesty mean? It is of vital importance now and then to drag out our secret
thoughts and feelings about the Lord into the full light of the Holy Spirit,
that we may see what our attitude about Him really is. It is fatally easy to get
into a habit of wrong thoughts about God, thoughts which will insensibly
separate us from Him by a wide gulf of doubt and unbelief. More than anything
else, more even than sin, wrong thoughts about God sap the foundations of our
spiritual life, and grieve His heart of love. We can understand this from
ourselves. Nothing grieves us so much as to have our friends misjudge and
misunderstand us, and attribute to us motives we scorn. And nothing, I believe,
so grieves the Lord. It is, in fact, idolatry. For what is idolatry but creating
and worshipping a false God, and what are we doing but this very thing, when we
allow ourselves to misjudge Him, and attribute to Him actions and feelings that
are unkind and untrustworthy.
It is called in the Bible a speaking against God. “Yea,
they spake against God; they said, Can God furnish a table in the wilderness?”
This seemed a very innocent question to ask. But God had promised to supply all
their needs in the wilderness; and to ask this question implied a secret want of
confidence in His ability to do as He had promised; and it was therefore, in
spite of its innocent appearance, a real “speaking against” Him. A good God
could not have led His people into the wilderness, and then have failed to
“furnish a table” for them; and to question whether He was able to do it was to
imply that He was not good. In the same way we are sometimes sorely tempted to
ask a similar question. Circumstances often seem to make it so impossible for
God to supply our needs, that we find ourselves tempted over and over to “speak
against” Him by asking if He can. Often as He has done it before, we seem unable
to believe He can do it again, and in our hearts we “limit” Him, because we do
not believe His Word or trust in His goodness.
If our faith were what it ought to be, no circumstances,
however untoward, could make us “limit” the power of God to supply our needs.
The God who can make circumstances can surely control circumstances, and can,
even in the wilderness, “furnish a table” for all who trust in Him.
There are many similar questions to be found in the
Bible, each one throwing doubts upon the goodness of God, and each one, I am
afraid, is a duplicate of questions asked by God’s children now.
“Is God among us or not?”
“Hath God forgotten to be gracious?”
“Is God’s mercy clean gone forever?”
“Hath God in anger shut up his tender mercies?”
“Do God’s promises fail forevermore?”
“O God, why hast thou cast us off forever?”
“Why hast thou made me thus?”
Let us consider these questions for a little, and see
whether we can find any counterparts to them in our own secret questionings.
“Is God among us or not?”
He has declared to us in unmistakable terms, as He did
to the children of Israel, that He is always with us, and will never forsake us;
and yet when trouble comes, we begin, as they did, to doubt His Word and to
question whether He really can be there. Moses called this, when the Israelites
did it, “tempting the Lord,” and it deserves the same condemnation when we do
it. No one can ask such a question without casting a doubt upon the truthfulness
and trustworthiness of the Lord; and to ask it is, if we only knew it, to insult
Him, and to libel His character. I know that it is, alas! a common question even
among God’s own children, and I know also that many of them think it is only
true humility to ask it, and that, for such unworthy creatures as they feel
themselves to be, it would be the height of presumption to be sure of His
presence with them. But what about His own Word in the matter? He has declared
to us in every possible way that He is with us, and will never leave us nor
forsake us, and dare we “make him a liar” by questioning the truth of His Word?
A good God cannot lie, and we must give up forever asking such a question as
this. The Lord is with us as truly as we are with ourselves, and we have simply
just got to believe that He is, no matter what the seemings may be.
“Hath God forgotten to be gracious?”
To ask this question is to “speak against” Him as
grievously as it would be to ask a good mother if she had forgotten her child.
And yet the Lord Himself says: “Can a woman forget her sucking child? Yea, they
may forget, yet will I not forget thee.” Those of us who are mothers know very
well how grieved and insulted we should feel if anyone should suggest the
possibility of our forgetting our children; and we mothers at least, if no one
else does, should be able to understand how such questioning must grieve the
Lord.
