Psalm 145:9 The Lord is good to all, and his mercy is over all that he has made.
Psalm 16:2 “I say to the Lord, ‘You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you”.
Psalm 73:28 “For me it is good to be near God”.
Set aside for a moment the gifts you yet long to have. Can you see — in your morning coffee and stocked pantry and spring leaves and garden plot — that “the Lord is good to all, and his mercy is over all that he has made” (Psalm 145:9)?
Even still, God knows that his general goodness, the goodness he scatters across all our days, does not remove the pain of particular goods not given. We find in the Psalms the conviction that God not only gives me good but also works my good through everything bad.
We see God’s commitment to work our best most starkly in his commitment to forgive our worst. Indeed, when the psalmists celebrate God’s goodness, they often have the goodness of his grace in mind. “You, O Lord, are good and forgiving” (Psalm 86:5). Through Jesus, God crowns our guilty heads with grace and rescues us from messes of our own making (Psalm 103:4; 107:1–3). He redeems us from the worst we’ve ever done.
And if God worked our good even at our worst, then he certainly will work it everywhere else, even in those places where his goodness seems gone. In Psalm 23, David pictures the goodness of God following him, pursuing him, not just sometimes but “all the days of my life” (Psalm 23:6). On some days, God’s goodness chased him toward green pastures and still waters; on other days, it drove him into the valley of death’s shadow; on all his days, it led him toward “the house of the Lord” where he now dwells forever. And thus God’s goodness does with us.
When we get to that house and look back upon our twisting way, we will no doubt see more clearly how not only the pastures but also the valleys carried us closer to heaven — how goodness laced both the giving and the taking. But for now, God bids us to believe what we may not be able to see: The hand that leads us into the land of deep darkness is none other than the hand of God’s goodness leading us home.
And so our own hearts have found a thousand ways to finish that sentence without reference to God. But when we see the hand that holds ours — a hand now bearing scars — and when we hear the counsel he gives and sense the glory he is, we cannot finish the sentence except as Asaph does: “For me it is good to be near God.”
God, the good Father, good Son, and good Spirit. God, the fountain from whom every gift flows. God, the one who created us to commune with him and redeemed us to rejoice in him. God, the definition of good and the one without whom nothing is good. Come valley, come darkness, come lack, come loss — if we get more of God, we have more good than all the earth has to offer besides. (Hubbard)
