Bite-Sized: The Goodness of God

Our framework is wrong. When most people read the book of Job, they think that what happens to him is unfair. The reason is this: We have a very large box, which we call Fairness and Goodness. We then place God in that box and tell Him that He has to abide by these rules. We do the same thing with love. We read, "God is Love", and invert our interpretation. As opposed to coming to the conclusion that God is the definition of love, we come to the conclusion that love as we conceive of it in our relationships is the manifestation of God. This is only true insofar as the love in our relationships mirrors the love that God shows, as that is true love. The same goes for fairness and goodness. Isaiah 55 comes back to mind: "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." God does not conform to our human conceptions of fairness and goodness, but rather we need to conform our conceptions of fairness and goodness to the heavenly standard. To say that God is good is to say that everything He does is good, at least in some way. Are we prepared to really say that? To say that God is just is to say that his acts, including, notably, the killing off of entire peoples in the Old Testament, are just. As emotionally uncomfortable as it is to admit, Scripture says that it is true. Let's stop submitting truth to our emotions and instead, submit our emotions to the truth. And yeah, it's much easier said than done.