Hard Questions: God’s Goodness

Welcome! Today we continue our series on hard questions. Last week we talked about God’s power, and we addressed the question of why, despite an all-powerful God, there is suffering and evil in the world. We also briefly talked about how to respond to those who suffer. This week we are going to focus on God’s goodness, and we will look at several questions that often are borne out of doubting the goodness of God.

Is God really good? (I realize there is a bit of a play on words here, with that word “really.”)

This is a common point of attack used by atheists and others who question or reject Christianity. Often the question has the form “How can a loving God…” followed by whatever particular charge is made against the claim that God is good.

Well, from the beginning, God’s goodness has come under attack. Look carefully at the serpent’s reply to Eve:

Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?" The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.'" "You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman. "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." – Gen. 3:1-5 

The serpent called God a liar, but more than that, he questioned God’s goodness. He told Eve, in effect, “Don’t trust God! He doesn’t even tell you the truth. And He is trying to keep good things from you.” This was an attack on the goodness of God. The serpent succeeded in getting Eve to believe that God was not so good, and that the forbidden fruit was good, better than God, even.

I believe that attacks on the goodness of God are even more dangerous than attacks on God’s power. Faith is not just an intellectual belief, but it is an active trust in the goodness of God. I have a picture in mind of toddler running to her daddy. As long as she believes that her daddy loves her and is good, she will again and again keep running to his arms. If she learns that he is not all-powerful, it may give her pause, but it won’t change her trust in him. But if she for some reason is led to mistrust him, to doubt his goodness, then she won’t run to him. This is why I believe Satan often attacks people’s trust in the goodness of God.

Now, there are countless verses on the goodness of God. God’s goodness is one of His most fundamental attributes. Here are just a few favorite verses:

Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good; His love endures forever. Let the redeemed of the Lord say this—those He redeemed from the hand of the foe, those He gathered from the lands, from east and west, from north and south. – Psalm 107:1-3

We are certainly among those who have been redeemed from the hand of the “foe.” God’s love (and remember, God is love) and God’s goodness are inseparable. This is not just some abstract property of God; God loves me. God loves you. He has shown us the unimaginable depth of His love by sending His Son to die a horrible death as redemption for our sins. We can run to Him, we can trust Him, because He is always good. He is always love.

Then Moses said, "Now show me Your glory." And the Lord said, "I will cause all My goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim My Name, the Lord, in your presence." – Ex. 33:18-19

Here we see that God’s glory and God’s goodness are inseparable. We, living in the age of movies with special effects, tend to think of God’s glory as a sound a light show. But God’s glory is His goodness. It was seeing God’s glory, God’s goodness, that caused Isaiah to cry out, “Woe to me, I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty!”

Suppose you have an old, slightly dingy, slightly beat-up sofa. It may look OK in your den, but if you put it in the Biltmore House, it is going to look terrible, when we and our “goodness” is placed in the presence of God’s glory, God’s goodness, we know just how terrible we are.

So God’s glory, God’s love, and God’s goodness are so mixed-up together that it is impossible to say where one of them ends and another begins. You cannot question God’s goodness without questioning His love or His glory.

One of my favorite psalms is Psalm 73, one of those by Asaph. (I love all of Asaph’s psalms.) The entire psalm is a journey into and out of the questioning of the goodness of God. Here is how it begins:

Surely God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart. But as for me, my feet had almost slipped; I had nearly lost my foothold. For I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. – Psalm 73:1-3

He goes on in verse after verse to describe how great they seem to have it. And then in the he writes:

Surely in vain have I kept my heart pure; in vain have I washed my hands in innocence. All day long I have been plagued; I have been punished every morning. – Psalm 73:13-14

He is questioning God’s goodness. Do you see this? His question is one asked many other times in Scripture. David asked it. Job’s friends asked it (Job 21:7). Jeremiah asked it (Jer. 12:1). Habakkuk asked it (Hab. 1:13).

Now the answer, again and again, is that God is just, and He will deliver total justice at the appropriate time. I’m not sure what this says about human nature, but the almost universal response of people to God’s answer is to again question His goodness! We are like Goldilocks: we want God to deliver retribution, to be just, but not too just. In our warped ways of thinking, being just but not too just is the only response that is good. Of course, a big part of the reason we think like this is that we want God to punish those who are worse than us but to not punish us.

And we tend to live this way as well, at least in theory. We like to think that we don’t hold others up to any higher standard than we do ourselves. And this standard is not an impossibly high standard, but one that is clearly attainable (since we ourselves attain it). Of course the reality may be quite different; in fact, much of the time people are actually hypocrites, setting different bars for personal behavior and for the behavior of others. And this is good?

