O give thanks unto the LORD, for He is good: for His mercy endures forever (Psalm 107:1).
Doesn’t everyone know that God is good? They should. Yet, some refuse to believe it. Sometimes even we might be tempted to doubt it. How can that be? How could a child of God be tempted to doubt the goodness of God?
Easily!
Satan is very powerful. Sinful flesh is very weak. And we were born as enemies of the Lord God.
Some might ask how God can be good if he allows unborn babies to be killed by the hundreds of thousands. How can he let thousands of people starve to death? Isn’t all of that bad?
A Special Forces captain wrote a book called “God is not here!” to vent his confusion and frustration over a tour in Iraq.
Sometimes God might seem to be M.I.A. in the battle against what is bad. Sometimes he seems to be a deserter. That is not good.
It raises questions. It makes us wonder: “Maybe he never is there. Never was there! Maybe he’s nothing more than a Santa Claus figure.” Maybe, Satan is spinning out disinformation!
The problem is not with the Creator and Redeemer. It is with us humans. We like to pretend we are God. We prefer to determine good and bad the same way we like to decide upon right and wrong. We tend to decide according to what makes sense to us—and what is to our advantage. We want to make the final call
Our attempts to play God are dismal and deadly failures.
We are not all-knowing. We are not all-powerful. We are not holy. We are not good. He is!
Better than that: “His mercy endures forever.”
Without his mercy, we would have to face the consequences of the bad we do. Without his mercy, we would never have any good thing happen in our life.
The Enemy wants to blind us to this.
Without the mercy of God, humans would have no life, no food, no shelter—and surely, no fun.
We tend to forget that. Instead, we view these gifts as entitlements—even as inalienable rights.
We are so wrong.
We do not deserve any good thing. We deserve only the bad. The very bad.
We have rebelled against him. We deserve what the rebellious angels got. We deserve abandonment by God. We deserve the dungeons of hell.
Demons must admit in anguish, ”No, God definitely is not here!”
The Apostle Paul wrote: “He saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit…” (Titus 3:5)
He promised a Savior. He came. He brought us to faith. God is merciful to us. God is good.
We pray the words we have sung before:
Now thank we all our God With hearts and hands and voices, Who wondrous things has done, In whom his world rejoices, Who from our mother’s arms Has blessed us on our way With countless gifts of love And still is ours today. Amen.
Written by Pastor Paul Ziemer WELS National Civilian Chaplain and Liaison to the Military Provided by WELS Ministry to the Military
