Is God Good When Life Does Not Feel Good?

Welcome back as we continue journeying together toward becoming people of depth, increasingly attuned to God, other people, ourselves, and creation and culture. We are entering a pivotal and deeply introspective portion of that journey as we begin uncovering the genuine ideas of God hidden within our hearts.

This is not primarily an exploration of the theological statements we consciously affirm. Most of us already know what we are supposed to say when someone asks, “Is God good?” We know the familiar answer: God is good all the time, and all the time God is good.

The more difficult question is whether our hearts experience that as reality.

Spiritual formation involves the transformation of both our conscious and unconscious selves. The conscious life is somewhat easy to describe because it includes the beliefs, conclusions, and commitments we can articulate. The unconscious life is more mysterious, yet it contains powerful forces that quietly shape how we think, act, relate, and love.

At least two of those forces are our ideas and desires. An idea is an assumption, conclusion, or principle in which the heart is rooted, though we are largely unaware of it. Ideas are not merely intellectual statements. They are experienced realities.

A person of depth invests time, courage, energy, and sometimes considerable pain in uncovering their hidden ideas about God, other people, themselves, and the world. Without that inward journey, we may spend much of our lives operating from false realities while presenting a religious identity that appears entirely coherent.

Jesus is the object of our formation because His ideas lead toward flourishing, beauty, goodness, truth, and love. He does not merely teach these ideas; He embodies them. Other ideas bend toward fear, corruption, harm, alienation, and death.

Because none of us is Jesus, each heart contains some combination of light and darkness, truth and distortion. These ideas were formed through all kinds of relationships and experiences, particularly within our families of origin, where our hearts were more tender, open, and malleable than they are today.

What Do We Actually Believe About God?

A. W. Tozer returns us to the central issue:

“That our idea of God corresponds as nearly as possible to the true being of God is of immense importance to us. Compared with our actual thoughts about Him, our creedal statements are of little consequence. Our real idea of God may lie buried under the rubbish of conventional religious notions and may require an intelligent and vigorous search before it is finally unearthed and exposed for what it is. Only after an ordeal of painful self-probing are we likely to discover what we actually believe about God.”

Tozer’s claim is unsettling because he places little weight on the theological statements we repeat compared with the ideas from which we actually live. Our doctrinal language may remain entirely correct while our hearts experience God as distant, controlling, disappointed, unpredictable, or unsafe.

This is the difference between our stated beliefs and our functional theology. Our beliefs may say God is good, while our anxiety, resentment, control, and despair reveal a heart that is far less certain.

The question “Is God good?” is therefore not merely a theological puzzle. It is a question about the reality in which we live.

The Former Missionary

A few years ago, I spoke with a friend whose brother had recently deconstructed from Jesus. I will call the brother Jack.

Jack had served as a missionary in a country suffering from extreme poverty and government persecution. He repeatedly poured himself into loving and caring for destitute people, many of whom were children. Again and again, some of those children disappeared through drug overdose, exploitation, abuse, or death.

After witnessing so much relentless suffering, Jack concluded that God did not exist. If God did exist, Jack reasoned, He either had no interest in caring for His creatures or lacked the power to do so.

Jack renounced his faith and concluded that both of God’s books, Scripture and creation, were fundamentally flawed. He then began trying to disprove God and remains committed to that effort.

If we spent enough time with Jack and carefully attuned to his heart, however, I suspect we would discover that he is not actually an atheist in the deepest sense. Atheism is his intellectual position, but his hidden ideas tell another story.

Jack still operates from the reality of God.

He is simply furious with Him.

His deepest conclusion is not that God does not exist. It is that God is not good.

Is God Good in the Messy Middle?

There may be no more powerful hidden idea about God than the conclusion that He is not actually good. All we need to do is open a news site, walk through a hospital, speak with someone enduring abuse, or sit beside a grieving parent to understand why that idea forms.

The biblical story nevertheless begins with a God who joyfully pronounces His creation good. He calls the sun, moon, stars, animals, birds, fish, land, and seas good. When He creates human beings, He reaches for a superlative and pronounces them very good.