“Is God’s mercy clean gone forever?” “Hath God in anger
shut up his tender mercies?”
To ask these two questions of a good God is to insult
Him. It would be as impossible for His tender mercies to be shut up toward us,
or for His mercy to go from us forever, as it would be for the tender mercies of
a mother come to an end. The psalmist says: “The Lord is good to all, and his
tender mercies are over all his works.” In the very nature of things this must
be, because He is a good God, and cannot do otherwise.
“Do God’s promises fail forevermore?”
There come times in every Christian’s life when we are
tempted to ask this question. Everything seems to be going wrong, and all God’s
promises seem to have failed. But if we remember that the Lord is good, we shall
see that He would cease to be good if such a thing could be. A man who breaks
his promises is looked upon as a dishonorable and untrustworthy man; and a God
who could break His, if one could imagine such a thing, would be dishonorable
and untrustworthy also. And to ask such a question is to cast a stigma on His
goodness, that may well be characterized as “speaking against God.” No matter
how affairs may look, we may be sure of this, that because God is good no
promise of His has ever failed, or can ever fail. Heaven and earth may pass
away, but His Word never.
“O God, why hast thou cast us off forever?”
It will be impossible for a good God to cast us off as
it would be for a good mother to cast off her child. We may be in trouble and
darkness, and may feel as if we were cast off and forsaken, but our feelings
have nothing to do with the facts, and the fact is that God is good, and could
not do it. The good Shepherd does not cast off the sheep that is lost, and take
no further care of it, but He goes out to seek for it, and He seeks until He
finds it. To suspect Him of casting us off forever is to wound and grieve His
faithful love, just as it would wound a good mother’s heart is she should be
supposed capable of casting off her child, let that child have wandered as far
as it may. The thing is impossible in either case, but far more impossible in
the case of God than even in the case of the best mother that ever lived.
“Why hast thou made me thus?”
This is a question we are very apt to ask. There is, I
imagine, hardly one of us who has not been tempted at one time or another to
“reply against God” in reference to the matter of our own personal make-up. We
do not like our peculiar temperaments or our especial characteristics, and we
long to be like someone else who has, we think, greater gifts of appearance or
of talent. We are discontented with our make-up, both inward and outward, and we
feel sure that all our failures are because of our unfortunate temperaments; and
we are inclined to blame our Creator for having “made us thus.”
I remember vividly a time in my life when I was tempted
to be very rebellious about my own make-up. I was a plain-spoken, energetic sort
of an individual, trying to be a good Christian, but with no especial air of
piety about me. But I had a sister who was so saintly in her looks, and had such
a pious manner, that she seemed to be the embodiment of piety; and I felt sure I
could be a great deal better Christian if only I could get her saintly looks and
manner. But all my struggles to get them were useless. My natural temperament
was far too energetic and outspoken for any appearance of saintliness, and many
a time I said upbraidingly in my heart to God, “Why hast thou made me thus?” But
one day I came across a sentence in an old mystic book that seemed to open my
eyes. It was as follows: “Be content to be what thy God has made thee”; and it
flashed on me that it really was a fact that God had made me, and that He must
know the sort of creature He wanted me to be; and that if He had made me a
potato vine, I must be satisfied to grow potatoes, and must not want to be a
rosebush and grow roses; and if He had fashioned me for humble tasks, I must be
content to let others do the grander work. We are “God’s workmanship,” and God
is good, therefore His workmanship must be good also; and we may securely trust
that before He is done with us, He will make out of us something that will be to
His glory, no matter how unlike this we may as yet feel ourselves to be.
