(By David for praise.)

(By David for praise.) The LORD Is Kind and Merciful Is God really good, all the time? Psalm 145:9 145 I will praise you, my God and King, and always honor your name. 2 I will praise you each day and always honor your name. 3 You are wonderful, LORD, and you deserve all praise, because you are much greater than anyone can understand. 4 Each generation will announce to the next your wonderful and powerful deeds. 5 I will keep thinking about your marvelous glory and your mighty miracles. 6 Everyone will talk about your fearsome deeds, and I will tell all nations how great you are. 7 They will celebrate and sing about your matchless mercy and your power to save. 8 You are merciful, LORD! You are kind and patient and always loving. 9 You are good to everyone, and you take care of all your creation. 10 All creation will thank you, and your loyal people will praise you. 11 They will tell about your marvellous kingdom and your power. 12 Then everyone will know about the mighty things you do and your glorious kingdom. 13 Your kingdom will never end, and you will rule forever. As we come to the close of this series on the Psalms, there is one issue that must be resolved forever in our minds if we are to be life-long worshippers. We have seen Psalms where people start off sharing their pain with God and then God comes through for them. We have studied Psalms where the Psalmist writes of his struggles and questions and then says, yet will I rejoice in the Lord, I know that God has got this. We have read Psalms that are just pure worship encouraging us to worship Him with our whole bodies because of who He is and what He has done. But there still remains one fundamental question that must be resolved in your heart and your mind if you are just going to love the Lord and worship Him 24/7. And it is this. Is God really good all the time. In many churches we call out the refrain, God is good, all the time, all the time God is good. But I want you to really think about that for a moment. Is that what you really believe deep down when an earthquake takes out a thousand people violently. Is that what you really believe when you hear of a young child dying of leukaemia? Is that what you really believe when faced with redundancy and bankruptcy or heartbreak of some sort? King David in this Psalm wrote that God is good to everyone, He takes care of all creation. 1

How do you personally reconcile pain and suffering with the statement, God is good to everyone, He takes care of all creation? Those that hate God in the world use our pain and our suffering as the major argument against the existence of a good God. One Philosopher John Stewart Mills said this: If God is able to prevent evil and He does not, then He is not good. If He would prevent evil but He cannot, then He is not God almighty. So people question is God good, really. And so how do you and I Jesus followers respond to that, do we just say, you have just got to believe God is good, take it on blind faith? Or do we say, because the Psalmists repeatedly say God is good all the time and to everyone then that settles it? I think this issue must be resolved in our minds intelligently if we are to be worshippers of the living God 24/7. IS GOD REALLY GOOD TO EVEYONE? What is His Word to us in answer to this question? 1. John 1:1 Jesus shows us what God is really like. 1 In the beginning was the one who is called the Word. The Word was with God and was truly God. Jesus is the Word. He is God in the flesh. If I want to know what God the Father, God the son and God the Holy Spirit is like, all I need to do is to look at Jesus, the Word. Now when I do I see nothing in Jesus life, actions, and ministry that was not good and just and loving. I find no meanness, no selfishness, no unkindness in Him. I look at God in the flesh and I have to conclude, God is good. The people who saw Him and touched Him, the history books that are filled with stories about Him, and my experiences of Him all lead me to conclude that Jesus is good to everyone and therefore God is good. 2. Jesus acknowledges the existence of pain and the existence of evil through His teachings and actions. So many world religions deny the existence of suffering and evil. I heard the story once of a Jehovah s witness and a Christian Scientist who found themselves in Hell on their judgement day. The Jehovah s witness said to the Christian Scientist on his arrival in hell. 2

I don t believe in hell and I don t believe this place even exists to which the Christian scientist replied I am not here and it s not hot. I mean people do that, they pretend the pain and suffering and the demonic realm and such things are just in your mind, they are not real. Jesus on the other hand taught us to pray lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil In Jesus prophetic teachings he said in this world you will have tribulation, there are going to be problems, and He taught us these things so that we would not be surprised or offended. Man don t be shocked or angry at God when you are bereaved or times are hard, Jesus said to expect it. 3. Jesus addresses both the storm and the legion of demons the same way. In Mark chapter 4 we read of Jesus encountering evil on two levels. Firstly, He is in the boat with his disciples having a good sleep when they wake him in panic, master the seas have risen up, we are in a storm, we are going to drown, wake up and save us. Jesus then stands in the boat and rebukes the storm with exactly the same words He would use to rebuke the legion of demons in the naked, crazy demoniac that he is about to meet in the cemetery moments later. He basically addresses the storm as an evil entity as he does the demons in the man and tells them to be muzzled. What does that tell us? It tells us that when our ancestors Adam and Eve sinned authority over this world was handed temporarily over to Satan, and that the natural disasters and viruses and bizarre weather conditions often attributed to God are in fact the work of the devil and a consequence of Adam and Eve s original sin. If you read the book of Job you will see that the destructive forces of nature are often driven by Satan, who Jesus called the prince of this world. Paul calls Satan the god of this age. 4. A few weeks ago as we studied Psalm 107 The Hospital of God we recognised that much of the pain and suffering in the world is caused by us. When we rebel against God s way of doing things, we will hurt ourselves and we will hurt those people around us we love the most. 3

