Is God good when the circumstances aren't?

Greetings,

The last two reflections have pressed on a hard question. If God is sovereign over all things, over the diagnosis, the silence, the circumstance that does not relent, then the question that follows is not a small one.

Is he good?

Good in a way that goes deeper than the word as we normally use it. Good that remains true even when the circumstance is painful and the outcome is not what you prayed for.

Because a sovereign God who is not also perfectly wise and perfectly loving is not comforting. He is terrifying. Absolute power without wisdom produces a tyrant. Absolute power without love produces indifference. What makes sovereignty safe to rest in, what turns it from a threat into a comfort, is the character of the one who holds it.

Romans 11:33 is Paul’s response to three chapters of the hardest theology in all of Scripture. He has just finished working through God’s sovereignty over election, over Israel, over the hardening of hearts. And his response is not systematic resolution. It is worship.

Paul does not resolve the tension. He gazes into it and finds it beautiful.

That is only possible if God is wise. If his judgments, even the ones we cannot trace, even the ones that feel like loss, are coming from a mind that sees what we cannot see and works toward ends we are not yet able to imagine. Jerry Bridges makes the point that God works through ordinary events and the voluntary actions of people, guiding by his unseen hand, never frustrated by our failures or our sins. He does not need our cooperation to accomplish his purposes. But he is never arbitrary, careless, or cavalier, and never working against his own character.

Which brings us to Romans 8:28, one of the most quoted and most misread verses in Scripture. We know that all things work together for good for those who love God. It is easy to read that as a promise that the hard season will eventually turn.

But the very next verse tells you what good means. Those he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son. The good God is working toward is your conformity to Christ, and that may not always be comfortable. Confusing the two is how we can end up spiritually disoriented even when the hard thing shows no sign of easing.

But why is conformity to Christ good? That is the honest question underneath the promise.

The deeper purpose is to bring us back to God himself. And in God, in the Triune God, there is perfect love, perfect peace, perfect joy. He is the one in whom we live and move and have our being. The ultimate good of man is not a comfortable life. It is God himself.

Which means that when God conforms a man to the image of Christ, he is restoring him to the thing his heart was always made for. The more like Christ a man becomes, the more he finds what his heart was always searching for.

And the evidence is not abstract. Romans 8:32 — he who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all, how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? The God who is sovereign over your suffering is the same God who experienced it. He subjected himself to it. Hebrews tells us he was tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin, which means he is not a distant sovereign observing our pain from above. He is a high priest who understands it from the inside. He entered our suffering because of his love for us, which is why we can bring our suffering to him and know that we are fully understood. A God who did not spare his own Son will not withhold from you the good he is working toward.

The psalmist recognised that the suffering he was experiencing was good for him because it made him a man who took God’s word seriously in a way comfort never would have. It is not something imposed on a man from the outside. It is the deepest thing in him being drawn out and restored.

The suffering is what conforms us. Paul puts it plainly in Romans 8:18. The suffering of this present time is not worth comparing to the glory that is to be revealed. In 2 Corinthians 4:17 he calls present affliction light and momentary, producing an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison. Eyes have not seen, nor ears heard, what God has in store for those who love him.

Understanding this allows you and me to suffer well. To persevere and endure with joy, as James says, to count it all joy when we meet trials of various kinds. That is the man who can bear what is ahead, because he knows he is sending his rewards ahead, where moth and rust cannot destroy. We must suffer well, in light of what is ahead.

This is not a distant truth. It is the most stabilising reality a man can rest in through a painful season. The God who is sovereign over your circumstance is not watching it with detached power. He is working in it with perfect wisdom and perfect love, toward an end that is better than you can currently see from where you are standing.

He does not willingly bring affliction or grief. He always has a purpose. He never wastes pain. He is not doing this to you, he is doing something in you, and through you, that his infinite wisdom has determined is best.

The circumstance may not change. But the one who governs it is perfectly wise, perfectly loving, and never working at cross purposes with his own character. That is enough.

Have you grasped the depth of the Father’s love for you, and are you resting in it?

Grace and peace,
Seun

If this one landed, No. 34 goes further — seunadeyemi.ca/reflections/34-how-long-o-lord-and-why-the-silence-is-not-the-answer-you