Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] I want to say thank you to everybody who made Trunk or Treat so awesome last week. You did an awesome job, Church.
[00:00:13] Everywhere I looked I saw happy children.
[00:00:16] And I appreciate the effort that everybody put into that.
[00:00:23] Dear Heavenly Father, you have revealed yourself to us.
[00:00:31] You've shown us the qualities of your character.
[00:00:37] You have.
[00:00:39] You've given us the ability to think about you in quality ways.
[00:00:47] And now I pray this morning your Holy Spirit would be here and guide us into the truth, and we would contemplate what it means when we say God is good.
[00:01:01] I pray that we would contemplate it in the kind of way that it would nurture our eternal souls.
[00:01:08] In Christ's name, Amen.
[00:01:11] We're studying the moral attributes of God.
[00:01:18] Last week we considered that God was true and trustworthy, and this week we're going to think together about God is good.
[00:01:29] This is what the psalmist one generation shall commend your works to another and declare your mighty acts.
[00:01:40] On the glorious splendor of your majesty and on your wondrous works, I will meditate.
[00:01:48] They shall speak of the might of your awesome deeds, and I will declare your greatness.
[00:01:55] They shall pour forth the fame of your abundant goodness and shall sing aloud of your righteousness.
[00:02:04] The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
[00:02:11] The Lord is good to all his mercy is over all that he has made.
[00:02:18] The Bible goes out of its way to connect the idea of goodness with God.
[00:02:27] In fact, it connects it so much that we stop paying attention to it.
[00:02:39] And in, in, in our deceived world, we've come up with a myth that good is possible without God.
[00:02:49] And the Scriptures teach us very plainly that good is only good because of God.
[00:02:59] Without God, all we have is relative opinions about what is good, and everybody makes up their own mind what is good for themselves instead of allowing God, the author of all goodness, to call us to a higher standard of goodness than we would create for ourselves.
[00:03:25] So why is good important?
[00:03:28] Why is it important for us to understand clearly the goodness of God?
[00:03:36] I'm going to read you this statement from the American theologian Charles Hodge, and then I'm going to say it in an easier way.
[00:03:46] The glory of God is the end to which the promotion of holiness and the production of happiness and all other ends are subordinate.
[00:03:59] Therefore, the self manifestation of God, the revelation of his infinite perfection, being, and the highest conceivable good, is the ultimate end of all his works in creation, providence, and redemption. All right, now I'm going to say this in an easier way.
[00:04:21] God has an agenda in all of creation and all of history.
[00:04:27] I've shared with this on other occasions. God has an agenda.
[00:04:32] And that agenda is ultimately for all of us to realize how truly magnificent he is.
[00:04:44] His. His agenda is for all of us to come to know him in the kind of way that we acknowledge within ourselves what an incredible blessing it is for God to say he loves us and cares for us where our egos take second place to the glory of God.
[00:05:09] So in his agenda to glorify his name, he places mankind in the situation that we're in.
[00:05:23] And then he says, now just see if my goodness doesn't work better than all of the other options.
[00:05:34] Go ahead, mankind, just start picking any option you want and test it against the goodness of God and ultimately humanity redeemed. Humanity will say, history has proven that the goodness of God is man's best option.
[00:06:00] Let's consider the elements of this psalm.
[00:06:04] One generation shall commend your works to another and shall declare your mighty acts.
[00:06:10] The goodness of God is multi generational.
[00:06:15] I want to attack this myth that somehow or another, if you would have lived when Moses lived, the goodness of God would have been more evident.
[00:06:25] Or if you would have lived when.
[00:06:28] When Jesus lived, the goodness of God would have been more evident, or if you would have lived in this time or that time.
[00:06:37] That is a terrible myth. The goodness of God is multi generational. And, and in every generation, God finds ways to show mankind how good he is.
[00:06:51] When I was young, I heard people say, oh, baby boomers aren't going to go to church. The church will be dead in America in 10 years.
[00:07:01] Well, where are those predictors?
[00:07:03] Looks like the church is doing pretty good to me.
[00:07:07] And then I heard this generation, they don't want church. And, and we're finding out that there's an incredible youth movement back toward God.
[00:07:19] God shows his goodness in every generation.
[00:07:25] The issue is not is he showing his goodness? The issue is who's paying attention.