If I lose my money on the Pokey machines and I can t feed my kids does that mean, God is not good? If I get drunk and say and do things that have painful consequences relationally, is that God s fault or mine? If I don t take a day off each week to rest and honour God and I get exhausted and sick, whose fault is my suffering? God didn t create us to be puppets or robots. He made us in His image, therefore He gave us sovereignty, that is the ability to make choices that will determine our future. Love demands a choice and therefore we will always have a freedom to choose to obey God or do things our own way. Often people shake their fists at God and say how come God, why is life so unfair when in reality they should be looking at their own behaviour and accepting that certain choices bring certain consequences. Much suffering is selfinflicted. Is God really good all the time? Is God good to everyone? I want to take my 5 th and final point from Luke 13. 5. God is so merciful. Kinder than any of us deserve. Let me give you the historical context before we read this together. Pilate was a mongrel, an evil ruler in that first century. He saw a need to build an aqueduct to pipe water into Jerusalem and he had no money and so he stole money given to the temple as tithes, money set apart for God s work to build his giant pipe line. As the next Jewish festival rolled around the people had gotten wind of what Pilate had been up to and there were rumours that the Galileans, a particularly hot headed, politically vocal bunch of Jews were going to protest and riot over Pilate s actions. And so Pilate had his henchmen dress up as Galileans and blend with the crowd when the protest started. Each of his henchmen had long knives hidden under their robes and when things got noisy and political they pulled out their knives and started killing these political protesters, butchering them in the streets. It looked like mate was turning against mate and yet it was Pilate s boys. Also about that time one of the towers that was holding up this aqueduct/ pipe thing fell over killing some of the people. Bear those two things in mind as I read this to you. Luke 13 Contemporary English Version (CEV) Turn Back to God 4

13 About this same time Jesus was told that Pilate had given orders for some people from Galilee to be killed while they were offering sacrifices. 2 Jesus replied: Do you think that these people were worse sinners than everyone else in Galilee just because of what happened to them? 3 Not at all! But you can be sure that if you don t turn back to God, every one of you will also be killed. 4 What about those eighteen people who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them? Do you think they were worse than everyone else in Jerusalem? 5 Not at all! But you can be sure that if you don t turn back to God, every one of you will also die. Two incidents of people dying, people suffering. Jesus listeners knew all about the political stabbings and the aqueduct tower falling over. Jesus says to the people, do you think that these guys who got stabbed to death in the riot, or these 18 who got crushed when the aqueduct tower fell over and crushed them were more evil and more sinful than those that didn t get stabbed or crushed. Were they the really bad guys who got what they deserved? No the real question is not why did they suffer and die? The real question is, why are any of you still alive. God is so holy and so just and so fair. He hates sin. A person with one sin in their life cannot live in His presence therefore don t wonder why a good God allows suffering in the world but ask yourself why does such a holy God allow any of us to even exist. Why am I even living and breathing right now? That s the mystery. Did you know that the air that we breathe is primarily composed of nitrogen and oxygen and some other gases? If the oxygen content was 2% higher, we would all burst into flames. And if the nitrogen content was 2% higher we would all be poisoned and die. The world has been created with so much colour and flavour and detail for us to enjoy. Why does the rain fall on the just and the unjust? Why do so many people get to breath and live and love when biblically they have all rebelled against God and are fit for the fires of hell? Don t wonder why good people suffer some times. Wonder at this, it s only because of the goodness of God we have the cross, we have salvation, its only by the grace of God we even get to breath. If you have never asked God to forgive you of your sins specifically, if you have never laid down your life in a watery grave and been raised to live for Jesus. The Lord would say to you Turn back to God, repent of your sin today and be baptized or you will surely die eternally, and then marvel at His goodness. I believe that God is good to everyone and He is caring of all creation! 5