Then, in a striking contrast to many other ancient creation stories, God invites human beings to participate with Him in caring for and governing the world. Creation is good, humanity is very good, and God desires to dwell with His beloved co-rulers as they steward this grand project called Earth together.

It takes only three chapters for the project to fracture. Humanity decides that we would prefer to rule creation without God, thank you very much, and the story deteriorates rapidly.

The remainder of Scripture tells the story of God continually working to dwell with us again despite our stubborn resistance. It reveals His relentless desire to love us, to be loved by us, and to restore what human rebellion has shattered.

The biblical story eventually reaches a beautiful ending, or perhaps a new beginning, where God and humanity live together again. Yet we remain in the mushy, messy middle, a part of the story still distorted by harmful ideas, destructive desires, suffering, disease, abuse, injustice, and death.

It is within this middle that our hearts ask whether God is really good.

The Problem Is Not Merely Intellectual

Thousands of pages have been written about the problem of evil. Theologians and philosophers have offered thoughtful accounts of how God’s goodness can coexist with suffering and how goodness is slowly and inevitably overcoming evil.

Those arguments are worth studying. Many have helped me tremendously.

Our focus here, however, is not primarily the intellectual problem. We are exploring hidden ideas, those mysterious experiential realities buried beneath our stated beliefs.

What happens when the mind accepts that God is good while the heart concludes otherwise? What do we do when theology provides an answer that suffering has made emotionally unbelievable?

Jack could probably explain several traditional Christian responses to evil. Information was not his primary problem. His heart had absorbed years of suffering and formed the idea that a good God would not allow what Jack had witnessed.

A theological argument may answer the mind while leaving the wounded heart untouched.

Goodness Does Not Mean the Absence of Pain

Questioning God’s goodness may be a necessary step into deeper faith, particularly when someone inhabits a community that welcomes honesty, vulnerability, and difficult questions.

I have become somewhat suspicious of effortless claims about God’s goodness from people who have never passed through a crucible of suffering. C. S. Lewis once observed:

“What do people mean when they say, ‘I am not afraid of God because I know He is good’? Have they never even been to a dentist?”

Lewis’s humor reveals an important distinction. Goodness does not necessarily mean the absence of pain, suffering, discipline, loss, or even encounters with evil.

If we define goodness in a working sense as seeking the flourishing of another, then discomfort may sometimes become part of goodness. Parents understand this rather quickly, particularly those who have raised teenagers.

A good parent does not prevent every consequence, remove every difficulty, or arrange a life free from pain. They seek the child’s ultimate flourishing, which may occasionally require boundaries, disappointment, struggle, patience, and painful growth.

That observation does not solve the problem of evil, nor does it explain every tragedy. It simply reminds us that comfort and goodness are not identical.

When My Heart Questioned God’s Goodness

I can write about this hidden idea because I have lived it.

When I became ill in late 2023, I experienced unexplained periods of severe anxiety and debilitating depression. We later discovered that bacterial infections had drastically depleted my vitamin D and testosterone, producing a range of mental, emotional, and physical challenges.

There were many mornings when I woke feeling weak, depleted, and hopeless. I often found myself looking forward to what seemed like the best part of the day, the moment when I would finally become unconscious in sleep.

The illness arrived after significant personal and professional upheaval, creating what Jessica and I have experienced as an extended and unfair season in the wilderness. It felt as though one loss had barely settled before another arrived.

Someone could have quoted Romans 8:28 to me every morning, and it would not have made much difference.

My head knew that God was good.

My heart was living in another reality.

Faith Is Forged in Hotter Fires

Whatever form our suffering takes, it is normal and even healthy to ask God how His goodness relates to our individual and cultural pain.

Some Christian traditions become uneasy with such raw dialogue. Honest anger, doubt, confusion, or lament may be interpreted as weak faith or a lack of confidence in God.

Perhaps those traditions would need to take issue with much of Scripture.

The Psalms repeatedly ask why God appears absent, how long suffering will continue, and whether He has forgotten His people. Ecclesiastes refuses simplistic explanations. Jacob wrestles. Job protests. Jeremiah complains. Even Jesus cries out in abandonment.

Faith and confidence are often forged in fires considerably hotter than Sunday sermons and small-group discussions.

Honest questions do not necessarily reveal the absence of faith. They may reveal a relationship sturdy enough to hold the truth.

