Imagine standing in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in front of van Gogh’s Starry Night. Only there’s a tarp covering the painting, save for a two-inch slit revealing a sliver of swirly yellow in the upper right corner of one of the world’s most famous paintings. Would you be able to appreciate the masterpiece in all its splendor? Would your bad experience make you think van Gogh was a sham, that if he were even an artist at all, he was certainly not a very good one?
Regardless of your opinions on Vincent van Gogh’s talent, hopefully you would recognize your limited field of view was to blame for your unfortunate museum encounter and not the fault of the artist himself. Yet when God doesn’t perform his duties to our liking, we are quick to criticize His lack of goodness. Often, we take our disdain a step further and conclude that a God who operates in such a manner must not actually exist at all.
The reality is that we are only able to see through a small slit in time and space. We have no idea how God is working because as Isaiah 55:8 tells us, His thoughts are nothing like ours. God says, “…my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts” (.v 9).
I’ve heard the argument too many times, “But a good God would never allow atrocities. Therefore, either God is not good, or there is no God.”
The very statement positions the speaker in a place of self-godship. Who are we to define what is good? Romans 3:12 says “no one does good, not a single one.” But in our lack of goodness, we have concocted a finite definition of “good,” limited by our human frailty, and conferred it upon the infinite Creator of the universe. Onto the one who sent His perfect and blameless son to a horrific death to secure our freedom from the enemy’s clutches. But surely, we know better what “good” is than God does.
I can’t begin to explain why God hasn’t prevented unspeakable things that He could have, but I do know He remains good—by HIS definition, not mine—all the time. And I know “the faithful love of the LORD never ends! His mercies never cease” because I have seen it with my own eyes, even through a slit in the tarp (Lam. 3:22). I could write book upon book on the countless ways I’ve seen miracles, healing, broken people pieced back together and used mightily in God’s kingdom work. Because of how God has showered mercy and blessing on me, I will never stop trusting in Him.
The tarp will not always remain. Someday we will get to see God’s masterpiece unveiled in all its glory, but until then, I choose to trust the One who sees the whole canvas and who is still, even now, at work on it.