This answer, that God will respond in justice upon the wicked, is given in Psalm 73 as well. Asaph then comes to his senses, he repents. Unlike how many people do today, Asaph does not question God’s goodness with regards to how He will deal with them justly. He writes:

When my heart was grieved and my spirit embittered, I was senseless and ignorant; I was a brute beast before You. Yet I am always with You; You hold me by my right hand. You guide me with Your counsel, and afterward You will take me into glory. – Psalm 73:21-24

This is the picture of trust, the toddler running into her daddy’s arms. Doubting God’s goodness destroys our ability to be close to God, but being restored in our faith in God’s goodness makes our relationship with God intimate and sweet. Asaph finishes the Psalm with the following:

But as for me, it is good to be near God. I have made the Sovereign Lord my refuge; I will tell of all Your deeds. – Psalm 73:28

Literally, in the Hebrew, it says that the nearness of God is my “good.” Intimacy with God is our supreme good. There are lots of ways to be good, but the greatest good is close fellowship, friendship, intimacy with, loving, God. Remember what Jesus says is the first and greatest commandment? To love the Lord your God – to love Him – with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind (Matt. 28:36-37). To love Him is to trust Him, to believe that He is all-good.

Of course, the ultimate proof of God’s goodness is the gospel, literally, the good news. But even here we have the “goldilocks” problem: some complain that it’s not fair that anyone who repents at the last minute, regardless of what they have done, is forgiven and receives the same eternal future as someone who has loved and served Christ for many years. But far more complain that the punishment for those who don’t turn to Christ is far too harsh. It is these hard questions, especially the latter, that I want to turn to next.

How can a good God let horrible people into heaven so easily?

This is a question I suspect many of you can answer quite well, if you think about it. First, like many hard questions, there are hidden assumptions built into the question that causes most of the difficulty. In this case, the problems are the phrases “horrible people” and “easily.”

The problem with the phrase “horrible people” is that people don’t realize that everyone is “horrible people.” The standard isn’t yourself, but it is God. And it’s not just about things like stealing and lying, although most people have done even those. It’s about loving the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength. To not do this is sin, continuous sin, lifelong sin. To walk in rebellion against God is the reality of all people apart from Christ. And as Jesus explained in the Sermon on the Mount, thoughts are sin, not just actions, because all thoughts are in the presence of God.

And the second problem is that word “easily.” God doesn’t let anyone into heaven “easily.” They may mean easy by the point of view of the “horrible people,” but there was a terrible cost. The cost was paid for by Jesus with His life, with torture, with abuse, with experiencing the full wrath of God meant for all those horrible people. God did this to His own Son! There is nothing easy about that.

And I should point out that Jesus addressed this type of question multiple times, in various ways. From the parable of the workers paid the same wage but who worked different lengths of time (Matt. 20), to the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15), better called the parable of the loving father, Jesus explained that showing favor on one is not in itself unjust. The jealousy of those who received less are the ones in sin. And I think also of the Pharisees who complained that Jesus allowed the woman “who had led a sinful life” to come to Him, weeping, wiping His feet with her hair and her tears and with expensive perfume she had brought (Luke 7). What did Jesus say about her? Her many sins had been forgiven, for she loved much.

So how do we answer the question? The fact is that all people are horrible people. And there is nothing easy about what it took for them to be able to enter heaven. And they don’t enter heaven as horrible people, but as forgiven people, as new creations, completely forgiven by the power of the blood of Christ and reborn by the Holy Spirit who will forever after indwell them.

Well, I think that is the “easy” hard question. Let’s tackle the “hard” hard question.

How can a loving God torture people in hell?

Once again, there is a hidden assumption in this question, a huge one. It is like the classic example of such a question, to ask a man, “When did you stop beating your wife?” What is the totally wrong assumption here? It is that God tortures people in hell. This is wrong. Hell is not a torture chamber.

And many who ask this question have an additional assumption, although it is not stated here. This assumption is that God, just because He’s the boss, has made some arbitrary rules, and by force of His might, if you don’t obey His rules, then he’ll send you to hell forever as punishment. God would be capricious if this were the case. But this really isn’t about following arbitrary rules. As I shared last week, it is about you were fundamentally made for.

Again, we need to start from the Biblically correct point of view that God is loving, kind, compassionate, in sum, good, and see where that leads us. And we need to add to this starting point the answer to the question what we were made for. We were made in the image of God. This is an incredible thing. It doesn’t apply to animals, or to plants. It applies to us. We were made to be in relationship with God, to love Him and be loved, forever. Being made in God’s image means that we, like God, have free will. If we were made to be robots, without free will, we would not be in any real sense made in God’s image; we wouldn’t be like him any more than a little girl’s doll is like a real little girl.

