The Goodness of God

Good might be the most overworked word in English. We use it for our coffee in the morning, for the kind of day we had, for the dog asleep at our feet. We say it so often the word has gone thin. So when somebody tells you that God is good, the phrase lands in the same bucket as everything else you called good this week, and it bounces off. The word has been worn out on lesser things.

That is the problem we walk into in Exodus 33. Moses had stood at the burning bush, watched the Red Sea split and close again, eaten manna out of the dust, and followed a pillar of fire through the night. The friend of God, of all people, climbs the mountain and asks for one more thing. He asks to see God’s glory. God answers with that worn-out word.

“I will make all My goodness pass before you.”

When God Himself reaches for a word to describe what His own glory looks like, the word He chooses is good. That tells me we have not yet understood what the word means. We have never met goodness in its proper sense, only its shadows and echoes.

I. The Glory of God Is His Goodness

Notice the trade. Moses asks for one thing. God answers with another. Moses asks for glory. God promises goodness. We would expect a polite refusal or some scaled-down version of what was asked. What we get is an equivalence, as if God is saying, you asked for glory. Good. Here is what My glory is.

The two words sit on top of each other in this verse. Glory is the Hebrew kabod, the weight of God, the heaviness of His being, the radiance that comes off Him when He is present. Goodness is the Hebrew tov, the same word God used in Genesis 1 when He looked at what He had made and called it good. Here in Exodus 33, He fuses those two words into one. The weight of My being, the radiance of My presence, is My goodness toward you.

Stephen Charnock spent over a hundred pages working out what goodness means when applied to God, and he kept arriving at the same point. The goodness of God is not one slice of God next to other slices. It is the total overflow of every perfection of God toward His creatures. His holiness, His justice, His mercy, His grace, His patience, His love, all of them reach us as goodness, because all of them come from a God who is good in His being. There is no attribute of God that, when you trace it down to where it touches you, comes through as anything else.

Jesus Himself protected this word. When a rich young ruler came running up to Him, dropped to his knees, and called Him good, Jesus did not let it pass.

Read that carefully. Jesus is not denying His own goodness; He is denying that any merely human teacher has any title to the word. He is saying, in effect, do you know what you just called Me? Goodness in its proper sense belongs to God alone. When we apply it to weather and coffee and weekend trips, we are committing a kind of theft. We have taken a divine word and spent it on cheap things.

So when David writes in Psalm 34 that we should taste and see, he is naming a doctrine, not handing us a slogan.

Goodness is not theorized. It is tasted. You do not learn the goodness of God by listening to a sermon about it, though I am glad you are reading this and you can start here. You learn it on your knees, in the hour after the diagnosis, when the prayer you prayed gets answered in a way you never expected, or when the thing you feared most turns out to have been the door He opened to bring you home. You taste it. Once you have, the word stops being thin.

Application

Brothers and sisters, stop using the phrase “God is good” as a slogan and start using it as a confession. Mean something by it. When something turns your way this week, do not call it luck. Call it what it is, goodness from the only One who can give it. A breath you did not earn, a meal you did not deserve, a child who came home safe, a friend at the door at the right hour. Name it as goodness from God. The day we stop naming it is the day we forget who gave it.

But this raises a sharp question. If goodness is so absolute, and we are so undeserving, why does it come to us at all? On what basis does the goodness of God ever reach a sinner? The very next clause in verse 19 answers that, and the answer is not what we would write if we were writing it.

II. The Goodness of God Is Sovereign Goodness

God promises that His goodness will pass by, and then He attaches a clause that no preacher should skip.

The goodness that passes by is distinguishing goodness, not the common kind. The Hebrew construction is emphatic, almost defiant. I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious. The choice belongs to God, and the grounds are in Him alone. Nothing in the creature demands the grace. It is free, sovereign, and rests on whom God pleases.

Paul knew this verse. When he was defending the sovereignty of God in election in Romans 9, answering the charge that God is unrighteous to choose some and not others, he reached for this exact verse. Not a Pauline argument. Moses on the mountain.

Paul lands the doctrine of election on Exodus 33:19. That is where it lives. The same God who promised to make His goodness pass before Moses said in the very same breath that the recipients of that goodness would be chosen by Him alone, not by their willing or their running.

Make a distinction here, because it matters. There is a kind of goodness from God that falls on every creature alive. Jesus said it plainly.