The First Step Is Uncovering the Idea

There appear to be two essential movements in responding to the hidden idea that God is not good.

The first is discovering whether the idea actually operates within us.

Are we living from a deep and experienced trust in God’s goodness, or do the indicators of our hearts tell another story? Do our thought patterns reveal constant fear? Do our emotions expose resentment or despair? Do our words, relationships, behaviors, and use of time and money suggest that we believe everything depends upon us?

Perhaps our need for control reveals that we do not trust God to seek our good. Perhaps chronic anxiety suggests that His care does not feel reliable. Perhaps our anger hides the conclusion that He failed to protect us.

This kind of self-examination should not become an exercise in condemnation. The discovery that our hearts question God’s goodness may be one of His gentle invitations toward greater freedom.

At Soil & Roots, we use the Eight Indicators of Heartview to notice what the hidden life may be revealing. The goal is not to judge the heart but to listen to it honestly with Jesus.

Information Alone Will Not Heal the Idea

The second movement is accepting that healing this idea will require more than additional information.

Reading Scripture and listening to wise teaching about God’s goodness can be deeply helpful. Our minds need truth, context, and language.

But the head learns primarily through information, while the heart learns through relationships and experience.

If the idea that God is not good was formed through suffering, abandonment, abuse, illness, betrayal, or unanswered prayer, then simply repeating the phrase “God is good” may not transform it.

The heart may require repeated experiences that slowly make His goodness believable again.

This is the tension between information and transformation. Instruction matters enormously, but the heart often needs to experience what the mind already knows.

What If Goodness Is Presence?

If our hearts question God’s goodness, how might He invite us into relationships and experiences that gently heal the idea?

What encounters with Him, other people, ourselves, or creation might remind our hearts of His goodness even while suffering continues?

What if goodness is not primarily the absence of difficult circumstances?

What if goodness is presence?

This returns us to one of the central themes in our journey toward depth: withness, the power of someone being genuinely and attentively present with us.

Presence does not remove the pain. It transforms the way pain is carried.

The Friends Who Stayed

People who experience long-term illness often discover that the friends with whom they began are not necessarily the friends with whom they finish.

That has been true in my life.

People who knew me as productive, proactive, capable, and useful eventually discovered that they did not know what to do with me in a weakened condition. When I could no longer provide the energy, influence, work, or help they had grown accustomed to receiving, some of them quietly moved toward more useful people.

New friends entered my life for entirely different reasons.

They were not interested in what I could accomplish for them. They cared because I existed.

They sat with me in suffering without offering endless advice or trying to fix what they could not fix. They showed up repeatedly because they understood that the illness might or might not disappear and that presence was a deeper and more powerful gift than explanation.

These friends became, in profoundly formative ways, an expression of God to me.

They were with me because God is with me.

Immanuel.

God With Us

God’s desire to dwell with human beings is one of the central themes of the biblical story. From the garden to the tabernacle, from the temple to the Incarnation, and from the Spirit’s presence to the garden city, God repeatedly moves toward us.

He does not love us only when we are healthy, productive, capable, cheerful, useful, or spiritually impressive. He desires to be with us because we exist and because we are His.

We often experience God’s character through people who remain attentive and loving when circumstances do not improve.

Their presence does not answer every theological question. It gives the heart another reality to experience.

God is still here.

I am not alone.

My value has not disappeared with my usefulness.

How Jack’s Family Responded

When Jack publicly deconstructed, his legalistic family responded by humiliating and ridiculing him.

They questioned whether he had ever possessed genuine faith. They argued against his new positions, challenged his intelligence, and portrayed his conclusions as foolish.

As we might expect, their response strengthened the very idea they hoped to correct.

Jack had concluded that God was not good. His family then represented God through condemnation, shame, argument, and relational rejection.

Their instruction claimed that God was good while their behavior communicated something else.

I often wonder what might have happened if some family members and friends had gathered around Jack, listened without panic, and remained with him as he worked through understandable grief and anger.

What might have happened if, month after month, they had allowed him to speak without needing to win an argument? What if they had wept with him over the children he lost and acknowledged that his questions made sense?

What might have happened if those closest to Jack had embodied God’s withness?

