The Alelyon (one another) passages in the New Testament:

Do not lie to each other but speak the truth to each other in love.

(Ephesians 4:14, 25; Colossians 3:9) – Part 4

Over the past month or so we’ve been developing an evolving response to Pilate’s question of Jesus on the matter of “what is truth?” We’ve come to Augustine’s formulation that “all truth is God’s truth”; to the even more definitive biblical statement that Jesus himself is Truth; and to the claim that perhaps the greatest true thing that we can know and believe is that God is always, everywhere, and perfectly good. I see the nods and hear the “amens” and even the “God is good, all the time” chants from the congregation.

But we’ve also agreed that sometimes we cave in to the opposition’s counter that the goodness of God and his promises are too good to be true. We might undertake a generalized resistance: Nothing that beatific is real. Alternatively, we take a more restricted tack: I believe God is almost absolutely good, but I am the exception, the non-recipient of his unconditional blessings.

How and why do these varied assaults on truth rob us of our inheritance as children of the Father whose “good pleasure it is to give us the kingdom”? For the generalists, there are arguments that go something like this: Look around you at the world. Isn’t it clear that there is almost overwhelming evidence against ultimate goodness? The persistence of suffering; the seeming randomness of wealth or poverty, success or failure, health or illness; the apparent tyranny of circumstances that determine such things all tell against an “all the time” good God.

If the assailant is not a Christian, the blame is immediate and total. As a number of my relatives complained to me when my brother died in a tragic accident, “How could any even reasonably good God allow this to happen?” Besides scratching my head over the curious fact that people were denigrating a being they didn’t believe in, I was equally fascinated by their unwillingness to ascribe any responsibility to my brother. Of course, I don’t believe that my goal in the face of such deep affliction was to trash the sufferers. And yet, the wholesale attack on God and his nature was unremitting, immovable, and un-nuanced. He gets blame, we get credit.

For believers, the testimony of our environment does not elicit quite the same blatant unbelief. Instead, we find ourselves engaging the Lord and his promises with a kind of caution. We are busy about covering our bases via self-generated activity, “prudent” planning, and the application of the best human wisdom we can access. These are the Christian adaptations of worldly cynicism about God. There’s too much disappointment in our lives, too many unanswered prayers and dashed hopes, too wide an experience of failed expectations. Absolute surrender to God in such circumstances looks dangerous, and maybe even foolhardy.

The individualist assails goodness from a different angle. The starting point is an investigation into our own character that very quickly unearths proof that we don’t deserve blessing. That’s fine, as far as it goes, except that we very much want to deserve it. We are believers in grace, but as a kind of adjunct to our own merit. The doctrine of depravity, shared by all Christian traditions, just seems too harsh, too miserable, too deeply offensive to our well-intentioned desires to be (at least seen as) good people. But we know the truth about what goes on in our hearts and minds and we are, just as Jeremiah prophesied, desperately wicked, ergo un-entitled.

The reactions to our undeniable unworthiness are quite varied. For example, we have the “woe is me” response: Yes, I’m really, really bad. So bad that my undeserving eliminates the possibility of goodness. I hope that some crumbs will fall my way, that I’ll be able to sneak in through the servants’ door to claim my morsel. The vision of Psalms 23 – the Lord setting a table before us in the presence of our enemies – is a completely foreign one. There may be many rooms in my Father’s house, but I am certain to have a closet in the basement.

Or there is the offended disciple response: I won’t take what I can’t earn. We stir up our resolve, roll up our sleeves, make some hardy promises, and get to work. And when I fail, which fail I must, I will either go back at it again, or fall apart in a pious pout, or crumble into a pit of self-pity, or take the destructive route of self-indulgence. In doing such things, we carry on the time-tested patterns of human pride which only further mar our vision of how good the Lord truly is.

And a third is the karmic God response: Yes, he is good, and I am blessed and even grateful. But the sunny day is always followed by the dark and stormy night. The good-we-have now is inevitably superseded by the pain that might be coming. Such thinking is a rejection of God before he can reject us – a superstitious protecting of ourselves from him and from the fearsome consequences of completely trusting of ourselves to him. The roots of the accusation against the Lord’s goodness (because that’s what it is) lie in the first Garden sin, where the serpent convinced Adam and Eve that God was holding out on them.

Whatever the form of resistance, the fact is that we spend far too much energy seeking to be in control of our own lives. Our eyes are on wind and waves, not on the Son of man. Unlike Peter, however, we scurry back to the safety of our own boats rather than crying out to Jesus. We are more like the disciples rowing in the storm, intent on reaching the other side and somewhat unwilling to allow Messiah into our space, lest he overturn all our diligent striving to maintain some sense of equilibrium.

And yet in spite of ourselves and in contradiction to any “evidence” to the contrary, the greatest of all truths is that God is perfectly good. In the face of our undeserving and against all the ambient noise is God’s free, no strings attached promise of mercy, love, and faithful friendship. He has an enviable track record that we can observe in our own lives and in those of others – a history of turning evil into blessing, of restraining our worst inclinations, of transforming our character into that of Jesus, of protecting us from our own fallenness and that of our sin-drenched world, of bringing gifts of hope and purpose, of providing what we need even when there seemed to be nothing in the offing.

And although these things are obvious to objective sight, we still struggle with the scourge of unbelief, of a complaining spirit, of an urge to put God on trial, of our preoccupation with circumstances. It is faith alone that will correct and console us. Faith that understands and believes that God is good when nothing else is. Faith that sees behind and beyond the failures and disappointments to comprehend his faithfulness. Faith that finds the Father in every blessing and in every gift such that those blessings and gifts become all the greater in our sight. Faith that tells us that whatever we give of ourselves in surrender to God’s goodness will be overwhelmed by his gracious and generous response.

Because he is good …

… all the time.