On College Football, Tweets, and God

I may be a girly-girl, but I definitely love me some college football. While the Clemson Tigers are my personal favorite, I enjoy watching any team play. 

I follow several players on Twitter, and a few of them tweeted the same thing following their teams’ victories – “God is good!” From what I know of these young men, they really do seek to follow the Lord, but I wonder… Would their tweets have been the same if their teams had lost?

We hear so often that ‘God is good’ when people are on their personal mountaintops, experiencing favor and blessing, lacking no good thing. But when life is hard, a barren wasteland of hardship and confusion, that statement is not as often proclaimed. Why? Do we associate our ease with God’s goodness? Tangible blessing with love?

I agree wholeheartedly that God is good, but it isn’t in victory that I’ve learned it. I came to believe in His goodness – His eternal, unchanging, omnipresent good – in my personal time of defeat, a time when no good was being poured out on me. I saw His good when all else was bad.

What do we even mean when we say He is good? You might disagree, but I think most people mean ‘He gives good things’ or ‘I feel good.’

We say that our children are ‘good’ when they are well-behaved, associating their goodness with their behavior, and I think we subconsciously do the same with our God. If He behaves in a way that seems to benefit us, then we deem Him good. If we feel slighted or hurt by His actions (or allowances), then we question His goodness.

Unlike our children, however, God does not change. He is the same “yesterday and today and forever” (Heb. 13:8). Scripture tells us that “God is love” (1 John 4:8), and if that was true thousands of years ago when it was written, then it is true today.

Because God IS love, everything that God allows comes FROM love.

Everything comes from love – even what momentarily seems bad. “For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all” (2 Cor. 4:17). Troubles come – and will come – but they are not an indication that God is not good. They are an indication that He desires eternal glory for us! 

The bad of this life is God’s good in disguise.