Articles

Truly God is Good

‘Truly God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart’

– Psalm 73:1

Truly God is good. That’s what we want to believe about God, that God is truly good.

However, when tragedies strike in the lives of the very people who seem to least deserve it, our confidence in the goodness of God is shaken.

Two weeks ago, a group of twenty-five Christians were gathered for prayer on the sixth floor of what was known locally as The Seven-Story Building. It was one of the tallest buildings in Kathmandu, the capital city of Nepal.

All of them were killed, save one, when an earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter Scale caused the building to collapse in a death-trap of rubble.

The lone survivor, Arun Kuman Moktan, surveying the bodies of his Christian friends and weeping with their devastated relatives, had reason to doubt the goodness of God.

Don’t tell me that you never doubt God! Don’t tell me that you never question your faith!

So much in this world seems to contradict the goodness of God. If you never have doubts, then it seems to me that your faith must be blind. Your eyes must be closed to the cruel realities of the world.

A blind faith is a cowardly faith . . . it isn’t really faith at all.

True faith stares down the evils of the world. True faith can’t help but admit doubt. Because doubt is not the opposite of faith. In fact, it is very compatible with faith – a confirmation of faith – because you can only doubt what you believe. The opposite of faith is not doubt, but unbelief.

Far from sabotaging faith, doubt can fortify our relationship with God, just as it did for Job, and just as it did for the author of Psalm 73 – who brings his doubts before God through the body of the Psalm (‘in vain have I kept my heart clean!’), and yet begins and ends with a confession of faith:

Truly God is good.