In our meeting the other evening we sang the song "King of My Heart" by Bethel Music. The chorus (which we repeated ad nauseam) goes:
You are good, You are good, oh oh
You are good, You are good, oh oh
You are good, You are good, oh oh
reminiscent of Gerald's "Peace will come..." in Adrian Plass' Sacred Diary. It set me thinking... The endless repetition should, I suppose, be excused as a literary device denoting emphasis. The song argues "You're never gonna to let me down" (also repeated) because "You are good". What, I wondered, goes through people's mind when they sing this? Is it good like chocolate? A gooey sort of goodness that makes me feel... well... good? I think not.
God, as portrayed in the Bible, is more like "terribly good" or "awfully good" - in each case employing the proper meaning of the adverbs, as in "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. " and "let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him".
The children's introduction to Aslan (in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) illustrates this well:
"Then he isn't safe?" said Lucy.
"Safe?" said Mr Beaver; "don't you hear what Mrs Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you."
And later on Mr Beaver tells the children: "He's wild, you know. Not like a tame lion."
You won't find many other Bible references to God being good. Here's one where Jesus quips "Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone." According to Strongs, the Greek word used means "good (in any sense)" and the Hebrew word used in the OT means "good in the widest sense". Maybe this is more helpful than at first meets the eye. Whereas we consider "good" as a description of God as in "God is good", I suggest that we have it upside down and that it would be better to say "good is God", i.e. that God is the definition of true goodness. We know a thing to be truly good if it is like God. Which rules out the chocolate argument.
This goodness of which we speak is not a license for our lazy behaviour. Paul sums it up by "What then? shall we sin, because we are not under the law, but under grace? God forbid."