[00:07:32] Because we end up seeing what we're looking for. If all I'm looking for is the bad, I can see it everywhere.
[00:07:40] But if I have an eye for the goodness of God, I can see that everywhere also too church.
[00:07:48] You see, what the psalmist is saying is first I have to learn what the goodness of God is, then I can commend it to someone else.
[00:07:58] I can't share the goodness of God that I don't know myself.
[00:08:03] Do you hear this, church?
[00:08:07] The better you know the goodness of God, the better you can share it. With others.
[00:08:12] The more vague you are about the goodness of God, the more difficult it becomes for you to talk to others about the genuine goodness of God.
[00:08:24] Then he says, on the glorious splendor of your majesty and on your wondrous works, I will meditate.
[00:08:33] The goodness of God is splendid and majestic, and it shows up in how he works. And it ought to be part of our meditation.
[00:08:48] Ah, let's start with the goodness of God is splendid.
[00:08:56] Because we're studying the character of God, we have to grapple with words.
[00:09:02] And splendid has to mean something specific. It just can't mean generally good.
[00:09:09] Otherwise we wouldn't need the word splendid, right?
[00:09:13] All right.
[00:09:14] So when we think splendid, we need to think sublime better than everything that competes with it.
[00:09:25] God's goodness is. Is sublime. It's better than anything you compare it to.
[00:09:33] God's goodness is superb.
[00:09:36] It is significantly above the other options.
[00:09:42] When we're thinking about the goodness of God, we have to raise our thoughts.
[00:09:48] We can't drag God's goodness down to my comfort level. I have to raise my thoughts up to his reality.
[00:09:56] So when I say God is splendid, I'm saying when he expresses himself toward humanity in his good works, it is better than anything else you can compare it to.
[00:10:12] No one has ever done as well as God.
[00:10:18] No one will ever do as well as God. His goodness is sublime.
[00:10:25] And then there's another word here. It's the word majestic Majesty.
[00:10:30] And we want to be. We want to think clearly about majesty also.
[00:10:35] So why do we call, why we call the Queen her royal Majesty?
[00:10:42] Why do we call the King his royal Majesty? All right, because majesty has. Has the. The idea of the sovereign ruler.
[00:10:52] When you say the Queen was her royal Majesty, you were saying she was the sovereign ruler of whatever country she was the queen of. All right?
[00:11:02] When we say God is majestic in his goodness, we say he is the sovereign ruler.
[00:11:10] Let this idea sink in you.
[00:11:13] God rules over everything that is good.
[00:11:18] If good is found anywhere, God is ruling over it.
[00:11:24] There is no goodness apart from the rule of God.
[00:11:32] So I wonder, when was the last time you turned your attention away from the broken world and everything that was uncomfortable and you don't like and you turned your attention on the reign of divine goodness.
[00:11:54] When was the last time you started looking around to see what was genuinely good and you saw something good and you said, that is because of the goodness of God.
[00:12:10] It doesn't have to be complex. It can be something very simple.
[00:12:15] I saw a blue jay land on the tree in my backyard this morning. And I thought, that's beautiful.
[00:12:23] That's. That's really beautiful.
[00:12:26] Okay?
[00:12:28] And then the next thought is, that's beautiful because God is good.
[00:12:35] That beautiful creature flew and landed on my tree as an expression of the goodness of God.
[00:12:44] I saw my little granddaughter dancing during worship time.
[00:12:49] Ah, beautiful.
[00:12:52] Absolutely beautiful.
[00:12:54] That child is beautiful because God is good.
[00:12:58] Can you hear me? We start associating the beauty, the goodness, the wonder of life. We start associating with its source, and that source is God.
[00:13:12] There isn't goodness in the world by random chance. There is only goodness in the world because God is good.
[00:13:20] And if I have the eye to see it, I can start seeing his goodness everywhere I look.
[00:13:29] God's goodness is not only in creation. God's goodness is seen in history. All of history says God is good.
[00:13:38] You say, well, Doc, I've read some pretty bad things in history.
[00:13:42] Let me remind you. We would have ruined ourself a long time ago if God wasn't good.
[00:13:48] Humanity would have wiped ourselves out a long time ago. It. If God wasn't good.