Arguments May Not Reach a Wounded Heart

Jack’s family assumed that his problem was intellectual error. Their solution was better arguments, stronger correction, and pressure to return to the proper beliefs.

But the heart does not always heal through debate.

Jack had not merely adopted a flawed proposition. He had been formed through years of trauma, helplessness, grief, and unanswered questions.

His heart needed people capable of entering that experience with him.

This does not mean agreeing with every conclusion or pretending that beliefs do not matter. It means recognizing that truth is often most deeply received when it is embodied in loving presence.

Before Jack could reconsider whether God was good, he may have needed to experience goodness from the people who claimed to represent Him.

Is God Good When Suffering Continues?

The question becomes especially difficult when suffering does not end.

It is easier to proclaim God’s goodness when the illness resolves, the job returns, the marriage heals, the child comes home, or the prayer receives the answer we wanted.

What happens when none of those things occurs?

Perhaps the Good Life with God does not mean that every circumstance becomes good. It means that we increasingly discover the presence of God in the middle of reality.

The with-God life allows suffering and goodness to exist in the same story. Pain remains pain, grief remains grief, and evil remains evil, but they no longer possess the final word.

This is not an intellectual trick or an attempt to make tragedy acceptable. It is the slow formation of a heart that discovers it is accompanied.

The Goodness of Creation

God may also remind us of His goodness through creation, His second book.

Beauty persists in a broken world. Morning light enters a room. A breeze moves through trees. A dog places its head in a grieving person’s lap. Flowers emerge from soil that appeared lifeless.

None of these experiences explains why terrible things happen.

They do, however, resist the conclusion that darkness is the whole story.

Creation remains wounded and good at the same time. It groans, but it also sings.

Our ability to notice beauty may diminish during suffering, and no one should pressure a grieving person to appreciate a sunset as though it resolves their pain. Yet over time, beauty may become one of God’s gentle overtures, reminding the heart that goodness has not vanished entirely.

The Goodness We Experience Through Others

We also experience God’s goodness when another human being seeks our flourishing.

A friend listens without rushing us. A spouse remains through illness. A community provides meals without demanding gratitude. A counselor helps us name the truth. Someone remembers an anniversary everyone else forgot.

These actions may appear ordinary, but they carry extraordinary formative power.

The heart that has concluded God is indifferent begins experiencing care. The person who expects abandonment experiences someone staying. The one whose value depended upon performance discovers affection without usefulness.

God’s goodness becomes embodied.

This is one reason deep Christian community is so difficult and necessary. Hearts are often healed through long-term relationships in which people repeatedly seek one another’s good.

The Invitation to Honest Trust

The goal is not to force ourselves to declare God good while suppressing everything in us that protests.

That is not trust. It is disintegration.

The invitation is to bring our actual experience into relationship with God. We can acknowledge that our minds believe one thing while our hearts struggle with another.

We can pray honestly: “I believe You are good, but my suffering has made Your goodness difficult to experience. Would You meet me here?”

This is an act of courageous curiosity, not rebellion. It allows us to explore what has shaped the heart without condemning ourselves for being human.

Trust grows as the hidden life becomes known, received, and slowly re-formed.

Is God Good?

The question “Is God good?” cannot be resolved by a slogan alone.

It must be wrestled with inside the realities of illness, grief, abuse, loss, betrayal, injustice, disappointment, beauty, friendship, Scripture, creation, and the presence of God.

Our minds need thoughtful theology. Our hearts also need relationships and experiences capable of making goodness believable.

God may not answer every question on our preferred timetable. He may not remove every form of suffering or explain every loss.

But He is with us.

Sometimes, His goodness arrives through a friend who stays when we are no longer useful. Sometimes it appears through beauty that refuses to disappear. Sometimes it is experienced in the courage to tell Him that we are angry and discover that He has not left.

The journey toward depth does not require us to pretend that suffering feels good.

It invites us to discover that suffering does not mean goodness is absent.

Duc in altum.

Explore Further

When Our Beliefs About God Conflict With Our Experience

Why Presence Is Essential to Spiritual Formation

Courageous Curiosity as a Spiritual Practice

Why Suffering Is Central to Spiritual Formation