Thou art good and doest good.
God good in being and good in action
I. God good in being. “Thou art good.” Good in the sense of kindness and in the sense of moral perfection,--the primal Font of all happiness in the universe, and the immutable Standard of all excellence.
1. Essentially good. His goodness is not a quality of Himself, it is Himself.
2. Immutably good. Because Himself absolutely unalterable, His goodness is immutable.
II. God good in action. “And doest good.” This follows of necessity, a good being must do good. (Homilist.)
The goodness of God
I. Describe it.
1. It is absolutely pure, and free from everything of a selfish or sinful nature.
2. Permanent and immutable as His existence.
3. Universal.
II. Show that it moves Him to do good.
1. The goodness of God must have moved Him to form, before the foundation of the world, the best possible method of doing the greatest possible good. His goodness must have moved Him to employ His wisdom in the best possible manner.
2. It must have moved Him to bring into existence the best possible system of intelligent creatures.
3. It continually moves Him to exert His power and wisdom in governing all His creatures and all His works in the wisest and best manner.
4. It must move Him to make the intelligent universe as holy and happy as possible, through the interminable ages of eternity.
III. Improvement.
1. The goodness of God is discoverable by the light of nature. Actions speak louder than words.
2. Then all the objections that ever have been made, or ever can be made, against any part of His conduct, are objections against His goodness, which must be altogether unreasonable and absurd.
3. Then no creature in the universe ever has had, or ever will have, any just cause to murmur or complain under the dispensations of Providence.
4. Then it is owing to the knowledge, and not to the ignorance of sinners, that they hate God.
5. Then He will display His goodness in the everlasting punishment of the finally impenitent.
6. Then those who are finally happy will for ever approve of the Divine conduct towards the finally miserable.
7. Then while sinners remain impenitent, they have no grounds to rely upon His mere goodness to save them. (N. Emmons, D. D.)
The goodness of God
I. As subsisting in himself.
1. It constitutes the perfection of His nature. Godhead and goodness are convertible terms.
2. It is original and underived.
3. It harmonizes with all the perfections of His nature.
4. It is impressed with the immutability of His will.
II. Its display.
1. The rich provision which God has made for the happiness of man.
2. The mysterious price by which man is redeemed.
3. The modes employed for the recovery of man.
4. The glorious result of all this in time and in eternity. (T. Lessey.)
Pain and pity
We will not deny that evil is evil, we will make no hard pretence that pain is anything but painful; but leaving that insoluble problem, we may rest, at any rate, in the conviction that pain and misery are the accidents--to a great extent the avoidable accidents--of life, not its end and object; that happiness and blessing so far preponderate over them that every one of us may sincerely thank God for His creation.
1. First, as regards ourselves, pain and sickness are chiefly due to the working of laws which have this obviously beneficent nature that they are meant to warn us against things inherently vile, hateful to God, and destructive to our own nature. Physical anguish and moral remorse, often in the individual, and always in the race, are nothing in the world but a part of the stream of sin taken a little lower down in its course. Man himself, if he would but keep the Ten Commandments, if he would but live in temperance, soberness, and chastity, might, to an immense extent, sweep his own life clean of foul diseases.
2. But even as regards ourselves, pain and sorrow are not only salutary warnings against impurity and excess, but, when rightly borne, they uplift us in every other respect. They help us to endure “as seeing Him who is invisible,” they make us yearn for unrealized ideals beyond our small moods and our vulgar comforts; they turn us from the near and the present to the distant and the future; they enable us to pass the death-doom on our mean and shivering egotisms. Take even the most innocent of all our sorrows--the aching anguish of bereavement. When we have lost those whom we have loved, has it not been to thousands simply as a golden chain between their hearts and God?
3. I turn to the lessons which pain and sorrow have for us as regards the world in general. I do not hesitate again to say that they are the stern saviours of society, that they have enriched humanity with its noblest types of character, that they have been as the storms which lash into fury the lazy elements lest they should stagnate in pestilence.
(1) For, first of all, they save society from itself. “A dissolute society,” says a thoughtful writer, “is the most tragical spectacle which history has ever to present; a nest of disease, of jealousy, of ruin, of despair, whose last hope is to be washed off the world and to disappear.” Such societies must die sooner or later by their own gangrene, by their own corruption, because the infection of evil, spreading into unbounded selfishness, ever intensifying and reproducing passions which defeat their own aim, can never end in anything except moral desolation. They go too far, such societies; they overreach themselves; they culminate at last in some hideous crime which awakens the flame of a moral indignation in which all their social shame and gorgeous gluttonies become as scum in the avenging flame. Nor do pain and sorrow only help the deliverers of the oppressed. They tend further to enrich the blood and uplift the ideals of the world. It is the pity for them which kindles the passion of the prophet standing undaunted before angry kings and mocking peoples, and the supremacy of the martyr who wields God’s lightning while he stands in his shirt of flame. (Dean Farrar.)