God is Good
Texts: Psalm 34:1-8, 106:1; Mark 10:17-18
Pastor Phil Hughes, American Fork Presbyterian Church, Utah
January 15, 2023
What tastes good to you? One of my favorite tastes is the taste of the first orange I eat in early winter. The citrus is just out, I generally haven’t had an orange for several months, and there is something about that first orange that is bursting with flavor. I love the taste of fresh picked blackberries. I love the taste of well-smoked ribs. I love the taste of French roast coffee first thing in the morning. I think peanut butter and jelly and a glass of cold milk are one of the classic tastes known to humanity.
God is good. And “taste” is the word the psalmist uses to speak of the goodness of God. “Taste and see that the Lord is good” David says. It is an invitation to experience the goodness of God.
To taste something you have to put it into your mouth. You can look at, hold, and smell something but you don’t really know what it tastes like until you internalize it. To taste takes a certain commitment. And it has to be experienced.
You don’t know what goat cheese tastes like until you put it in your mouth.
When David said, “Taste and see that the Lord is good” it was like he was saying “Try the Lord. Take him for a test drive. If you are unconvinced, live by trusting him in a 30-day free trial.”
In Psalm 34 David gives a personal testimony of God’s goodness in his life. The interesting thing is that David doesn’t say that God made everything perfect for him. David had fears, but he says the Lord delivered him from all his fears. He had troubles, but the Lord heard him when he called to the Lord and saved him out of all his troubles.
David did not claim God as good because all was smooth and trouble-free for him. No, it was in his fears and his troubles and afflictions that David knew that God is good.
That God is good is a common refrain throughout the psalms. “Give thanks to the Lord for he is good…” it says in Psalm 106.
In Psalm 25:8 it says, “Good and upright is the LORD…”
“For you, O Lord, are good and forgiving, abounding in steadfast love to all who call on you,” says Psalm 86:5
Peter writes in his first letter to believers how they have tasted that the Lord is good.[1]
Jesus was setting out on a journey one time and a man ran up to him, knelt before him with reverence, and asked Jesus “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus answered, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” Many people wonder why Jesus answered the way he did. Isn’t Jesus good?
In Judaism at that time a rabbi would never be addressed as “good teacher” because “good” was a characteristic of God. To call yourself “good” in a religious context put you in danger of being somewhat blasphemous. As Jesus affirms, only God is good.
Jesus was possibly being a little ironic with his response, subtly suggesting that this man figure out whether Jesus is God.
But then, Jesus is also possibly pointing the young man away from himself and pointing him to God the Father. The Son of God no more thought of His own goodness than an honest [person] thinks of his honesty.[2] It is so natural that it is like breath, you don’t consciously focus on it. Jesus was a servant. He was humble. He only did and taught what the Father showed him. He didn’t supersede his relationship with the Father.
And so Jesus said, “No one is good but God alone.” The point I want us to get is that Jesus affirms that God is good. It is an attribute of God.
But, you know, it can be hard to affirm that God is good. For many people fears, troubles, and problems convince them that God is not good, or that he doesn’t even exist. We look around this world and see a lot of cruelty, brutality, and evil. We suffer and wonder why God, if he is good, lets this happen. How can there be a God who is good if there is so much bad?
There is a book called “Good God, Lousy World, And Me” written by a human rights activist and lawyer named Holly Burkhalter. In it she writes:
“I once heard it said that you can believe in an all-powerful and loving God or you can believe in the Holocaust, but you cannot believe in both of those things. Yes. When I think of the Holocaust and other atrocities that have become horrifyingly ordinary, it seems just stupid to imagine a good God who put this in motion and only watches it unfold. [God] appears to be either uninterested or helpless against the forces of violence and cruelty that clearly have the upper hand most of the time, especially if you’re a woman, a child, disabled, or poor.” Holly Burkhalter said that it’s less painful to believe that God doesn’t exist at all than to try to add up that there is a loving God when daily it certainly doesn’t look like it.[3]
She’s right. It can be really hard to hold that God is good in the face of so much wrong in this world.
