In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis said we cannot hold to a simple religion. “After all, real things are not simple. They look simple, but they are not.” This observation of C.S. Lewis applies to Bill Johnson’s understanding of the goodness of God described in Part 1. Johnson’s view of God in God is Good was too simple. Saying God is good and then glossing over what is obviously bad and meaningless in the world is simplistic.
Lewis called this view of the Christian religion “Christianity-and-water,” meaning, “there was a God in Heaven and everything is all right—leaving out all the difficult and terrible doctrines about sin and hell and the devil, and redemption.” Real Christianity is not this simple; it is complicated. It’s not what you’d expect. “It has just that queer twist about it that real things have. So let us leave behind all these boys’ philosophies—these over-simple answers. The problem is not simple and the answer is not going to be simple either.”
In describing his own journey to faith in Christ, Lewis said in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist, that all of reality was senseless, he discovered he was forced to assume that one part of reality—his idea of justice—was full of sense.
Consequently, atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light, in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
There were only two views, according to Lewis, that face all the facts of what is bad and meaningless in the universe. One is the Christian view that says we live in a good world that has gone wrong, but it still retains the memory of what it ought to have been. The other view is what Lewis called Dualism.
Dualism means the belief there are two equal and independent powers at the back of everything, one of them good and the other bad, and that this universe is the battlefield in which they fight out an endless war. But it has a catch in it. . .
Badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself; badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.
Johnson is not dualistic in this sense, but he does seem to have been heavily influenced towards dualism by the gap theory of creation described in the Scofield Study Bible and dominion theology. And as a result, he has drifted far from a traditional understanding of the goodness of God.
Scofield, Dominion, and the Gap Theory
In chapter two of God is Good, Johnson adapted what he had already written in When Heaven Invades Earth about our commission from God in Genesis 1:28, which he sees as a dominion mandate, not merely a creation or cultural mandate. Although the Garden of Eden was perfect, the rest of the earth was in disarray. Satan had rebelled and was cast out of heaven with a portion of the fallen angels and took dominion of the earth.
Johnson thought it was obvious why the planet outside the Garden was in disorder. “Outside of the Garden was chaos and disorder as it was under the influence of the devil and his hordes.” Although God could have easily destroyed the devil and his host, “He chose to defeat darkness through His delegated authority.” So, He placed Adam and Eve in the Garden with a mission: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). This understanding of Genesis 1:28 presumes the gap theory of creation.
According to the Dictionary of Christianity and Science, the gap theory was espoused by Thomas Chalmers and C.I. Scofield, and was popularized by the Scofield Study Bible. It holds that there was a large “gap” of time between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2, likely because of a cataclysmic event such as the fall of Satan. After the first creation in Genesis 1:1, Satan (who was the ruler of the pre-Adamic world) rebelled, which led to sin entering the creation and brought God’s judgement in the form of a flood (the waters mentioned in Genesis 1:2) and a global ice age. “Genesis 1:2 thus describes the ruined condition of the earth, while Genesis 1:3-31 describes God’s re-creation.”
There are several major problems with this view. First, it is full of speculation, since there is not one word about Satan’s fall in Genesis 1, nor any “men” prior to Adam, nor any judgment on the earth prior to the flood of Genesis 6–8. Second, the Hebrew phrase tohu wabohu used in Genesis 1:2 does not always carry the idea of judgment, but simply means that the earth was unformed and unfilled. Finally, in Genesis 1:2 the Hebrew form used is a waw disjunctive, indicating the setting at the time the earth was created by God. If the meaning of Genesis 1:2 was “the earth became unformed and unfilled,” as the gap theory requires, then the waw consecutive form would have been used, as it is throughout the remaining verses of Genesis 1. Thus Genesis 1:2 does not describe action subsequent to Genesis 1:1, as required by the gap theory.
For more on the gap theory, see What is the Gap Theory? For more on Scofield and the Scofield Study Bible, see “C.I. Scofield’s Influence on the NAR” and for more on dominionism, see “Dominionism in Eden, Part 2.”
What Does the Bible Say About the Goodness of God?