Given that we were made with this free will, and that we were made to be in relationship with God forever, what is God to do if someone chooses not to be in relationship with Him? God’s answer is to separate him from God. And that is what hell is.

Now part of God’s goodness is His righteousness. Letting people who refuse to submit to Christ hang around and basically ruin heaven for everyone else is not an action consistent with God’s goodness. God will not do this. It’s hard for us to understand this, but heaven is a sinless place. We who are Christians will all be changed – we won’t just have new bodies; we will no longer fight our sin nature. And I think we just don’t appreciate how we all over time become dulled by the constant presence of sin in society, in our culture, in our lives. God is not like us. He is all-good. He is holy. His goodness is such that sin cannot stand in His presence. Sinful beings cannot stand in His presence and live. Unrepentant sinners, people who have not put themselves under the Lordship of Christ, who have not given God permission to kill their old selves and give them new selves, simply cannot be in the presence of God. They cannot be in heaven, or they would be utterly destroyed. And so God has made a separate place for them, a place apart from His presence. This is hell.

J. P. Moreland has excellent thoughts about this. He points out that hell is both a consequence for people living a life where they say, “I don’t care if I’m separate from God; I want to do things my way,” and hell is a punishment for having broken God’s standards. But… and this is so important.. although hell is a punishment, it’s not punishing. The punishment of hell is separation from God and separation from those who love God. We just don’t appreciate how horrible this punishment really is. We don’t understand what an eternity of intense regret, of total anguish, could possibly feel like. It’s more horrible than pain. It is why the Bible describes hell with imagery like unquenching fire, worms eating people’s flesh, and so on. Are these the literal situation? I have no reason to think so, because this imagery is surrounded by other imagery that is clearly figurative. Other passages describe hell as total darkness. Well, flames and total darkness don’t really go together, do they? But whether you think these descriptions as literal or not doesn’t really matter. I’m not trying to make hell less, well, hellish. The reason for these descriptions in the Bible is that they are vivid, they are intense, and they try to give the reader some idea of just how horrible eternal separation from God really is.

By the way, another frequent image Jesus uses is that of weeping and gnashing of teeth. Many people seem to misunderstand what gnashing of teeth refers to. It isn’t a response to torture. It is an expression of extreme anger, in this case, anger directed at God and self. As Moreland explains, hell is the worst possible situation that could ever happen to a person. But it’s not a situation borne of one quick mistake. Remember that God desires that none would end up in hell, that His still small voice (the Holy Spirit) has been wooing them their entire lives. Hell is the result of a literal lifetime of rejection of God.

Now, there are a number of objections people make in this topic of hell. I will present them as additional questions. These questions come from The Case for Faith, by Lee Strobel. My answers are in part based on the discussion in this book and in part on my own thoughts. As I said last week, if something doesn’t make any sense, it probably comes from my thoughts.

How can a loving God send children to hell?

The Bible doesn’t have much directly to say about this, but we know that the answer must be consistent with God’s nature. We can be sure that in hell, there will be no one there who does not belong there. There will be no one there who, if they had had a chance to grow up to be adults, would have chosen to enter into a saving relationship with God.

And you learn a lot about how God views children by passages such as this:

He called a little child and had him stand among them. And He said: "I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes a little child like this in My Name welcomes Me. But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea. – Matt. 18:2-6

Does this sound like a God who sends little children to hell? No. I don’t know how God does it – perhaps at the moment of a child’s death for the most fleeting of moments God grows up the child’s soul and gently asks the child, “Will you come with Me?” And that child, no longer a child, but an adult, makes a choice, probably nearly always “Yes.” But I don’t know what happens; this is just a guess. And it is not my problem. It is enough for me to know that God is good, all-good, and how He deals with this situation will be totally in accord with His nature.

Why does everyone suffer the same in hell?

The question behind the question is that someone is picturing a normal “pretty-good” person as compared to say, Stalin or Hitler. What is the answer to this question? One thing to say is that, as we have already discussed, there is no such thing as a normal “pretty-good” person. Given that loving God is the greatest commandment, a lifetime of choosing not to do this is not what we can call “pretty good.” But the second answer to this question is to say that we don’t know that everyone suffers the same way in hell. We know it is awful beyond imagining, but we don’t know if it is the same. And consider this:

Then Jesus began to denounce the cities in which most of His miracles had been performed, because they did not repent. "Woe to you, Korazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! If the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. But I tell you, it will be more bearable for Tyre and Sidon on the day of judgment than for you. And you, Capernaum, will you be lifted up to the skies? No, you will go down to the depths. If the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Sodom, it would have remained to this day. But I tell you that it will be more bearable for Sodom on the day of judgment than for you." – Matt. 11:20-24

This is speaking of cities, not individuals. But the principle here is that the punishment is worse in some cases than others because the sin was greater in some cases than others. This is of course a principle we also see throughout the Old Testament Law. It may be that those who have committed more sin will feel greater regret, feel greater the pain of isolation from God, in hell.

