Good Either Way

My grandmother used to interrupt our stories to correct our theology.

We often praise the Lord when He protects us from something or when we barely scraped by in a tough situation. We say things like, “I almost had a car accident today, but the Lord protected me! Isn’t God good?!” or “I was afraid the diagnosis was going to be worse. But it wasn’t—God is good!” or “I had just enough money to pay that bill. God is so good to me!”

If you said something like that around my grandmother, she’d stop you mid-sentence and tell you God is good either way. She certainly wasn’t chastising you for praising God. Indeed, she was prone to praise Him in every circumstance and talked about Jesus all the time. But when she corrected you over the favorable evidence of God’s goodness, she wanted you to understand that is His very nature to be good. So, if we’d had the wreck, if the diagnosis had been worse, if the money hadn’t been enough—God would still be good because His goodness doesn’t evaporate in the midst of unresolved trials or adversity.

“You are good and do good; teach me your statutes.”
Psalm 119:68

I’ve been thinking about this as I’ve studied the life and ministry of Paul in the book of Acts. Sometimes the Lord protected him from persecution as he traveled around preaching Christ. But sometimes the Lord did not intervene, and Paul was brutally beaten by his opponents. Just this morning I was reading Acts 21 where Paul is warned by all the believers in his life that if he travels to Jerusalem, he will be persecuted. Ready to obey the Lord even in the face of suffering, Paul insisted on going, saying, “I am ready not only to be imprisoned but even to die in the Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus” (Acts 21:13). He went to Jerusalem. And was quickly dragged out of the temple and beaten severely, as he expected.

Just a couple chapters prior, the Lord had kept him from the mob that sought his life in Ephesus. It is jarring, then, to see him met with such abuse in Jerusalem. I jotted it down in my notebook as I read chapter 21 again and again: “Sometimes God protected Paul from persecution. And sometimes He didn’t. He’s good either way.” I think that Paul, having experienced both scenarios many times, trusted that the peace of Christ could rule in his heart no matter what happened to him. He learned contentment in every circumstance, and he held on to the steady, unchanging nature of God.

Paul knew God was good, and that his suffering would not cancel out God’s goodness. Somehow, he knew God would use his suffering for good. You get that from his many writings in the New Testament. The fact that I—a Gentile living two thousand years later in North America—am writing these sentences about God’s goodness testifies to ways that God has redeemed Paul’s suffering for the advance of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

“The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering,
and abounding in goodness and truth.”
Exodus 34:6

When Scripture illustrates so clearly that suffering is a part of the Christian life (for indeed we follow a Savior who suffered), it’s a wonder why our immediate response to hardship is to question God’s nature. I do it all the time, don’t you? We’re so quick to accuse God of being untrue to us when we face trials and suffering. Somewhere in our hearts and minds, we’ve been trained to equate God’s goodness with only favorable outcomes. But, Scripture doesn’t support that kind of thinking. As my grandmother believed, God’s goodness does not ebb and flow with our circumstances. If He intervenes and protects us, He is good. If He allows suffering and sorrow, He is good. In trials, He has the power to work good from evil. In suffering, He has the power to work good in our sanctification. Even in His discipline, He is being good to us the way that a good father loves his children (see Heb. 12:5-7).  It may not feel good to us at the time, but our God is especially skilled at redeeming hard or even bad things and working them for our good and His glory.

So, when the news isn’t good, the car is wrecked, the bills are too much, the nights are long, the pain doesn’t cease, God is still good. When we’re in the valley of the shadow, we must walk by faith and not sight, believing what we might not yet understand. We must trust that we are never alone in that valley, that He is our comfort in our trials, and that He chases after us with His goodness and mercy. His goodness is on your heels. 

“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life;
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”
Psalm 23:6

As my grandmother so fervently believed—and as I am praying to believe every single day—God is good either way. And that means we can trust Him with our lives. Because if He’s good no matter what, He will make sure His people see a very good ending.

And by ending, I mean beginning.

“And he who sits on the throne will shelter them with his presence. They shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore; the sun shall not strike them, nor any scorching heat. For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”
Revelation 7:15-17

God's goodness doesn’t evaporate in the midst of our unresolved trials or adversity. Share on X

Photo by Pablo García Saldaña on Unsplash