I met Holly Burkhalter almost a few years ago when I went to Washington D.C., at the invitation of International Justice Mission. International Justice Mission is one of the largest and most effective anti-trafficking organizations in the world and is a thoroughly Christian organization. IJM specializes in combating the sex-slave industry.
I was invited to be part of their lobby day on Capitol Hill for a piece of legislation that was being brought to the House of Representatives called the End Modern Slavery Initiative. This bill provided billions of dollars to fight human trafficking throughout the globe.[4]
I was invited by IJM to come and meet with Utah Senator Mike Lee because he was one of two Senators who had put a hold on the bill, and they wanted a Christian leader from Utah to lobby. Like I know how to do that, right? It was a fascinating meeting and a story for another time.
Holly Burkhalter was with me when we met with Senator Lee. Burkhalter is a Christian, but she wasn’t always. She was an atheist for forty years, and deeply critical of Christianity. She had been around the world and seen the savagery and suffering of so many. She had seen so many atrocities that she figured God probably didn’t exist, and if he did he surely wasn’t good.
But as she traveled and did her human rights work, she kept coming into contact with Christians who were doing tremendous works of good in the midst of evil and the mess of this world.
She met a woman named Margaret from Uganda whose leg had been torn off after she stepped on a land mine while trying to escape the Ugandan terrorist group called the Lord’s Resistance Army. Margaret had been brought to Washington to speak at a secular conference for the international campaign to ban land mines. Despite an infection where her leg had been taken off which led to much suffering, Margaret thanked God for her amputation in her speech. She said to this secular audience that she experienced Jesus’ presence much more after her injury, that he had blessed her with love and friends, and that she now did the good work of helping other land mine survivors.[5]
It made Burkhalter squirm. She said at that time she “stubbornly refused to find God in my blessings so long as there were those who had none such.” She felt guilty about having joy when so many others lacked it. Then she heard someone say that rejecting joy in order to stand with those who suffer doesn’t help those who are suffering. Rather, it is those who bravely focus on what is good and beautiful and true, even in the small things, who give thanks and find joy in hardship, they are the change agents who bring the fullest light to the world.[6]
Well then.
Then Burkhalter met a Roman Catholic bishop in South America who oversaw a drastically poor diocese with one of the highest rates of HIV in the world. Yet, he served and advocated for so many people with peacefulness and joy. She noticed.
Then she met Becky, an HIV/AIDS doctor, and evangelical Christian, who met people where they were in life without judgment and insisted that the church be a “no-penalty zone” where people can lay down their defenses, say what they are afraid of, and receive the love of God even if they had made some terrible mistakes.
By the way, don’t let the American media or certain strands of religion steal the term evangelical. Yes, some people are misrepresenting what it means to be an evangelical Christian, but that is all the more reason for those of us who live by the good news of the word of God – which is the true meaning of evangelical - to demonstrate it by doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly (not arrogantly) before God. It is all the more reason not to play to political power, but to faithfully live lives that show Jesus to an increasingly skeptical and searching world.
Well, as Burkhalter came into contact with these Christians her defenses against God began to crumble. It got worse when she was deeply influenced by a conservative Christian friend, and Holly makes no apologies about being liberal, who worked against sex-slave trafficking, and encouraged Burkhalter to start to pray. Quite a step for an atheist, to start praying. But she did.
Holly Burkhalter became a Christian when she applied for a job with International Justice Mission and had to write a statement of faith since IJM is a Christian organization. She basically realized she had come to believe in the good God. She said,
“I was not a Christian for most of my adult life precisely because I did not see evidence that God cared enough about the world to intervene to save the tortured and the maimed and the insane and the abused. One of the most important things that got me over the hurdle was observing [people who]…’show up’ to help widows and children and prisoners. God works through the people who love and serve him, and he gives them strength and courage. That made sense to me.”[7]
Folks, don’t ever underestimate how important it is to live lives consistent with Christ, and the effect that can have on others.