In his Systematic Theology, Louis Berkhof said the goodness of God should not be confused with His kindness, which was a more restricted concept. “We speak of something as good, when it answers in all parts to the ideal.” When we ascribe goodness to God, we are saying He is in every way as He should be, and answers absolutely to the ideal expressed in the word God. “He is good in the metaphysical sense of the word, absolute perfection and perfect bliss in Himself.” It was in this sense that Jesus said to the young ruler in Mark 10:18, “No one is good except God alone.”
However, not only is God good in Himself, He is also good to His creatures, and is the fountain of all good throughout the Bible. The Psalmist says in Psalm 145:9, “The Lord is good to all, and his mercy is over all that he made.” In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said in Matthew 5:45 that the Father “makes his sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust.” And as Paul said in 1 Timothy 4:4, “For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving.”
The Dictionary of Biblical Imagery said goodness is a mysterious term that communicates a sense of delight and fathomless depth. A review of the words goodness or good in the Bible reveals that the reason for this is “goodness in the Bible is God himself.” Goodness is part of God’s nature. “This characteristic is not changeable or diminishing, nor does it have a beginning or an end.”
Not only is God good; he does good. The psalmist links the two when he writes, “Thou art good and doest good” (Ps. 119:68). In the OT, God “promised good to Israel” (Num 10:29) and kept his promise. Although Joseph’s brothers “meant evil against” him, “God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive” Gen 50:20). At the dedication of the temple, the people “went to their homes joyful and glad of heart for all the goodness that the Lord had shown to David his servant and to Israel his people” (1 Kings 8:66). In Psalm 23, a psalm that catalogs God’s acts of provision, the poem rises to a confident prediction that God’s “goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life” (Ps 23:6). In the NT, God is similarly portrayed as the God who does good. Jesus “went about doing good” (Acts 10:38). Paul expressed the confidence that “in everything God works for good with those who love him” (Rom 8:28 RSV).
The creation story in Genesis 1 declares six times that His creation was good. Then in Genesis 1:31, “God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.” All of God’s creation, including people who were created in his image, are an extension of his own goodness. But an important aspect of goodness in the Bible is to see that it is set over against its opposite. There is an ongoing tale of a great spiritual conflict between good and evil. Thereafter good and evil are intertwined-the lot of those living in a fallen world.
A prime responsibility for those living in such a world is to discern good from evil (2 Sam 14:17; 1 Kings 3:9; Heb 5:14). Another is to do good rather than evil, to actively choose good over evil (Ps 34:14; 37:27; Prov 14:22; Is 7:15, 16; Amos 5:14, 15; Rom 12:9; 1 Pet 3:11). Goodness is something that must be actively sought (Prov 11:27). Another variation on the theme is that the human race is assumed to fall into two categories: the good and the evil (Prov 15:3; Eccles 9:2; Mt 5:45; 12:35; Jn 5:29), just as actions are assumed to be either good or evil (Eccles 12:14; 2 Cor 5:10). The resolution of the cosmic conflict of the ages will occur in the eschaton, and although the words good and goodness do not appear in English versions of the book of Revelation, a major meaning of the book is the final and conclusive triumph of good over evil.
The references to goodness in the Bible tell us that God is good and that through his life in us we grow in goodness and in our likeness to him. Meditating on the goodness of the Lord engenders a sense of true virtue that speaks to the best that is in each believer. As creatures made in the image of God, we can aspire to goodness, surrounded by a world and society that includes much that is good.
Real Christianity is not simply saying and believing in the goodness of God; it’s complicated by our original sin, not the fall of Satan. So, we live in a good world that has gone wrong, but still retains the memory of what it ought to have been. It’s not what you’d expect. “It has just that queer twist about it that real things have. So let us leave behind all these boys’ philosophies—these over-simple answers. The problem is not simple and the answer is not going to be simple either.”
When Paul describes the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5, goodness was one of those fruits. But doing greater miracles than Jesus wasn’t mentioned. The resolution of the cosmic conflict between good and evil occurs when Jesus Christ returns in the eschaton and He brings what is in heaven to the earth. Maranatha, Lord Jesus.