[00:13:55] If we hadn't killed ourself in war, we had poisoned ourself with some chemical or something else, this place would have been done apart from the goodness of God in history. And if you really read history again after time, after time, God starts fresh. A new culture, a new civilization. He gives mankind another good chance at it because God is good.
[00:14:25] And then the psalmist said, they will speak of the might of your awesome deeds, and I will declare your greatness.
[00:14:36] The goodness of God, when we see it, inspires awe.
[00:14:42] When was the last time you felt genuine awe?
[00:14:47] You were just stunned with awe.
[00:14:52] This has happened to me several times when I've. When I used to do motorcycle road trips, I would be in the middle of nowhere and I would see this panoramic view and I would hit. I would have that feeling of awe. Do you know what I mean? It just. You're not really sure how to respond to it. It's just so awesome. All right.
[00:15:14] When we see the goodness of God, the human soul responds in awe. And we go, how can God be so awesomely good?
[00:15:31] And it is good for us from time to time to quiet ourselves and meditate on the goodness of God.
[00:15:39] I don't have to go through history. I don't have to look through creation. I can look at my own life and start checking the boxes where God has been very good to me.
[00:15:53] I was born at one of the best times and best places you could be born in the history of mankind.
[00:15:59] I was born in 1953 in Middle America, that is winning the lottery. Church.
[00:16:08] Ah, ah.
[00:16:11] Just because God was good to me, I could have been born anywhere.
[00:16:15] I could have been born anywhere. But out of the goodness of God, I got to be born at a great time and, and in a great place.
[00:16:24] Ah, ah. Something we take for granted. I, I got 12 years of free education.
[00:16:31] You take that for granted, but that's relatively rare in human history.
[00:16:35] If you look at all of human history, that is a relatively rare thing. And God was good to me.
[00:16:43] I was born in a Christian family. God was good to me.
[00:16:49] When I was at a key point in my life, God made Sharon temporarily insane. And she said, yes, God was good to me.
[00:17:04] He'll never have to do anything other than that to prove his goodness to me.
[00:17:12] Healthy children. I mean, I go down the I, the list gets endless.
[00:17:18] And if I'm really going to be a good Christian man, there have to be times when I put pause and turn off the I want machine and sit quietly and just meditate on how good God has already been to me.
[00:17:38] The band sings from time your goodness comes running after me.
[00:17:46] How beautiful an idea that my whole life God has been chasing me down with goodness.
[00:17:55] And then the psalmist said, they shall pour forth the fame of your abundant goodness and shall sing aloud of your righteousness.
[00:18:09] I don't want you to miss the word abundant. The goodness of the Lord is abundant. And as I have said, you can see it everywhere you look.
[00:18:20] Listen what James, the half brother of Jesus, wrote.
[00:18:23] Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of Lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.
[00:18:38] Did you hear that?
[00:18:40] Every single good gift there is, every single perfect gift there is, it comes from God.
[00:18:51] I wonder what the world would look like if we worked as hard to make the goodness of God famous as evil has worked to make evil infamous.
[00:19:09] Evil has worked very hard at making evil infamous. I wonder what the world would look like if we worked equally as hard to make the goodness of God famous.
[00:19:24] And then last week I told you that the Bible likes to cluster the attributes of God.
[00:19:33] Rarely does the Bible like to give a single attribute of God. And it's like, that's not sufficient. It's. It's misrepresenting. Now we have one of those clusters where the psalmist clusters a whole bunch of attributes of God and he says, the Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. The Lord is good to all his mercy is over all that he has made. Did you hear the whole cluster?
[00:20:03] The Lord is gracious. He treats people better than what they deserve. The Lord is merciful. He meets us in our misery. The Lord is slow to anger. He's abounding in steadfast love. He's good to all and his mercies overall.
[00:20:19] Now please open your heart to this.
[00:20:22] God is gracious because he's good.
[00:20:26] Grace is an expression of his goodness. God treats you better than what you deserve because he's good.
[00:20:34] God is merciful because he's good.
[00:20:39] Mercy is God's answer to human misery. And in the goodness of his heart, he meets us in our misery with the healing goodness of mercy.
[00:20:54] God is slow to anger because he is good. God is abounding in steadfast love because he is good.
[00:21:02] Now, I can hear some of you thinking, well, Doc, maybe God's been good to you, but you don't know my life.
