I received a copy of this book to facilitate my review.  As always, all opinions expressed here are entirely my own.

This is a hard topic.  So hard, in fact, that I’ve been wrestling with this book (off and on) for several years.  I may have mentioned before that since I’ve gotten married, God has spent a number of years teaching me that He’s sovereign.  But now that I’ve learned that lesson fairly thoroughly, I’m having to learn all over again that He’s good.  That’s the root of my wrestling with the book.  It’s also a dichotomy that, in my opinion, the book handles well.

The Goodness of God is not an exceptionally long book.  In fact, it’s condensed from a longer work, If God is Good: Faith in the Midst of Suffering and Evil (which I have not read), and it’s only a little larger/more substantial than a typical “gift book.” But the subtitle sums it up well, I think: Assurance of Purpose in the Midst of Suffering.

There are not trite answers here.  There often is no single, hard-and-fast, simple answer when we are struggling through hard times.  What the book does do is tackle a whole long list of questions we typically ask in these sorts of circumstances.  Why do bad things happen to good people?  Where is God in the midst of suffering?  How does free will fit in with God’s sovereignty.  (I don’t 100% agree with his treatment of that subject, but I don’t radically disagree, either.)  And, ultimately, how can God be good and still allow such evil?

This quote is both illustration and summation of his answer to that:

“Usually children don’t fully comprehend why we discipline them, make them clean their rooms, take them to the dentist, or refuse to allow them to eat all the candy they want.  One day, when they grow up, they’ll get it.  And so will we.”

I’ll leave you with a couple other quotes I found to be excellent food for thought.  In a manner of speaking, they’re opposite sides of the same coin; one has to do with our view of Satan & his connection to suffering; the other has to do with our view of God in the midst of suffering.

“It shouldn’t surprise us that Satan uses evil and suffering—the very things he specializes in—to get us to question God’s goodness, love, power, or knowledge.  His purpose in all he does is to keep us from trusting our Savior.  Just as he did with Eve, he wants us to question God’s Word: ‘Did God really say that?'”

“When we face a natural disaster, a disease, or even a financial hardship, we should ask our sovereign God, ‘What are you trying to tell us?'”

(This is good advice even if you don’t believe God orchestrated the event.  We can always choose to take away a positive lesson!)