The psalmist seemed to delight in repeating over and
over again this blessed refrain, “for the Lord is good.” It would be worth while
for you to take your concordances and see how often he says it. And he exhorted
everyone to join him in saying it. “Let the redeemed of the Lord say so,” was
his earnest cry. We must join our voices to his—The Lord is good—The Lord is
good. But we must not say it with our lips only, and then by our actions give
the lie to our words. We must “say” it with our whole being, with thought, word,
and action, so that people will see we really mean it, and will be convinced
that it is a tremendous fact.
A great many things in God’s divine providences do not
look like goodness to the eye of sense, and in reading the Psalms we wonder
perhaps how the psalmist could say, after some of the things he records, “for
his mercy endureth forever.” But faith sits down before mysteries such as these,
and says, “The Lord is good, therefore all that He does must be good, no matter
how it looks, and I can wait for His explanations.”
A housekeeping illustration has often helped me here.
If I have a friend whom I know to be a good housekeeper, I do not trouble over
the fact that at housecleaning time things in her house may seem to be more or
less upset, carpets up, and furniture shrouded in coverings, and even perhaps
painting and decorating making some rooms uninhabitable. I say to myself, “My
friend is a good housekeeper, and although things look so uncomfortable now, all
this upset is only because she means in the end to make it far more comfortable
than ever it was before.” This world is God’s housekeeping; and although things
at present look grievously upset, yet, since we know that He is good, and
therefore must be a good Housekeeper, we may be perfectly sure that all this
present upset is only to bring about in the end a far better state of things
than could have been without it. I dare say we have all felt at times as though
we could have done God’s housekeeping better than He does it Himself, but, when
we realize that God is good, we can feel this no longer. And it comforts me
enormously, when the world seems to me to be going all wrong, just to say to
myself, “It is not my housekeeping, but it is the Lord’s; and the Lord is good,
therefore His housekeeping must be good too; and it is foolish for me to
trouble.”
A deeply taught Christian was asked by a despairing
child of God, “Does not the world look to you like a wreck?
“Yes,” was the reply, in a tone of cheerful confidence;
“yes, like the wreck of a bursting seed.” Any of us who have watched the first
sproutings of an oak tree from the heart of a decaying acorn will understand
what this means. Before the acorn can bring forth the oak, it must become itself
a wreck. No plant ever came from any but a wrecked seed.
Our Lord uses this fact to teach us the meaning of His
processes with us. “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall
into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but, if it die, it bringeth forth
much fruit.”
The whole explanation of the apparent wreckage of the
world at large, or of our own personal lives in particular, is here set forth.
And, looked at in this light, we can understand how it is that the Lord can be
good, and yet can permit the existence of sorrow and wrong in the world He has
created, and in the lives of the human beings He loves.
It is His very goodness that compels Him to permit it.
For He knows that, only through such apparent wreckage, can the fruition of His
glorious purposes for us be brought to pass. And we whose hearts also long for
that fruition will, if we understand His ways, be able to praise Him for all His
goodness, even when things seem hardest and most mysterious.
The apostle tells us that the will of God is “good and
acceptable, and perfect.” The will of a good God cannot help being “good”—in
fact, it must be perfect’; and, when we come to know this, we always find it
“acceptable”; that is we come to love it. I am convinced that all trouble about
submitting to the will of God would disappear, if once we could see clearly that
His will is good. We struggle and struggle in vain to submit to a will that we
do not believe to be good, but when we see that it is really good, we submit to
it with delight. We want it to be accomplished. Our hearts spring out to meet
it.
I worship thee, sweet Will of God!
And all thy ways adore;
And, every day I live, I seem
To love thee more and more.
I love to kiss each print where thou
Hast set thine unseen feet:
I cannot fear thee, blessed Will!
Thine empire is so sweet.
Space fails me to tell all that I might of the infinite
goodness of the Lord. Each one must “taste and see” for himself. And if he will
but do it honestly and faithfully, the words of the psalmist will become true of
him: “They shall abundantly utter the memory of thy great goodness, and shall
sing of thy righteousness.”