[00:21:10] You don't know what I've been through.
[00:21:13] You don't know what I've had to endure.
[00:21:16] I'm sorry, I can't let you stay there.
[00:21:20] I'm pulling you out of that place.
[00:21:23] The psalmist said, he is good to all.
[00:21:29] And by the way, you are part of all.
[00:21:34] Everyone seated here this morning in some way has received the goodness of God.
[00:21:40] Everyone. Everyone watching online has in some way seen the goodness of God. The goodness of God touches every living thing.
[00:21:52] God is even good to that which is opposes him and hates Him. His goodness is over all. Can you hear this?
[00:22:04] The most wicked that ever. The most wicked being that ever lived. God was good to him in some way.
[00:22:11] Do you hear this?
[00:22:14] No one can say the goodness of God missed me.
[00:22:20] Somehow or another, I suffered through my whole life, and God was never good to me once. If you think that you have misunderstood and you've misjudged life because in some way, God is good to all.
[00:22:37] All right, now let's drill in a little harder on what we mean by goodness.
[00:22:45] The Greeks were the first ones to start trying to philosophically define goodness.
[00:22:52] And what they did was they. They made goodness represent things like useful. A good horse was a useful horse.
[00:23:03] If the horse wasn't useful, it wasn't a good horse.
[00:23:06] Or they would say good is what is desirable.
[00:23:10] That is a good apple. I would. I would. I desire to eat it.
[00:23:16] If it wasn't. If it wasn't desirable, if it was a rotten apple, it wasn't a good apple.
[00:23:24] They associated good with goodness with happiness.
[00:23:27] Goodness is what created happiness.
[00:23:31] The trouble is all these Greek definitions make good relative.
[00:23:38] It's decided by the individual. Instead of there being a absolute standard of goodness, Christianity takes a very different beginning place.
[00:23:51] And for you who have are Bible readers, you know that good. The word good shows up in Genesis chapter one and each day of creation. God. God looks at it and says, this is good.
[00:24:07] And he gets to Genesis 1:31, the end of the chapter, and he looks at everything he created. And God saw that everything he had. And God saw everything that he had made. And behold, it was very good.
[00:24:25] Did you hear that?
[00:24:27] From the very beginning, God has had clarity about what goodness is.
[00:24:34] And in this, in this context, goodness means just exactly what God intended it to be.
[00:24:44] Let's read it that way.
[00:24:47] God saw everything that he had made and behold it was just what he intended it to be. Be what is good.
[00:24:58] Good is everything functioning and being exactly what God intended it to be.
[00:25:07] If it is do. If it is being what God intended it to be and doing what God intended it to do, it is good.
[00:25:15] If it is not being what God intended it to be and not doing what God intended it to do, it's not good.
[00:25:24] You can start looking around in your life and saying, am I doing what God. Am I being who God intended to be?
[00:25:32] Am I doing what God intended me to do?
[00:25:35] Is our family functioning the way God intended it to function?
[00:25:39] Are we treating people the way God intends us to treat? That's how we begin to define good.
[00:25:45] Goodness is not an arbitrary scale that we create. It is defined by what God intended from the very creation.
[00:25:59] Then there is.
[00:26:01] There is revealed goodness.
[00:26:04] And this, this revealed goodness is connected to the word benevolence.
[00:26:10] And benevolence means a generous. A generous attitude or a generous inclination.
[00:26:20] We. We are good when we are generous in doing what God intended.
[00:26:27] Listen what the prophet Micah wrote.
[00:26:32] He has told you, O humanity, what is good?
[00:26:37] And here it is.
[00:26:39] What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love, kindness and. And to walk humbly with your God?
[00:26:48] God has told you what is good.
[00:26:51] And good is to have a generous attitude, to do justice, to have a. To have a generous attitude that believes other people deserve justice, just like I want justice.
[00:27:07] What does. What is. What is goodness? It is to love kindness is to have a generous disposition, to be kind.
[00:27:17] And it's to walk humbly with God.
[00:27:21] What is good? It is being what just what God intended to be. It is being generously what God intended us to be.
[00:27:33] And then we start working on a theological definition for Goodness.
[00:27:41] Christianity. In Christian theology, we define the goodness of God as the sum of all his perfections.
[00:27:49] Everything that is perfect about God equals his goodness.