She also tasted that God is good when she prayed. She asked for help to be more peaceful, joyful and patient, and she got it. She doesn’t understand it. It is a mystery to her, but she said the more she prays the more she changes.
Burkhalter confesses she can still sway between doubt and faith, but she cannot help but believe God’s hand is in this world as lousy as this world can be. That the bad isn’t because of God, it is because of what people do, or, sadly, what they don’t do. As Jesus said to that young man, “No one is really good but God alone.”
Through seeing some of the hardest things that plague this world, Holly Burkhalter came to believe that God is good.
Psalm 145 says “The Lord is good to all…” Holly Burkhalter says, “This glorious expression of God’s love and truth being the source of everything that is good…shames the smallness of my understanding of God and my contempt for what I had understood to be the God of the Old Testament. The Lord who ‘upholdeth all that fall, and raiseth up all those that be bowed down’ is a radically generous God, available to all.”
She has come to see that God’s love and care can be present in even the most hopeless of circumstances, and she has seen plenty of that.
Let me tell you a story of another person who knew God is good amidst the worst. Allen Gardiner was a missionary who experienced many physical difficulties and hardships throughout his service to the Lord Jesus Christ. Despite his troubles, he said, “While God gives me strength, failure will not daunt me.”
In 1851, at the age of 57, Gardner died of disease and starvation while serving on Picton Island at the southern tip of South America. When his body was found, his diary lay nearby. It was the record of hunger, thirst, wounds, and loneliness.
The last entry in his little book showed the struggle of his shaking hand as he tried to write legibly. It read, “I am overwhelmed with a sense of the goodness of God.”
David wrote Psalm 34 to invite all to taste and experience God’s goodness for themselves. And the crazy and mysterious thing is that God’s goodness might be tasted more poignantly in the fears, troubles and sufferings we face than in the easy, blissful things.
It is OK to ask why is there so much bad in the world. But we also have to ask why is there so much good amidst the bad. Why are so many good people doing so many good things in some of the worst and wretched places in the world: whether that be in refugee camps far away or a single home in our neighborhood?
Why are so many people and organizations feeding, healing, sheltering, praying, educating, and helping in some of the darkest places? And so many doing it in the name of the God who is good? Why keep doing it? Could it be that God is good and his goodness shows in his people? That people have tasted his goodness and can’t help but share it?
Why did God come in Jesus Christ into the dismal, dark refugee camp we call our world? Because God is good.
He created us because he is good. Do you think we deserve to exist? And why aren’t we and this world destroyed given what we’ve done with this world? Because he has spared and saved us in his goodness.
Why would the Son of God bleed and die on a cross for me? Why not blame me, condemn me, punish me? Because God is good.
Why does God answer prayer? Don’t think it is because we are so good. It is because he is good.
The thing about the taste of something really good, you never forget it and you tell others about it. You share the goodness. Jesus’ goodness is shown through his people. And he asks us to show his goodness to the sick, the poor, the prisoner, the lonely. We are told to remember those going through the worst of it, and to do good.[8]
Have you tasted the goodness of God in your life? In your family? In the way he provides for you? In your wealth? In all you get to experience? In the peace and joy you know? In this church? In the fact you had the strength, breath, and safety to come to this place today? In friends? Those who care for you? In the modern conveniences you enjoy? Leisure? Even in the challenges?
“Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his steadfast love endures forever.” Indeed.
See how many ways you can count the goodness of God this week. Just try it. Make it an exercise of faith. And see how you can let God’s goodness flow through you to others.
Prayer: Open our eyes, O God, by your Holy Spirit, to your goodness. Inspire us to share what we have tasted. Drive us to show good where there has been bad. We can’t do this of our own so we ask for your grace to do this in us.
And we will give you the praise and the glory. Amen.
[1] 1 Peter 2:3
[2] Quote from George MacDonald, found in James Edwards commentary on Mark, p.310
[3] P.3
[4] Sadly, Representative Corker is one of those who has decided to leave Washington because of the current tone and workings of our government.
[5] P.56
[6] P.59
[7] P.108
[8] Hebrews 13:3,16