Why are people punished infinitely for finite crimes?

To word the question another way, wouldn’t a loving God make the punishment fit the crime by not making hell last forever?

First of all, remember that this isn’t torture. It isn’t eternal conscious torture; it is eternal conscious suffering resulting from separation from God. Now, this doesn’t directly answer the question, but it is an important starting point.

And the following also doesn’t directly answer the question, but I think it helps: Even in our justice system, the length of punishment is not generally related to the length of time it takes to commit a crime. A murder might take a few seconds, but the punishment can be life in prison or even death.

Now to the question at hand: We are not talking about one act of sin; we are talking about a lifetime of continually rejecting God, of totally violating the greatest commandment. And when it comes to the severity of sin, the nature of the object against which the sin is committed is an important factor. Again, even in our court system, killing a young child is generally considered worse than killing a man, and killing a man is certainly worse than killing a dog. Where does rejecting, even hating God fit in? (And recall that Jesus said hating is like murdering.)

When some people ask this question, what they are thinking is, “Why doesn’t God just snuff people out?” That is, why doesn’t God just make unrepentant people just cease to exist? Some have suggested that God could even “go back in time” to make it so they never existed. This goes back to some things we talked about last week about God’s power. Not all things are possible, like square circles. God cannot go back in time to undo people without changing everything they came in contact with. You cannot in isolation remove someone from ever existing.

As to the question of just snuffing them out when they die instead of making them live eternally separated from God, experiencing the agony of the consequences of that lifelong decision to reject Him, I again like what Moreland has to say. He argues that if God is really a respecter of persons made in His image, then everlasting separation from God is morally superior to annihilation.

Related to this question is the whole question of why God couldn’t just force people to love Him. In both cases, God is forcing Himself on people, violating their free will. God has free will, and people are made in God’s image. To take such a noble creature and treat it like a mere animal is morally unacceptable. To talk about wiping out people made in God’s image, whether it is wiping out their brains (in the case of forcing people to accept Him) or wiping out their everything (in the case of total annihilation) is not in keeping with a good God. God is eternal, and creatures made in His image were made to be eternal. Given that God would make such creatures, separation for those who refuse to turn to Him seems to be the best solution in keeping with God’s good character. If you’ve never thought along these lines, you may need to stew over this for a while. Think about it. It’s not the only possible explanation, but it is one that makes sense to me. Remember that God doesn’t want anyone to go to hell, but He will not override their free will.

Now some teach that the Bible actually teaches annihilation. They quote Old Testament passages that talk about the wicked being destroyed. They also quote some metaphors used by Jesus along the same lines. But each of these passages are not clear about what they mean by this, or by what perspective they are speaking, whether this world, or eternity. And more importantly, there are other passages that are quite clear. For example:

Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt. – Daniel 12:2

Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life. – Matt. 25:46
Finally, one last question on this topic:

Why doesn’t God give people a second chance?

To quote Moreland: “This question assumes God didn’t do everything he could do before people died. God does everything He can to give people a chance, and there will not be a single person who will be able to say to God, ‘If You had just not allowed me to die prematurely, if You had given me another twelve months, I would have made that decision. The Bible tells us God is delaying the return of Christ to the earth to give everybody all the time He possibly can so they will come to Him. If all a person needed was a little bit more time to come to Christ, then God would extend their time on this earth to give them the chance.”

Remember, God is good. He is a rewarder of those who seek His face. Ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened to you. Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with Me. We need to remember that God doesn’t just give a second chance; He gives continual chances for the entire life of every person.

Now some may argue that a taste of hell might cause people to repent. After all, if there is intense regret in hell, people would jump to heaven given the chance. Moreland calls this an “incubation period” and his answer includes the following: “This would make life before death utterly irrelevant. Then the question would be, why didn’t God create people from the beginning with the incubation period? Why did He create them on earth for an average of 75 years and then put them in the incubation period if it was the incubation period that they really needed in the first place? Here’s the truth: this life is the incubation period!”

He also says this: “God maintains a delicate balance between keeping His existence sufficiently evident so people will know He’s there and yet hiding His presence enough so that people who want to choose to ignore Him can do it. This way, their choice of destiny is really free.”

Let me close with this: My experience is that very few people come to Christ out of the fear of hell. What brings them to faith is the love of Christ. God’s goodness, His love, is what attracts people to Him. The reality of hell is out there, documented in the Bible for all to see. But there really is a kind of balance in that it’s not hell that brings people to Jesus, but Jesus’ love for them. God is good; God is love. Do not allow Satan to confuse you or to steal your joy over this fact.