[00:27:56] A man once. A man once said to Jesus, what do I have to do? A good teacher, what do I have to do to inherit eternal life?
[00:28:08] And listen what Jesus said to him.
[00:28:12] Why do you call me good?
[00:28:15] No one is good except God alone.
[00:28:19] What did Jesus mean by that?
[00:28:22] He meant no one is morally perfect.
[00:28:27] No one is the sum of all the perfections except God.
[00:28:32] God is the only one who is perfectly perfect. Perfect.
[00:28:36] So when we say God is good in a theological sense, we're saying God is perfectly perfect in everything he is and everything he does. Is that a beautiful idea?
[00:28:52] All right.
[00:28:53] Now you get to hear Augustine again.
[00:28:56] Church, you're lucky I bring you the good stuff.
[00:29:00] You're not going to get to hear Augustine on TV Preachers. All right, once again, this is kind of hard, but I'll say it in an easier way.
[00:29:13] As God.
[00:29:15] God as the perfect and blessed One is the supreme good for all his creatures.
[00:29:22] The supreme good all things. Strive for.
[00:29:29] The fountain of all good things.
[00:29:32] The good of every good and the one necessary and all sufficient good.
[00:29:40] The end of all goods.
[00:29:43] All right, now let's make it easier.
[00:29:47] All right. Augustine wants to say.
[00:29:51] I want to talk to you about the nature, the innate nature of God's goodness.
[00:29:58] Okay, But I'm gonna have to use the word good about 10 times.
[00:30:03] All right, so let's. Let's do these.
[00:30:05] Let's pick some of these apart.
[00:30:09] He is the supreme Good. That means there is no good higher than Him.
[00:30:16] He's not only the supreme Good.
[00:30:19] He is the supreme good that every good created soul has a longing for.
[00:30:30] Somewhere in your soul because God is good, you have a longing for goodness.
[00:30:39] You don't long for goodness because you are a good person. You long for goodness because a good God created you with an innate need for.
[00:30:51] For his supreme goodness.
[00:30:55] He is the fount of all good things. We've already said this. Every good and perfect gift. All right.
[00:31:03] Look at, look at this one.
[00:31:05] He is the good of every good. If there's any good in it, it's God.
[00:31:12] He is the necessary and all sufficient good.
[00:31:16] God is not just good because he's good.
[00:31:21] He is good in a way that all creation finds absolutely necessary.
[00:31:28] The goodness of God is necessary for all creation.
[00:31:35] He is the final cause of every good.
[00:31:37] Please listen to this.
[00:31:42] We are studying the nature, the attributes of God.
[00:31:48] And the Bible says repeatedly that God is good.
[00:31:53] What does it mean when it says that?
[00:31:56] It means there is something that is essential to the nature of God, that is absolutely perfect in every way.
[00:32:06] It means that there's something that is essential to the nature of God.
[00:32:11] That God always is and God always does just exactly who he's supposed to be and what he's supposed to do.
[00:32:21] In the very nature of God, there is a.
[00:32:27] There is a goodness that the human soul consciously and subconsciously longs for.
[00:32:36] The good you think you want, the good you think you could get if you could just move to a new house. The good you think you would have if you just had a different car. The good you think you'd have if so and so would just change their life. Action. Those are not the supreme good because they wear out.
[00:32:58] Our desire for good shifts from this to that, from this to that.
[00:33:04] Because ultimately those are not what the heart is really longing for. The heart is ultimately longing for this innate perfect goodness that is God.
[00:33:20] So when we contemplate the goodness of God and we do it properly, it nurtures something empty in our soul.
[00:33:31] And we don't quite feel so compelled by these lesser things. They start to lose some of their shine in the brightness of the infinite goodness of God.
[00:33:45] Our dear Heavenly Father, I believe that you are good.
[00:33:54] I believe that you're good to all.
[00:33:58] I believe that every good gift and every perfect gift comes from you.
[00:34:05] I believe your goodness is what the human soul longs for.
[00:34:10] And I pray this morning that, as only your Holy Spirit can do, we could sense the goodness of your presence.
[00:34:20] And we could sense it in a kind of way that something of the longing of our soul would be touched and we would be satisfied in the goodness of your perfect nature.
[00:34:35] And I ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
