Do I really believe God is good?

I find Jeremiah 44:15-19 very interesting. The people are evaluating who to worship based upon how their lives are going. They feel that this “queen of heaven” was better than YHWH at making their lives good. They reason that they had plenty of food, prospered, and saw no disaster when they made offerings to her. When they stopped making offerings to her, their fortunes reversed.

I wonder how many people (including myself) do this today? It’s easy to point fingers at the prosperity gospel as a relative of this kind of thinking. But I’m not going there. I’m thinking of those (including myself) in Christ-centered gospel-preaching evangelical churches. Do we evaluate the reality and worthiness of God based on our prosperity? When things go well, we praise Him. When things go poorly (at least from our perspective), we tell ourselves that God is good, but do we genuinely believe it inside, or is it just a theological “belief” in our minds that we doubt in our hearts?

“God is good.” is a truth that must press deep into our souls. We must realize, not simply in our minds but rather in our hearts that we are not intended to be the evaluators of this truth. God isn’t letting us decide or evaluate what circumstances are “good” or “bad.” We desperately need His perspective on the circumstances of life.