If God is good, why do so many bad things happen?
Goodness sounds like an easy topic. Nobody walks into a conversation about goodness ready to argue. But the moment you try to define what "good" actually means, things get complicated fast. Everyone agrees they want life to be good. The disagreement is about what good actually looks like, and who gets to decide.
At Neighborhood Church, we are continuing our summer series called Fruit of the Root, working through the qualities the Holy Spirit grows in people who follow Jesus. We have covered love, joy, peace, patience, and kindness. This week we are looking at goodness, and it turns out to be one of the most contested ideas in the whole series.
Who is good?
Jesus gives us a starting point in the Gospel of Luke. A ruler approaches him with a question and opens with a compliment: "Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus responds with a question of his own:
"Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone." (Luke 18:19)
Jesus does not begin with a definition of goodness. He begins with a source. God is good, and because God is good, goodness itself flows from his character. Everything we recognize as good in the world is a reflection of who God is and how he made things. As James writes, “every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights” (James 1:17). If goodness exists anywhere in creation, it is always traced back to him.
This matters because it means goodness is not a moving target. Your definition of good and your neighbor's definition of good may differ. But God sets the standard for goodness in his creation, and that standard is rooted in who he is, not in what any of us prefer.
What is good?
In the very first chapter of the Bible, God creates the world and declares it good. Light, land, sea, plants, animals — again and again the text says God saw that it was good. Then he creates human beings in his own image and calls his creation “very good.” Everything is as it was designed to be.
Then in Genesis 2, a detail appears that changes everything. In the middle of the garden stands a tree:
"The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil." (Genesis 2:9)
God tells the man and woman they may eat from any tree in the garden except this one. The fruit itself was not poisonous. What set it apart was a prohibition by the one and only source of good. God was giving his image-bearers a genuine choice: trust me and live within my good design, or reject my authority and find out what exists outside of it.
Evil, then, is not a thing God created. It is the absence of goodness, the rejection of God's design. Think of a dark room. Darkness is not a substance you can introduce. It is what remains when you remove the light. Evil entered the world when humanity chose to step outside of the good order God had made.
This is why a conversation about goodness always leads to a conversation about right and wrong. Morality is not a human invention. It is the shape of reality as God designed it, and departing from that design is what the Bible calls evil.
What evil has shaped the way you see the world? That is not a question to brush past. Many people carry real wounds and legitimate grief, and those experiences make it genuinely hard to believe that God is good. The honest answer is not to minimize those experiences. It is to name them and bring them toward the truth, rather than let them become the final word.
Functional atheism
Here is a subtle trap worth naming. Most people who come to church would say they believe in God. But belief and practice can quietly drift apart. There are moments in ordinary life when we set God aside and operate as if he is not there. A decision at work, a reaction in traffic, a choice we make when no one is watching. We believe in God, but we function as if he does not exist.
Psalm 14 describes this pattern:
"The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God.' They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds; there is none who does good." (Psalm 14:1)
The psalmist is not writing exclusively about intellectual atheism. He is describing the practical drift that happens when we stop factoring God into our daily decisions. When we forget God, our moral math stops adding up, because we have removed the foundation.
When are you most tempted to forget God? That is worth sitting with in prayer this week, not as a guilt exercise, but as an honest look at where the drift tends to happen. As the Holy Spirit brings things to mind, don’t despair because He also makes a way to return to His design.
How do we grow in goodness?
Psalm 34 was written by David from what may be the lowest point of his life. He was running from a king who wanted him dead, had lied to a priest and set off a chain of events that got an entire town killed, and wound up hiding in enemy territory pretending to be mentally ill to avoid being murdered. He had looked at his problems, tried to solve them on his own, and made everything worse at every turn.
From the back of a dark cave, he wrote this:
"O taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him." (Psalm 34:8)
Taste and see. Not understand and verify. Not resolve every objection and then decide. Taste. There is an invitation embedded in that word. David is not writing from a place of easy circumstances. He is writing from the wreckage of his own DIY life repairs. It was there that he humbly discovered that when he stopped trying to manage God's problems for him and simply cried out, God met him.
The psalm does not promise a trouble-free life. Verse 19 is clear:
"Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all." (Psalm 34:19)
Troubles are real. Pain is real. But the Lord is near to the brokenhearted. He saves the crushed in spirit. His goodness does not eliminate hardship; it is present inside it.
Growing in goodness begins with seeing God rightly. When we see God rightly, we begin to see ourselves rightly too. And when that happens, what we do starts to change. God transforms who we are, and that reshapes what we do.
Are we moving toward God's truth, even when our experience does not yet match what we believe? Or are we turning away and refusing to taste? The truth does not change based on how we feel about it.
God is good. God makes good. God does good.
If you are wrestling with that, keep wrestling. Bring the questions. If you want to keep exploring with a community, we would love to connect with you. If you are outside the Ocala area, we encourage you to find a local church where you can ask these questions alongside others who are on the same road. You do not have to have it figured out to take a next step.
Editor note: This blog summary was generated from a sermon transcript processed by AI and reviewed by a human editor. It is provided for convenience and engagement but may not fully reflect all of the original sermon emphases or explanation. The original writing and delivery of the sermon were done without the input of AI. Please refer to the full message and more importantly the Scripture for complete context and teaching.
