O taste and see that the LORD is good; 

How blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him!

—Psalm 34:8

I love my job as a teacher. I love getting to know my students. I love teaching them English lessons as well as life lessons. I love helping them develop as young human beings. But hands down, without a doubt, one of the worst parts of my job (right alongside the mounds of paperwork and meetings during my planning block) is having to listen to the kids talk about who they think God is and being limited on what I can say.

Like many people, adults included, they often think of God as angry and harsh in His justice because of popular Old Testament stories. I hear kids talk about God as if He were a supernatural boogeyman who sets out to seek vengeance on kids who don’t act the way they are supposed to, but I never hear kids talk about how good, loving, and kind God is. 

One of the biggest blessings of my adult life has been discovering layer after layer of the depth of God’s goodness, and just like God’s goodness, the word translated as ‘good’ in today’s verse also has layers. The same word translated as ‘good’ in Psalm 34 is translated elsewhere as upright, pleasant, gracious, pure, sweet, precious, and more. It’s almost like each potential interpretation of the word is another layer of God’s character and that’s only one psalm.

Today, I just want us to meditate on and worship God for His unfathomable goodness. Below are some of my favorite places in the Old Testament where God’s goodness is on display.

Hosea— The book of Hosea is the record of the prophet Hosea who was told to marry a prostitute as a way to illustrate how the people of Israel had been unfaithful to God. By the end of the book, Hosea’s wife Gomer had given birth to Hosea’s children before leaving her family to sleep with whomever would buy her the prettiest presents and ended up being taken captive as a slave. 

When Gomer is put up for auction, Hosea is there and pays the price to buy her back. Hundreds of years before Jesus was born, Hosea plays the part of Messiah, illustrating how God would rescue us and bring us back to Himself. 

And then a couple of verses later comes, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful verses in the Bible: “So let us know, let us press on to know the LORD. His going forth is as certain as the dawn; and He will come to us like the rain, like the spring rain watering the earth.” Hosea is warning the people of Israel that punishment is coming if they do not change, but at the same time, he also gives them a picture of God’s desire to heal and restore His people with the gentleness of a spring rain.

Elijah— In 1 Kings 18, the prophet Elijah famously defeats the priests of Baal by praying to God to send fire from heaven. His prayer is answered, and all the priests of Baal are killed for worshiping an idol. Elijah then follows this up by ending a three-year drought through prayer and then beats a king’s horse in a footrace. Time and again God demonstrated His power through Elijah. 

But when Elijah hears the queen has decided to kill him, we get to see just how human Elijah was because his response was not to wait expectantly for the Lord to take care of things or to have confidence in God’s ability to protect him. His response was to ask God to take his life. “Lord, I had a good run. Especially back there against Ahab’s horse. Why don’t ya go ahead and bring home and save me the torture Jezebel has planned?”

God had just shown He was more powerful than humans, animals, the weather, and any other ‘gods’ we could come up with, but Elijah was still afraid. If I were God, I think I would be at least a little bit irritated. But God wasn’t angry. God let Elijah rest, watching over him until He knew it was time for him to eat. He cared for him with the same attentive care as a parent might give to their sick child.

David, Rahab, Ruth, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Esther, Gideon— God has done some amazing things in the lives of very messed up people, and I think it is such a deep kindness that their stories are included in Scripture. 

These people remind us that we serve a God who takes shepherds and makes them a king. He takes a harlot and a foreign widow and makes them ancestors of the Messiah. He takes liars—yeah, I’m looking at all three of you Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—and makes them into a great nation. He takes an exiled orphan and makes her queen. He takes a coward and uses him to lead His army to victory. There is no one God is not able and willing to use to further His kingdom. He has decided there is nothing we can do and nothing that can be done to us that would make Him give up on us.

Praise the Lord that we have such a good, good God!