Will God Hurt Me and Call It Good?
00:00:00.000 | Here's an interesting follow-up to what we talked about yesterday.
00:00:09.600 | A listener writes in to ask this, "Pastor John, my beautiful girlfriend is questioning
00:00:14.360 | God's goodness.
00:00:15.600 | She is a religion major and understands that God can do whatever He wants, and that goodness
00:00:20.360 | to Him is whatever He wants it to be.
00:00:23.860 | Just like how we saw it was good to see His Son on the cross, or good to have Stephen
00:00:29.320 | killed, she lives in constant fear that God will have her injured or disabled and count
00:00:35.840 | it as good.
00:00:36.840 | I don't know what to say, but I thought you could help me."
00:00:41.080 | She is certainly not irrational to tremble at the absolute sovereignty of God over her
00:00:49.160 | life.
00:00:50.160 | It is true, as she says, that God can do whatever He wants.
00:00:58.840 | Indeed, He does do whatever He wants.
00:01:02.280 | Psalm 115, verse 3, "Our God is in the heavens; He does all that He pleases."
00:01:08.780 | The person who does not tremble at this has simply not faced up to the power of God greater
00:01:17.440 | than a billion hydrogen bombs or the holiness of God, a purity burning like a million galaxies.
00:01:28.280 | Or the mystery of God acting in ways that none but He can fathom.
00:01:36.760 | She's not irrational to tremble before such a God.
00:01:40.840 | She would be crazy if she didn't.
00:01:44.420 | Maybe one fruitful place to start would be with her statement, "Goodness to God is
00:01:56.160 | whatever He wants it to be."
00:01:58.280 | Now, I know this is coming through her boyfriend and may not be precisely what she thinks,
00:02:05.680 | but then again, maybe it is.
00:02:09.440 | What I hear in those words, "What is goodness to God is whatever He wants it to be," what
00:02:16.320 | I hear in those words is a heavy emphasis on God's sovereign freedom seen as a divine
00:02:25.240 | arbitrariness.
00:02:27.640 | And there seems to be perhaps a tinge of cynicism, and this may be what he's concerned about.
00:02:36.840 | Here's one piece of counsel that I would offer when dealing with the various attributes of
00:02:43.760 | God like His freedom and sovereignty and power and goodness and wisdom and grace and patience
00:02:54.120 | and justice and wrath and so on.
00:02:57.200 | The counsel is, keep these attributes in living, dynamic relation to each other.
00:03:07.440 | Let each one have its emotional and intellectual effect on each of the others.
00:03:16.200 | And the best way to do this is to keep our hands on the texture of Scripture itself.
00:03:25.080 | If all is feeling rough and sandpapery under our fingers, make sure we move our hands around
00:03:32.200 | the Scriptures to feel the smooth parts or the moist parts or the soft and tender parts
00:03:39.080 | or the jagged parts.
00:03:41.320 | It's the mixture of the sensations that create the truest feeling for God.
00:03:49.240 | Specifically, in this case, if God's goodness starts to seem utterly arbitrary—Jesus gets
00:03:59.760 | killed, Stephen gets killed, James gets killed, Peter goes free, and in our lives one child
00:04:06.000 | lives and another child dies—when God's goodness starts to seem arbitrary, we need
00:04:14.720 | to remember God's wisdom alongside it, in and through it.
00:04:20.840 | Oh, the depth of the riches and the wisdom and the knowledge of God.
00:04:24.920 | How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable are his ways.
00:04:30.280 | Who has known the mind of the Lord?
00:04:31.960 | Who has ever been his counselor?
00:04:35.000 | Nobody.
00:04:36.340 | So we preach to ourselves the wisdom of God's sovereignty.
00:04:42.840 | It's not willy-nilly.
00:04:44.540 | It's not capricious.
00:04:46.960 | It's not exactly right for her to say the goodness to God is whatever he wants it to
00:04:55.360 | be.
00:04:56.800 | That seems to isolate the want-to, whatever he wants it to be.
00:05:03.120 | It isolates the want-to of God as though it were not connected to the wisdom of God.
00:05:10.360 | No, his goodness is not merely whatever he wants it to be.
00:05:16.600 | It is what it is in accord with infinite wisdom.
00:05:21.480 | It is what it is in accord with the revelation of the grace of Christ.
00:05:26.120 | It is what it is in relation to the totality of God's repeated revelation as a God ready
00:05:32.400 | to forgive, gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love.
00:05:37.400 | And if we start to disconnect any one of these attributes into its own little sector, it's
00:05:44.720 | going to go bad on us.
00:05:46.440 | It's going to start feeling like something we don't really like.
00:05:51.680 | So encourage her not to spin out seemingly rational inferences from one divine attribute
00:06:02.880 | or another.
00:06:03.880 | Rather, encourage her to constantly bring them together.
00:06:08.580 | The glory of God is not found in dissecting his perfections into separate parts, but in
00:06:17.060 | seeing them whole and keeping them in connection with each other.
00:06:23.860 | One final way of doing that to suggest.
00:06:29.020 | Encourage her to ponder the stories of the Bible whose clear intention is to show the
00:06:37.060 | inscrutable ways of God leading through suffering to amazingly wonderful ends.
00:06:45.420 | I think of the story of Joseph in Genesis and how his years and years of sorrow were
00:06:53.180 | designed for the salvation of Israel and for his own great power and joy.
00:06:58.660 | Or I think of the story of Esther and how the strangest turns of affairs reverse the
00:07:08.220 | destruction of God's people and Mordecai moves from being a serf to the king's favorite,
00:07:16.060 | while Naaman dies on Mordecai's gallows.
00:07:21.460 | And the return of the exiles from Jerusalem, when it looks like the adversaries are going
00:07:26.140 | to shut the whole thing down and in a sudden turn of affairs, you not only get the king
00:07:32.780 | back in the enemy territory supporting it, but paying for it.
00:07:37.380 | God is amazing.
00:07:38.380 | At the worst of times, he seems to turn things around and make the bad work for good.
00:07:46.060 | And of course, Jesus, brutally murdered, rose from the dead, giving life to all who trust
00:07:55.540 | him, the best story of all.
00:07:57.700 | So the point of all those stories is to help this young woman trust God when his goodness
00:08:05.860 | seems most arbitrary.
00:08:10.020 | So yes, we do tremble.
00:08:12.220 | We do, and we should tremble before the goodness of a sovereign God.
00:08:18.280 | It may cost us our lives, but we do not give way to cynicism.
00:08:24.980 | We do not call his goodness whimsical or capricious.
00:08:30.860 | We fix our eyes on his infinite wisdom and his proven kindness, and we trust him with
00:08:40.180 | our lives.
00:08:41.180 | Amen.
00:08:42.180 | Yes, we can.
00:08:43.180 | Thank you, Pastor John, for that wisdom.
00:08:45.140 | These are the tricky pastoral questions that we've been tackling on the podcast now for
00:08:48.100 | a few years, and all of the past episodes are available online right now.
00:08:52.100 | For more information and to download our apps and to search our archive of all of those
00:08:56.360 | past episodes, find us online at desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn.
00:09:01.940 | I am your host, Tony Reinke, and we will be back tomorrow.
00:09:04.580 | Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast with author and longtime pastor, John
00:09:09.140 | Piper.
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