Wrongly placed hope distorts the goodness of God

Wrongly placed hope distorts the goodness of God

I hope all my readers and listeners are doing well. I am thankful for all of you. This month, I decided to write on the goodness of God. I started a read-through of John Calvin’s Institutes of Religion for my master's Degree, and I want to take a little more time to write on this topic.

We hear this all the time: God is good. However, I want to take some time and think about what that means in a few ways. First, I want to share how fundamental knowledge of existence comes from God, two, how God supports us in His power, third, how God guides us in His providence, and fourth, how we receive all types of blessings that many take for granted.

When we begin to understand these four, it is then that we start to tap into the benevolence of this great God.

Fundamental knowledge of existence comes from God.

We must understand the knowledge of God is not initially salvific. It is more fundamental knowledge that the whole of our existence stems from—God is creator and sustainer. He is transcendent. He extends past earthly perception to show that he is supreme. We will never be able to properly adore Him unless we realize how good He truly is through the gift of creation and our lives.

To live and comprehend creation is to understand some of God’s goodness. We should be ever grateful to Him for giving us all things.

When man is convinced that all goodness comes from God, man can have true piety. Until then, man teeters back and forth, trading one lie for another in their self-made shadow world of sin. When man understands that he owes everything to God, it is then that he can understand to trust and have reverence for God.

I was in Scotland preaching many years back, and a guy came up with his child on his shoulder and stated, “What if you're wrong? I don’t believe God exists. Prove to me He exists.”  I looked at him with a smile and suggested he needed to come up with a more complex question, for this one was relatively easy to answer. He looked at me with shock; however, this is the very point John Calvin is making in Chapter Two of Book One of his Institutes. We must start with God to make sense of any goodness at all.

I answered the gentleman from Scotland’s question by telling him his life was one proof of God. What was one of the most overwhelming pieces of evidence in his life that God was real and actively at work in his life—his very existence is evidence of a good, loving, and benevolent God who has graciously created him and is currently sustaining him to have this conversation with me. His rejecting the goodness of God by doubting his existence does not change the fact that God is needed for him to account for any goodness in his life and his existence and the child on his shoulder was truly two good things in his life.

After I answered him, he looked at me and stated, “I never thought about it like that.”  Cornelius VanTil worded it this way, “The only proof for the existence of God is without God, you couldn't prove anything.”

I want to suggest that if you have a false god, you are willingly entering into the same realm of absurdity. Not only is God fundamental in our knowledge of existence, but He is also provisional in the power it takes to support us in ways that no false god ever could.   

God supports us in His power.

Humans like to think of themselves as independent. People earn a living at their jobs, care for their bodies, and provide for their loved ones with things that are needed. However, man is not the starting point. This is what Calvin is forcing us to stop and contemplate. Our strength, abilities, and even our proper desire to care for loved ones is a picture of God's power on display sustaining our lives.

None of the three is possible without God, but because He is, all is possible. A person without a relationship with their creator and the Savior Jesus Christ is a person with misplaced hope. Let me briefly explain by referencing a section of Holy Scripture.

“But in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect.” (1 Peter 3:15)

This text gives us three important facts: (1) how we should honor Christ, (2) why our hope is placed in Christ, and (3) how we should engage people who don’t have that hope. People put their hope in all types of people, places, and things, but if it is not Jesus, it is misplaced.

A Christian realizes that the only opinion that truly matters is God’s. He has our best interest at heart; therefore, in our hearts, His holiness matters more than anything else. The best way to honor Christ is to continually let our minds and hearts be conformed to His holiness.

A Christian, at minimum, has hope in two areas that have to go in order one after the other. One is that God is the creator and sustainer of all things. The second is that God grants us salvation from our sins through His son, Jesus. When humans understand this divine order, God being the creator and Savior, they can have proper hope.

Until then, they are placing their hope in things that continually leave them disenfranchised from actual life. As I said earlier, they are chasing pleasures in the shadow world of sin. All these pleasures and false gods demand love and care without giving any in return. However, God is just the opposite. He is constantly giving.   

Finally, the third truth we can take from the text is how we should handle the people we are engaging in our lives and conversations. We must be gentle and reverent because they have only the façade of hope. We have hope because we understand who the creator and sustainer of life is. We know that God gave logic, rationality, and morality because these are some of the invisible attributes that show He exists. In short, we understand how life works because the Creator has introduced Himself to us in the Bible.

We are calling all people—as we have been called—to cast off all things hindering them from submitting to that. This is where the second hope comes in the hope of salvation. When a person sees what God has done for us on the cross, and their eyes are enlightened to this truth, repentance and belief will naturally follow.    

We are to cast off false views of God and thrust ourselves into understanding that we are His workmanship. He has given the law of creation and created from that law, and we all must submit to His authority. Human nature will lead humanity away from these facts and try to keep them diluted and delusional about the truths of this great good God.

The last thing humanity wants to do in their own nature is to submit to the goodness and faithfulness of God. Creation owes allegiance to this great God who gives and sustains through His goodness. When man comes to terms with this, when doubts come our way, we lean back on a God who has proven Himself to be just what He is: faithful. Loving and knowing God means that we follow Him and obey because of His goodness.

God guides us in His providence.

God supports us in His power and guides us by His providence. This fact helps every person rest, because they properly understands reality. Throughout our lives, God's providence has been leading every person who has ever existed. These are fundamental things like who our parents were, where we were born on this earth, where we spent our childhood, whether we had disabilities, extraordinary intelligence, extraordinary ability in sports or business, or anything else.

This picture of God’s providence in your life should allow you to trust an all-powerful God with your life and salvation. Unfortunately, people use it as an excuse to rebel against Him. They say, “I would never love a God like that.”

My question would be, how is your chosen option going for you? Depression is at an all-time high, and people are dissatisfied with their jobs and relationships. Antidepressants are the number one prescribed drug, job retention is at an all-time low, and faithfulness to one person is a thing of the past. All of this comes from the fruit of the roots of people's lives. They are placing their hope in the wrong things.

In short, they are robbing what God has given in creation and scripture to prop up their broken lives and worldviews. They are robbing the Christian God who gives rationality, logic, and morality to keep their false god on life support. The Christian exposes this by simply explaining why they have hope in Christ. Christ gives Christians two hopes—the hope of making sense of life and the gift of salvation.       

The Father is worthy of obedience and worship because His goodness is proven through creation. This gives us the fundamental knowledge of our existence. When this first hope is realized that we exist because God has initiated His plan into action, we see His power providing for us and His providence leading us. This leads to the second hope, a person humbly coming to the blood-stained cross in repentance and belief.

Understanding God's goodness gives humanity the ability to have true hope.  Until next month, go out and share and proclaim the Gospel to see a life transformed because the truth worth sharing and proclaiming is the truth that transforms.