441. Life = God ? (2025.10.26)

Many people think their faith in God will grow when their life gets better. It sounds like a plausible theory because many people lose faith in God when life gets worse. They conclude that God is not good based on the quality of their lives. But this simply isn’t true.

Here is why. The essence of Christian faith is trust in the “goodness of God”. However, it is difficult to understand the goodness of God when life is going perfectly well. Because it becomes difficult to distinguish the goodness of God from the goodness of “life”. Life can be good at times apart from God.

Someone said, “We enjoy God’s goodness on the mountain top, but we intimately get to know God in the valley.” In other words, we witness God’s goodness through good times, but we internalize his goodness through tough times. What used to be an observation becomes an internal conviction through difficult times, while holding on to the truth: “God is good all the time.”

God gave us life, but life is not God. That is why judging God’s goodness based on the quality of our life can be the worst mistake we can make. It is still a mystery why God allows hardships in our lives, but one thing is clear: faith grows through hardships. (James 1:2-4) Faith in God’s goodness requires circumstances that contradict it. And hardships remind us that the world we live in is not our home, and that we are waiting for our true home. We begin to loosen our grip on our pursuit of the goodness of life and increase our anticipation of eternal life.

But most likely, our lives will be full of good times. It is because God works all things together for our good. (Rom 8:28) Many past events that felt so painful get replaced by the joy we experience today. We are not to barely get by in this life, hoping to go to heaven one day. God helps us to enjoy heaven before going to heaven when we decide to trust in his goodness in all seasons of life. Because heaven is where we become so certain, without a shadow of doubt, that God is good.