God's Holiness: Greatness, Goodness, and Justice

"God is great, God is good and we thank Him for this food." I don't know who first composed that prayer, but I think the prayer somehow was supposed to rhyme, and when my grandmother said it, it did rhyme. She said God is great, God is good, and we thank Him for this "food," and I always thought that was strange and she used to call that thing that was on top of our house, the "roof," and that's just a different generation, but like many children, I memorized that table grace and would say it by rote without any deep meaning or appreciation for the words I was expressing. [00:00:21]

The holiness of God directs our attention to His transcendent august majesty, so that when we say that he is holy, we're not only saying that He is pure, we're not only saying simply that He is good, but we are saying that He is great. In fact, that's the primary reference to the word. But, what we're concerned about in this session is not so much His greatness, for the moment, but rather we're concerned for His goodness. [00:03:15]

The biblical concept is this, that there is a law of goodness that even God must obey, and by which God Himself is judged, and that goodness, however, is not something apart from Him, but the ultimate norm for goodness, the standard of goodness itself, is the eternal character of God Himself. When we say that God is a law unto Himself, we mean that God always acts and behaves according to His nature, according to His own character, and that character is altogether holy. [00:07:18]

The philosopher, John Stuart Mill, for example, said that Christianity and Judaism together both teach that God is all powerful and all good, and Mill's criticism was this, that Christianity wants to have its cake and eat it, too, that both of these propositions cannot be equally true. And the reason for the protest of John Stuart Mill was this, that Mill looked at a world that is filled with pain, with suffering, with grief, and with evil, and he says, "If God is all powerful and allows the pain that you know and that you experience, the suffering that has afflicted you, if God is all powerful and allows the degree of evil that casts a shadow over the joy of human life, then He cannot possibly be good." [00:09:20]

God is threatening to rain down judgment upon Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham has friends that lived there and he said," God what are you going to do? Are you going to destroy innocent people? Are you going to punish the innocent, the righteous, along with the wicked?" Now, I know that Abraham did not have the benefit of New Testament theology. Abraham did not have the benefit of a contemporary seminary education, but Abraham is considered the Father of the faithful in sacred Scripture and we would expect that a man as close to God, a man as knowledgeable of the character of God as Abraham was would have bitten his tongue before he asked such an insulting question of the Almighty. [00:14:27]

"Shall not the Judge of all of the earth do what is right?" That is the prime assumption of the biblical concept of God and His justice, that this is one Judge, the supreme Judge, the Judge of heaven and the earth, shall He not do what is right? Ladies and gentlemen, that's all God knows how to do, because He is altogether righteous. And to be righteous, simply speaking, is to do what is right. God always does what is right and Abraham understood that, and that was the foundation for this almost humorous narrative of negotiations. [00:19:54]

Bad things don't happen to good people, because the Bible makes it very clear that there is none righteous, no not one, that judged by the ultimate standard of God's goodness, it is a misnomer to credit humanity with the epitaph "good." Do you remember the rich young ruler that rushed to the feet of Jesus saying to him, "Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" and Jesus stopped him in his tracks and said, "Hey, why do you call Me good? Only God is good." [00:25:28]

Now, I've answered part of the question by saying ultimately there are no good people, but what I'm about to get into now I think you may find shocking and I'll ask you to put yourself on shockproof control for a few moments until I finish this lest you become so shocked with what I'm about to say that you won't even hear the explanation of it. Suppose in your wildest imagination, in your dreams, that Jesus walked in here right now and came up to you and looked you in the eye and said, "I'm going to make a promise to you, that for the rest of your days in this world, I'm not going to allow anything bad to happen to you, that all that's going to happen to you for the rest of your days will be good." [00:27:28]

We all know that verse, don't we? "All things work together for good for those who love the Lord and who are called according to His purpose." You memorized that years ago, right? Well, at first blush that seems to say to us, "Okay, there are all kinds of things in the proximate realm that happen to us that are bad. But God stands over and above that proximate realm. God is on the vertical plane transcending this horizontal veil of tears in which we live, and He has the power to take every bad thing that happens to you and make it contribute ultimately to your good, doesn't He? Isn't that what that verse is saying? [00:34:38]

Ultimately, it is good that they happen to us, that the heavenly Father never allows anything to happen to you that is not for your ultimate good. If we could believe that, we could face anything. I wrote a book on suffering called Surprised by Suffering. I chose that title on purpose, because in this day and age there's a brand of Christianity that I believe is a serious distortion of biblical Christianity, that goes about the world teaching people that God only wills health and prosperity for people and that all of the sorrow and the pain in the grief and death and all of that is a result of the devil's work among us, as if the devil had the power ultimately to frustrate the sovereign authority of God. [00:36:23]

The Bible never promises that Christians will not suffer. Ladies and gentlemen, if you'd just read it once, you'll see that the Bible promises that we will suffer, but with that promise is the promise of God's triumph in our suffering, God's triumph over our suffering, God's triumph through our suffering, God working over and above. This ultimate should be reversed and put up here in control over the proximate, so that all things work together for good to those who love the Lord and who are called according to His purpose. [00:40:52]

Now, I said in passing that every tragedy for the Christian is ultimately a blessing. That doesn't deny the reality of the tragedy at this level, but ultimately every tragedy in your life is a blessing and every blessing that the pagan receives from the hand of God for which that pagan does not respond in gratitude and repentance before God increases his guilt before God. Every good and perfect gift that God gives to an unbeliever that that unbeliever refuses to praise God for, becomes an occasion for judgment ultimately. [00:45:28]