Is God Good?

The last time I wrote, I considered the question: “Is Death Good?” This time I want to look at the question as to whether or not God is good. Some would say not because there is so much evil in the world. The mistaken assumption is that God caused the evil and that he is either helpless to do anything about it, he is not a good God, or he simply does not care.

When Darwin looked at the world, he had a difficult time trying to reconcile the carnage found in the natural order. In addition to the natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods, he tried to understand how species could destroy one another to survive. He concluded that God could not make his creation this way and be a good God at the same time. Cornelius Hunter writes in “Darwin’s God”: “…Darwin repeatedly argued that God would never have created the world the way that the nineteenth century naturalists were uncovering…Darwin wrote to a friend: ‘there seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the [parasitic wasp] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that the cat should play with mice.’” (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2001, p. 12) Darwin observed correctly, but he started with a faulty, uniformitarian presupposition. God did not make creation this way. Things have not always been as they are now. That was the point of my last article. When God finished creating everything, he declared it all to be very good. (See Genesis 1:31).

If God used evolution, even theistic evolution, along with uniformitarian geology, then death, disease, destruction, and suffering have always been a part of nature since the beginning. Rather than a biblical creation week, all that remains is millions of years of suffering. Then how could God look back at all his creation filled with death, disease, destruction, and animals devouring each other and call it “very good” after “creating” mankind through theistic evolution?

So if God called death, disease, and suffering “good,” we need to ask ourselves, “Is God good?” What does the word “good” mean in the original language? Dr. Henry Morris writes in the book “Creation Basics and Beyond” that good is “the same Hebrew word each time and it means just what would be expected: good, pleasant, agreeable, excellent, of benefit, etc. That word is used over 500 times in Scripture” (p. 14). Can we apply those characteristics to death and disease?

Morris lists three of God’s attributes: Holiness, Omniscience, and Goodness. He also states that God’s goodness is flawless. Because of that, “goodness” could not include malfunction, sin, or death. Those are all contrary to God’s nature. This is where Darwin and many other skeptics have a problem with the concept of God.

What they fail to understand is that God did not create the world as it is today. That belief comes from evolutionary brainwashing and uniformitarian thinking rather than revelation or even by observable science. A biblical concept better fits what we actually observe in nature and the revealed attributes of God. He created the universe to function flawlessly. Death was not a part of it. Because Adam sinned (Romans 5:12), death entered the world through that sin, and Paul states that the entire universe (“creation”) is “groaning” because of it (Romans 8:22).

When Christians claim to believe the Bible, but say that God could have used millions or billions of years to “evolve” mankind, they send a mixed message about God as well as themselves. First Morris says, “If physical death is part of the design of God in the original creation, that makes God the Author of death…The Bible calls death the ‘last enemy’ and insists that the Lord Jesus will destroy it. If God Himself created death, then why would he destroy it later? Did God deliberately confuse us?” (p. 17) For that matter, if God created death, why would he call it an enemy?

“If death is not the judgment for sin as the Bible insists, then the whole of the gospel message is foolishness. What would salvation rescue us from? If death is not the judgment for sin, then the death of the Lord Jesus on the cross at Calvary is nothing more than a foolish end to an idealist—a martyrdom for an illusionary cause” (Ibid.).

Yes, God is good. He is also holy and cannot let sin go unpunished. The good news is that Christ took the punishment that you and I deserved and paid the debt for us. Peter says that Christ “Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness” (1 Peter 2:24). And he writes in 1 Peter 3:18 “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive by the Spirit.”

This same Peter preached about the “restoration of all things” (See Acts 3:21) where God will reverse the curse. This good God will one day remove creation’s curse and finally destroy the last enemy, death. This good God will create a new heavens and a new earth where “there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away” (Revelation 21:4). Are you ready for that day? Have you believed the good news?