God is good.
All the time.
And all the time,
God is good.
How many of us have grown up reciting these phrases in response to our pastor? We associate this responsive reading with traditional worship, and we have probably recited these lines more times than we can count. But do we really believe that God is good all the time? “All” is a strong word. How can God really be good all the time?
In the beginning, God created Adam, and Adam and God lived in perfect harmony in the Garden of Eden. The Bible says that Adam walked with God in the garden. The relationship that Adam had with God was tangible and perfect, and it was intended to last forever like this. As the story goes on, God gives Adam very specific instructions about what trees to eat from in the garden: “And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die,” (Genesis 2:16-17). Unfortunately, we know the rest of the story. In chapter 3, the serpent tempts Eve; Eve eats the fruit from the forbidden tree and she shares it with Adam; Adam and Eve’s relationship with God from this point forward is fractured because sin enters the world. “The Fall,” as this series of events is known, is very familiar; however, recently, when my husband was teaching this passage to the youth group, a new thought stood out to me: God really is good all the time, as evidenced by His response to the previously mentioned events. Read below the verse from Genesis 3:21-23.
The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken.
How can a passage where God casts out Adam and Eve point to His goodness? The answer for this is simple: God, in His infinite wisdom, sees the bigger picture. First, He clothes Adam and Eve. Prior to them eating the fruit from the forbidden tree, Adam and Eve had no idea that they were naked. When they ate the fruit, their eyes were open and for the first time, they felt shame. They hid from God because they did not want Him to see them. Although God punishes Adam and Eve and inflicts curses for generations to come, God still loves Adam and Eve, and out of His compassion and goodness, He clothes them so they do not have to bear the shame that they brought upon themselves. Though we too are sinful, God does not flee from us. God provides for and has compassion over us, just as He did for Adam and Eve.
Now for the bigger question: why would a good God cast out those whom He cares for? The answer: God is setting the scene for Jesus. Even from the third chapter in scripture, God points to a Savior who the world needed. The situation following Adam and Eve’s mistake was grim. Their options, though they were not the ones choosing, were either to live forever (assuming they eventually ate from the Tree of Life) in a state of brokenness between them and God in the garden or they could be separated, cast out from the garden, from God for the purpose of one day being reconciled back to Him. This thought blew my mind. God cast them out of the garden because He couldn’t bear the thought of enduring for eternity a fractured relationship with man. Jesus is our hope for reconciliation with our Heavenly Father, a father who separated Himself from us because of decisions we made and then sacrificed His son to save us. How good, no, GREAT, is our God?
For generations to come, the people waited for this Jesus whom the prophets spoke of. Their hope was in a savior. There were also the lucky few who lived among Jesus, the Savior of the World. Now here we are living in the AD period. God fulfilled His promises to us, and now, we have a hope of a future in Heaven, reconciled to our Heavenly Father through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. How Great is our God, and how blessed are we to worship Him who always has the bigger picture in mind! God is good, all the time, and all the time, God is good. Amen!
