Good Is God

I’ll be frank: Numbers was not easy to read.  It documents the forty years Israel spends wandering through the desert as punishment for the disobedience and lack of faith of the previous generation.  Once the generation dies off, the Lord lets Israel into the Promised Land.  A lot of the events that take place are, for lack of a better word, downers.  We see examples of God loving and providing for Israel, but also many examples of His wrath on those who sin against Him.

Similar to Leviticus, Numbers for me was less about directly applicable stories and more about seeing who God is.  His anger burns (justifiably) against Israel numerous times throughout Numbers, and they are punished accordingly.  What I really want to address in this post are all the times I said to myself, “Wow, that’s kinda harsh.”

A couple weeks ago I wrote about God’s provision for Israel in the form of manna.  Well after eating manna every day, for every meal, for a long time, the Israelites had lost their appetite for it.  They complained to Moses, claiming that they ate better in Egypt.  According to Numbers, the Lord became “exceedingly angry” and said, “you will not eat it for just one day, or two days, or five, ten or twenty days, but for a whole month—until it comes out of your nostrils and you loathe it—because you have rejected the Lord.”

The Lord piles quail in Israel’s camp up to three feet high and as far as a day’s walk in any direction.  “While the meat was still between their teeth and before it could be consumed” God unleashes a severe plague upon everyone eating the quail.  The place is named “graves of craving” because of all who died from craving the meat.

Later Balak, king of Moab, summons a powerful sorcerer named Balaam to put a curse upon the Israelites.  Balaam refuses, saying that the Lord has forbid him from doing it.  When Balak’s representatives return to ask again, God says to Balaam, “Since these men have come to summon you, go with them, but do only what I tell you.”  Two sentences later Numbers says, “But God was very angry when he went and the angel of the Lord stood in the road to oppose him.”

Balaam’s donkey sees the angel and will not go near it, but since Balaam can’t see the angel he becomes angry and beats the donkey.  Eventually the Lord reveals the angel to him.  “I have come here to oppose you because your path is a reckless one” said the angel, “If (the donkey) had not turned away, I would certainly have killed you by now.”  Balaam says, “ I have sinned.  I did not realize you were standing in the road to oppose me.  If you are displeased, I will go back.”  The angel tells him to go with the men, but speak only what it tells him to.

Soooo Balaam followed the Lord’s instructions but the Lord became angry with him and almost killed him.  When the angel speaks with Balaam, he tells him to do what he was originally going to do in the first place.  Something doesn’t make sense…

I mention these two stories because they are part of several stories in Numbers that leave me scratching my head saying, “Why did God do that?  That doesn’t seem right.”  Well the reality is that everything God does is right, purely because He does it.

See, God isn’t subject to what we define as “good” and “just.”  In fact it is quite the opposite.  Goodness and justice are derived from Him, and He can’t do anything that is not good.  It’s important that we avoid judging God’s morality from within our tiny, simplistic, narrow-minded frames of reference of right and wrong.  What do we know?  In recent American history it was considered perfectly acceptable to buy and sell people as property!

Seeing the aftermath of the typhoon in the Philippines is hard.  Seeing a child wasting away in a hospital bed from cancer is hard.  We don’t understand it.  “If God is so good, how can He let these things happen?”

Francis Chan puts it this way: “Do you ever even consider the possibility that maybe the Creator’s sense of justice is actually more developed than yours?  And that His love and His mercy are perfect and that you could be the one that is flawed?”  He goes on to point out that when we say things like, “well God wouldn’t do that” we’re putting God’s actions in submission to our reasoning.

The Bible is full of things that don’t make sense to us.  But we need to be assured that everything God does is good.  Goodness is inseparable from Him.  Good is God.