Is Your God Good?

Searching for Why We Suffer

A popular meme shows a small boy cowering in the corner of a dark room labeled, “Religion,” and crying, “I messed up. My dad’s gonna kill me!” The second scene labeled, “Gospel,” shows a similar child reaching up to an extended hand as he says, “I messed up. I need to call my dad!”
            If bad theology has destroyed your hope that God is truly good and someone you can call on without fear, it needs repair! Is Your God Good? relieves confusion and terror regarding the character of God. Most of its insights have been realized by theologians, ancient and modern, but have ended up as siloed truths, without incorporating them to recast our image of God.
            First, rooted in the reports and pagan context of the patriarchs, is the theory that God is primarily a violent and retributive God. This is in such a sharp contrast to the character of Jesus, the fullest “image of the invisible God” and “the exact representation of his being,” that it’s as though we’ve tried to amalgamate two different deities.
            Second, we think God’s way of achieving his purposes in the universe employs our human methods of working out plans by micromanaging everything over which we have power. Plans are finite; purpose is infinite. God doesn’t need to control everything to achieve his purposes. Therefore, not everything that happens is an act of God.
            Third, our view of Christ’s atonement on the Cross often presumes his sacrifice pays a debt we owe to a vindictive God for our sin before God can embrace us, when in fact, it is Satan who demands a ransom and God who loves us so much he was willing to sacrifice his son to redeem us from Satan’s power.
            This book dismantles those faulty theologies that paint God as someone to fear. Why we suffer may still involve certain mysteries, but “if God is for us, who can be against us?” We don’t have to deny contradictions, gaslight our pain, or survive on hollow platitudes. Instead, we can live with integrity, realizing that God really is good!

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Annotated Chapter Descriptions

Introduction

When it comes to suffering, we are all involved in “great matters too difficult to fully understand.” If we could leave them alone, as the psalmist advises, we would. But we can’t! We wonder whether God causes suffering—or at least doesn’t care enough to stop it.

1. What Is the Weight that Stifles Faith?

We imagine many ways God could have stepped in and stopped suffering. When he doesn’t, we ask, “Why?” We press on, refusing to face the toll on our faith. Theologians have addressed the subject for centuries without a final answer, but we can clean up some of the shallow answers that destroy faith.

2. Is Everything an “Act of God”?

Many ancient and modern preachers claim God causes all calamities and violence. Their belief reflects the gruesome pattern they see in the Old Testament. Many of us ignore or skip over those “Texts of Terror,” but we’re still influenced by the presumption that a vindictive God micromanages everything.

3. What Didn’t the Patriarchs Know?

“All Scripture is God-breathed.” What if God inspired the authors to record their full experience, including their cultural presumptions? The Israelites needed to know God as the great “I AM.” But in ancient cultures, that was proved by who won battles and blessed or cursed followers according to how they obeyed him.

4. Why Did God Tolerate Cultural Assumptions?

Missionaries to a tribe practicing female circumcision provided sanitary scalpels, pain medication, and antiseptics to alleviate suffering and death. After teaching about Jesus for three years, they suggested the custom wasn’t consistent with Jesus’ love. It soon ended. But a midway observer might have misunderstood.

5. What If God Is Not Who We Thought?

God did not wait until the Israelites were fully convinced of his sovereignty to begin revealing himself as other than violent and retributive. He began immediately to correct their misconceptions, but it wasn’t until he came as Jesus to live among us that the full goodness of his character was revealed.

6. Jesus, the Revisionist

Jesus’ disciples expected a violent Messiah to throw off the Romans. But political revolution was not his purpose. He did not come to “tune up” old ideas, getting people to obey Mosaic Law more strictly. With the authority and the character of the “I AM,” he introduced a New Covenant with new ethics and goals.

7. What God Allows Is Not Necessarily What God Approves

Much suffering stems from unmitigated evil, in which God cannot have been involved. The ultimate example is Satan’s rebellion. Passages, such as the man born blind, are poor translations, suggesting God planned it. Some scriptures that sound like threats from God may have been warnings of natural consequences.

