Although I grew up believing in Jesus, I could not understand why especially in churches, they always proclaimed “God is good!” Surely there has to be a reason for God, or anyone in fact, to be declared good.
I decided that this was so by faith, meaning, if I may be blunt about it, "we may not see it or experience it, but this is truth, that is why this is called faith". Now, speaking about faith, I too have heard so many definitions attempted by different people, but nothing had born witness with my heart. Not until recently, but I will come back to this in the next article.
So for decades, I accepted "God is good", regardless of the reality I experienced. When we barely had enough, “God is good”, when friends left me for no reason, “God is good", when my loved ones were abused, “God is good”. That was my posture growing up. Until it was not.
I was not disagreeing that God was good, but I wanted to understand why He was good, especially when there were so much pain in this world. Being brushed off for asking only made things worse, and I understand why many were put off by so-called “our faith”. There has to be an explanation, there has to be a basis for everything. That has always been my belief about anything. But no one, not a sermon, priest, pastor, or friend could explain this to me, whether or not they came from a broken past or a shiny one.
I started searching for the truth of my Christian faith about five years ago, I set it in my heart that it was a journey that I would not fail. Having read so many books about it, I realised that I had not quite understood the Bible – in fact, for the most part of the New Testament book, I could only go as far as the Gospel because I found that the epistles, especially Paul’s, were beyond my understanding. So I started there.
After careful studies over five years, I finally saw that the cross was really the whole point of the Bible. The cross is God's love for us! Everything was about the perfect sacrifice of love: God giving up His only begotten Son, Jesus, to be our sin offering. The Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Men had sinned and sin must be paid by death. No good work can wipe sin off our blood. That’s why Jesus came to take our sins away and paid with His sinless blood. This is the only way to atone for our sins. This is what Paul was trying to explain in Romans chapter five:
12 Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:
13 (For until the law sin was in the world: but sin is not imputed when there is no law.
14 Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam's transgression, who is the figure of him that was to come.
15 But not as the offence, so also is the free gift. For if through the offence of one many be dead, much more the grace of God, and the gift by grace, which is by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many.
16 And not as it was by one that sinned, so is the gift: for the judgment was by one to condemnation, but the free gift is of many offences unto justification.
17 For if by one man's offence death reigned by one; much more they which receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness shall reign in life by one, Jesus Christ.)
18 Therefore as by the offence of one judgment came upon all men to condemnation; even so by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life.
19 For as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous.
20 Moreover the law entered, that the offence might abound. But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound:
21 That as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord.
I began to understand how God is good.
It was never God’s fault that Adam and Eve sinned. They chose to disobey God, to live after His grace and instead, they wanted to live being measured by their conduct, good and evil, and thus they placed their lives under the devil, and mankind has been slaves to sin ever since.
In the standard of the world, most of us would agree that it’s not His responsibility. In fact, He had every right to let men perish and suffer the consequences. But God is not like that. His kindness, His heart is beyond our comprehension. He, for reasons we probably can never understand, loves us. Instead of letting us perish, He sacrificed the very thing He loves dearly, His Son. Can we ever sacrifice our dearest child for a criminal? I don’t think so.
By His action, we now can judge. God is good.
And if you think that His goodness is only about saving us from eternal damnation, fire that cannot be quenched, you will be pleased to know there’s more.
Because we believe in His Son, that is the faith of Jesus: that He would take our sins and die to pay for them, God fully forgives us of all our sins. That is why Christianity is established on the foundation of His grace. How is it not grace? All it takes is for us to believe that and God accepts us. No need for penance, no need to mend our ways first, and no need because no amount we give can ever be enough to pay for our sins. God knows that, that’s why He knew it has to be given as a gift. We can never afford it. That is why it’s called fore-gift-ness. Forgiveness is a gift He already prepared to give before we are truly sorry for what we did.
Now, being forgiven means we stand before God with our debts cleared. They are cleared because someone paid for them. Not our payment, but it was done in our name nevertheless, so God accepted it.
Let’s say you owed a million dollars to the bank. You were on the brink of losing everything and going to jail if you failed to pay your debt. Then as you expected the worst, you received a call and it’s a trillionaire of your country. He heard about your debt and he offered to pay your debt. All you had to do was to consent to his kindness. You said yes and the next day you received another call, this time it was the bank telling you all your debt was cleared, and you got back your righteous status. Not only that, your debt was overpaid and now you have an excess of billions of dollars in your account. The bank now calls you their VIP client and gives you preferential treatment.
No matter how much I add zero to a million, billion, or trillion, the example above still pales in comparison to the real thing God did for us at the point of our conversion. Because our debts were cleared (paid by Jesus), God deems us as righteous (for the wicked borrows and pays not back – Psalm 37:21). Not by our works, that is why every believer receives righteousness as a gift. This gift of righteousness is the basis for us to be blessed, for only the righteous can be blessed and can inherit the land. And now we are righteous, we walk as righteous people through His Spirit in us, holy and blameless, just like Jesus.
God yearns for us to be saved in His Son Jesus, so that He can have the legal basis to bless us! The goodness of God! He provides the way out, free for us but death for His Son, and then having saved us, He blesses us with only good - at the basis of grace, not of work, all we have to do is to believe His promise and wait. O praise the name of God Almighty! This is our God.