Every sunrise over a sleeping atheist is goodness from God. So is every breath drawn by a man who hates the name of Christ, and every meal eaten by a household that never prays. That goodness is real. It is sometimes called common grace, and the man who refuses it will have no excuse on the day he stands before the throne.

But there is another goodness in this passage. It is the kind that names you. It pulled you out of darkness, opened your eyes when they were shut tight against God, and gave you a heart of flesh when you were content with the stone you had. It found you and would not let you go. That goodness is sovereign, not common. It was given to whom God willed to give it, and the only reason it ever came to you is because in eternity past He said, that one.

Application

Saints, stop being unsurprised that you are saved. The day you grew used to the goodness of God toward you is the day you started losing the doctrine. Cultivate astonishment. The man at the table next to you in the restaurant breathes the same air you breathe and eats the same food. The only difference between the two of you is that the sovereign goodness of God passed by and named you, and to this hour it has not named him. Be shocked, and pray for him.

Moses asked to see this goodness. He asked to see the glory. The answer comes back in two parts. Yes, you will see. And also, no, you cannot, because there is a way the seeing will kill you. The rest of the passage tells us how a sinner ever lays eyes on the goodness of God and walks down the mountain alive.

III. The Goodness of God Is Seen Only From the Rock

Moses has just been promised goodness, and now he is told that if he looks straight at the source of it he will not survive the sight. No man can see Me and live. The reason is not cruelty but holiness, and Moses, even Moses, is still a son of Adam. The face of God is too much for the eye of any sinner, even a saved one, even the friend of God.

So God makes a way. Look at the detail. He says there is a place by Him, a rock with a cleft in it, a hand that will cover the eyes, a glory that will pass by, and finally a removal of the hand for a glimpse of the back. The whole apparatus of seeing God is God’s doing from start to finish. Moses does not pick the spot, cover himself, or time his own glance. God places him in the cleft, covers him with His own hand, and lifts that hand at the right moment.

If you ever needed a picture of mediated access, this is it. The goodness is real and Moses will see it, but only from the cleft, under the hand, on God’s terms.

Paul, writing to the Corinthians, gives us the key that turns this lock. He is recounting the wilderness story, and he says something easy to read past.

The rock was Christ. Read Exodus 33 again with that sentence in hand. There is a place by Me, and you shall stand there on the rock. Moses, you cannot see the goodness of God except by standing on Christ, and you cannot survive the glory except inside Him.

There is more, because we are not at the end of the story. Moses saw the back, a glance after the glory had gone by. We live on the other side of the cross, and Paul tells the Corinthians that the very face Moses could not see is now the face we look into.

Did you hear that? The glory of God in the face of Christ. The thing Moses pressed his face against the stone to glimpse is the thing the Father has poured into the heart of every believer. Moses saw the back as the glory passed. We see the face, and the face is looking back at us, calling us friend.

Application

Do not try to know God outside of Christ. The face of God seen any other way is death. Inside the Rock, it is life. Fly to Him. Be hidden in Him. When Scripture talks about being in Christ, it is not poetic language. That phrase is the cleft of the Rock, the only place from which the goodness of God can be seen without killing you. If you have been trying to know God through your morality or your religion or your own sincerity, you are standing out in the open. Come to the Rock. There is still room in the cleft, and the hand is still hovering.

Conclusion

Moses asked to see the glory. God answered with goodness, because the goodness of God is the glory of God when it touches a creature. That goodness is sovereign and given to whom God wills, and it is seen only from the cleft of the Rock, on God’s terms. Moses got a glimpse of the back. We have been given the face.

The question for every soul is not whether God is good. It is where you are standing when His goodness passes by. Are you in the Rock?

A Word to the Sinner and the Saint

Friend, if you are not in Christ this morning, hear this carefully. The goodness of God will still pass by you. It will still send rain to your roof, breath into your lungs, food onto your table. Every day you are alive and outside of Christ is goodness from God, but that goodness will not cover you. You are standing out in the open. A day is coming when the glory passes by, and there will be no cleft to step into, no hand to hide behind, and no man can see Him and live. There is one Rock, and His name is Jesus Christ, the Son of God, wounded so that there would be a cleft for sinners to stand in. Run to Him today, before another sunrise of common goodness passes you by unconverted.

Saints, hear this just as carefully. You are already in the cleft. You were put there, not because you climbed, but because the same hand that covered Moses lifted you in. The goodness Moses saw in shadow is yours in full. A day is coming when even the face will not kill you, because the One whose face you will see is the One who died to bring you there. He will not flinch when He looks at you. He has already paid for every reason you ever gave Him to.