8. “I the Lord Do Not Change!” So, What Should We Do?

Proving the literal details of the Creation and Flood storiesreveals the absurdity of insisting all Scripture is inerrant. But Paul already told us, “For now we see only . . . in part.” Did the Bible’s authors see only in part, also? Thankfully, Jesus brings us corrections to—not contradictions within—our understanding of God.

9. Job’s Overwhelming Suffering . . . Why?

The Book of Job is the most extended examination of suffering in the Bible, and it is based on two common premises believed by both ancient and many modern people: (1) God micromanages all events. (2) God primarily blesses those who please him and vents his wrath on those who displease him. However, . . .

10. Job’s Magical Mystery Tour of the Universe

Many read God’s response to Job as a put-down, but God may have had a deeper purpose by revealing to Job things in the universe about which Job had little understanding. Job responded, “My ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you,” relieving him of his two great errors about the sources of suffering.

11. Is Your God Too Small?

We also may need a “magical mystery tour.” Imbedded in the evolutionary beauty of the universe are many events we might call “natural disasters.” But without them, we couldn’t exist. Grasping this complex requisite reveals why God allows complications such as freewill that characterize us as humans rather than robots.

12. The Enigma of Spacetime and Prophecy

The past, present, and future—time moves in one direction at a constant pace, right? No, reality is bigger. Our plans are finite; defined by our perception of time, but God’s purposes are infinite. Without predestining everything, God can adjust to any possibility, allowing humans freewill while still achieving his purposes.

13. Why I Laid Down My Gun in the Middle of a Cosmic War

Satan’s rebellion against God resulted in a cosmic battle that includes human warfare. Satan doesn’t care who wins because he’s not fighting for one side or the other; he’s only interested in pitting us against each other. Forced to face people around my church with a gun rather than God’s Word, I withdrew from the Army.

14. Who Demanded that Aslan Die?

The “penal substitutionary” theory that God’s anger required death for our sins is not the only way to understand Christ’s Atonement. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis portrays the “Christus victor” or “ransom theory” (favored by the early church), in which Satan is the one demanding our death.

15. Judgment: What Is God’s Goal?

Judgment exposes behavior as good or evil, also revealing our unfaithfulness to God and our harm to others. Full repentance relieves suffering far more than does punishment. Facing the truth and turning from sin is essential to spend eternity with God and one another. But it’s not required to follow Satan and his minions.

16. Why Doesn’t God Perform More Miracles?

Jesus’ miracles transformed history. We can recognize more miracles when we note that all good gifts are from him. But though God is sovereign, he has not chosen to micromanage all events and rarely thwarts human freewill. Still, he welcomes our prayers and speaks if we listen. Those are also miracles.

17. What about Discipline?

God’s discipline might not be easy, but it doesn’t harm, destroy, or kill. Instead, it heals and strengthens. Hebrews 12 speaks of a father’s love and a sports analogy of strengthening weak limbs. Jesus’ analogy of the vine and branches in John 15 does not mean branches are “cut off” but cleaned and lifted up.

18. Embracing Redemptive Suffering

Redemptive suffering is different from other kinds. By suffering while spreading the Gospel or in someone else’s place, we do not replace Christ’s work on the Cross, but we share in Christ’s suffering by joining the fight against Satan. And God allows us a degree of agency to embrace the risk or not.

19. How Should We Then Live?

After reviewing the assumptions of bad theology that characterize God as violent and retributive, we are free to embrace his goodness by joining Jesus’ sacrificial mission to free all of humanity from Satan’s claims and influence. We can resist evil, pray, not fear, embrace change, practice thanksgiving, live by faith, and sing!

Annotated Bibliography

A selective list of books on suffering or issues related to the bad theology that cause people to doubt the goodness of God from authors: Gregory Boyd, Jerry Bridges, Paul Copan, Bart Ehrman, Timothy Keller, Peter Kreeft, C.S. Lewis, Thomas Joy Oord, J.B. Phillips, Paul David Tripp, and Philip Yancey.

 

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