606. “For He is good and loves mankind” – ?

The priest says those words at the end of almost every service. But does it fit the evidence?

Is God really good?

Here is our basic working principle:

“I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth and of all things visible and invisible.”

In that context, here is a group of images – some very beautiful, some troubling, some so heartbreaking that it is hard to get them out of my mind. Please don’t just flip past them. Scroll down slowly, and ponder each of them briefly.

Afterwards we’ll talk about it.

I. Things created directly by God.

 

 

Largest cosmic explosion ever recorded: thousands of times larger than our sun.

 

 

 

 

 

Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland

 

Earthquake Destruction: Chile

 

II. Created things with human input.

… remembering that it is God Who gives human beings free will.

 

Gaza: Palestinian children killed by bombing

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hiroshima

 

Slavery in the United States

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gaza

__________________

Enough! You’ve got the point.

So, based on the evidence all around us:

Is God really good?

My Personal Experience

Based on my own life, I would argue that God is very good. Every life has a few bumps, but I have had very few. From my birth I have been surrounded by people who love me. Today a genuinely happy family and nearly sixty years married to the love of my life. We have experienced no tragedies. God led me to the ordained ministry and, with help from Saint Nicholas, into the Orthodox Church. I have served two parishes filled with good people who have loved the Lord and loved me. My doctor says I am still in “good” health at my advanced age. As I type this, I am sitting in my easy chair seeing out the window the blue sky and early summer greenery, feeling the soft summer breeze. Forgive me for blathering on like this… I just want to make the point that I have been blessed beyond measure. Based on my own personal experience, I would rate God: Extraordinarily Good. A+. However, this is not going to continue forever. Sometime soon death is going to come after me: Death,“the last enemy to be destroyed” I Corinthians 15:26 – but not yet destroyed. How should I rate God’s goodness then?

Then I look around at people who have died young, who have lost spouses or children or gone bankrupt or are dead for lack of health care, or … just look back to some of the pictures above. How would they rate God’s goodness? After the Holocaust of World War II, my Jewish father in law (a good man) decided that no God could have allowed that, and he gave up believing in God altogether. An understandable conclusion.

Here’s what I’d conclude – and I don’t mean to be blasphemous, only honest: I see much evidence of God’s goodness, but also a great deal to the contrary. Based solely on the evidence alone, I’d conclude that God is either changeable, or He loves some people more than others, or perhaps He’s not paying attention.

Some Analysis: good and evil

As shown above, obviously there is much good in the natural world. But if God is good, as we’re told, how do we explain the apparent evil? Legally, natural disasters are termed “acts of God”. But did God create diseases and natural disasters in order to kill people? I graduated in meteorology (atmospheric science), and I believe in the so-called “laws” of physics. But every time I see a tornado, I automatically think “demon”.

And I believe that is the explanation.  There is the story (referred to obliquely in canonical Scripture) about how Satan, once the archangel Lucifer, rebelled against God and was cast down to earth.

 

I think the serpent in the Genesis Creation story tells us that the devil was present and at work here before we arrived. This takes the immediate burden off God. But on the other hand, that doesn’t explain why archangels have (had?) free will, the ability to rebel against their Creator.

• Is earth the only part of God’s creation that has fallen into the hands of the Prince of Evil, as was believed in the Middle Ages in the West? Or is there more going on out there than we know? What is this “dark matter”? Why these explosions? Is there a cosmic conflict going on? Science can describe what’s happening but cannot explain what’s behind it all.

Which immediately brings up the question of why we human beings have free will – the ability to choose between good and evil. The answer: We really don’t know. Wouldn’t you think Christ would have given the answer to this question which we believers ask so often. But He didn’t.

Saint John hints at it. “We shall be like Him.” 1 John 3:2  It is possible for us to change from what we are now and become like Jesus Christ, the process called “theosis”. Some of the Fathers wrote about it. Saint Athathasios: “God became Man so that man might be come god.”

What must that entail? What kind of “Being” * is God? God has complete freedom and always chooses the Good and therefore always knows Joy. He wants us to become like that, so that finally we know complete and endless joy. This requires that we now be given freedom to choose good… or evil. This is a slow process (tell me about it, me at age 87) which will be completed after we die.

• “Super-essential Being”, for lack of adequate words

All I can say is there’s a whole lot of “choosing evil” going on lately. The Twentieth Century produced more war deaths, by far, than all the rest of the centuries put together (evil). We’ve had no World Wars in eighty years now (good), but lots of pointless, prideful lesser wars which are causing so much suffering (evil). Once we were semi-protected by nuclear arms treaties (good) which are now being abandoned, and the arms race is quietly going on again (evil). In the America of my childhood mass gun murders were rare, in some years none (good), but now there are hundreds every year (great evil). Childhood diseases were once rampant, so that parents expected to lose a child or two (evil). Vaccines eliminated polio and many childhood diseases and quieted the Covid pandemic (good), but now many people are turning against them (evil – and crazy). American government once worked well (good) but has degenerated into dysfunction (evil). American democracy for nearly two centuries was a light to the world (good), but now will it survive? (evil)

You see how it goes. Actually it goes just as Our Lord Jesus Christ said: “Good and evil will grow together till the End.” Matthew 13:30

Despite all this, Christians believe that God is good, pure goodness.  “God is love.” 1 John 4:8  “In Him is Light and no darkness at all”. 1 John 1:5  How could we possibly come to that conclusion?

Here’s how.

Why we believe God is good.

I once heard a bishop from the (Protestant) Church of South India, who said that he had seen so much horror that, were it not for Jesus Christ, he would be an unbeliever.

Philip said: “Lord, show us the Father, and we shall be satisfied.:  Philip wasn’t looking for a picture of the Father. He knew God is pure spirit. He wanted to know God’s “character”, so to speak. Jesus replied, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and yet you still don’t know Who I am? Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father!” John 14:8-9  What is God like? “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” John 15:13  Here is the ultimate image of what God is like: God hanging on the Cross out of love for mankind, for us “His friends”. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, God is good.

Can God be conquered? Here’s the evidence for that:

This and this alone is why we believe our God “is good and loves mankind”.

Just One More Thing

We sing about it over and over at Pascha: “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death…”  So why does our good God continue to let us die? Here again, Jesus didn’t tell us. This is the best speculation: He lets us die and leave our bodies behind for our own good. It’s obvious that we don’t handle bodily existence very well. After all, most of our troubles are not the fault of our poor old  bodies, who pretty much do what they’re told. It’s our souls, our minds that are the problem. So, He takes our souls off to get them (us) cleaned up, sanctified, made good and holy like Himself. So then at the End of All Things, in the General Resurrection, we’ll be able to handles our bodies aright. That’s the best guess.

No matter, I remember sitting in the vesting room after the funeral of someone I loved dearly, completely overcome: “God, couldn’t You have done this some better way?” I see all the suffering in the world and ask the same question. The answer, I guess, is “None of your business.”

Christ came not to give us answers about life and death. He came to lead us through life and death with one simple command: “Follow Me.”

So all the speculating above really comes to not very much. If I were you, I wouldn’t bother to read it.

The Next Two Weeks: Reruns (revised) from my old series on “Other Faiths”: Judaism