God won’t Allow what won’t Ultimately be Good for Us (Yep, Needs a Better Title)

Like many people, I hate clichés. When people simplify what can only ever be inordinately complex it does nothing to help the situations of suffering people find themselves in — whether it’s completely their own fault or totally out of their control, or myriad nuances of combination between.

But I hold to this crucial exception.

I’ve heard God speak into my life the words of the title of this article. Hearing these words from another person, amid my own suffering, would not have been helpful. Yet there is a difference when God convicts us by His Holy Spirit.

Another part to this exception is this biblical truth. When we have no hope left, nothing visible, only a hope vested in faith, the only hope we have left is God’s goodness — that what we’ve been asked to endure will ultimately work out as good for us.

“Now faith is confidence in what we hope for
 and assurance about what we do not see.”
— Hebrews 11:1 (NIV)

Having experienced this personally, we no longer reduce it, in our personal circumstances, to the banal even harmful effect of a cliché. The cliché becomes significant. It gives us life and purpose.

There have been times in my life when all I had to hope in was that what God had allowed in His sovereignty He could turn to my ultimate good; through character growth. (And besides, of course, there is the ‘ultimate good’, in a believer’s conception, in being eternally with God when we’re ultimately gone.)

The difference between our positive and negative reception of the truth in Romans 8:28[1] is who says it. If God says it, all should be well. If someone else says it, and it depends on many variables, including our perception of whether they care or not, we can be either offended as if it were a plastic platitude cast nonchalantly our way, or we can be encouraged to press on. That this is a character growth opportunity.

Sometimes we simply have to believe that God can make something good for us out of something bad. And believing this helps us endure, because it gives us hope when we have none.

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[1] “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”