Despising God's Goodness?

The Goodness That Leads Us Home

There is a question buried deep in Romans chapter 2 that has the power to stop a person cold if they let it settle long enough. It is not a comfortable question. It does not flatter us. But it is one of the most important questions a human being can sit with: Do we despise the goodness of God without even realizing it?

Paul writes to the church at Rome with a kind of urgency that cuts through centuries and lands squarely in the present moment. He has just finished cataloguing the full weight of human failure — envy, pride, deceit, disobedience, malice, and more — and then he turns the corner into chapter 2 with a single, devastating word: therefore. Because of all of that, he says, you are inexcusable.

Empty your pockets of every excuse. There are none that will hold.

We Are All on the Same List

Before we can understand the goodness of God, we have to reckon honestly with where we stand. Romans 1 does not describe a category of people we can comfortably point to from a safe distance. It describes the full spectrum of human brokenness, and there is something on that list for every one of us. We are guilty. We are broken. And that shared guilt is precisely what makes judgment of others so spiritually dangerous.

Paul is not talking about discernment here. Spiritual discernment is a gift, and the scriptures call us to exercise it. What Paul is addressing is something far more subtle and far more corrosive. It is the posture of the heart that looks at another person — at who they are, what they have done, where they have been — and quietly withdraws the love of God from them. It does not have to be loud. It does not have to be visible. It happens in the heart, and God sees it there.

The standard Paul sets is high: there is no justification for treating any image-bearer of God with less than the love that has been shown to us. And when we measure ourselves honestly against that standard, we find we are not standing on solid ground.

The Danger of Thinking You Have Arrived

Paul reinforces this point by taking his readers back to the Israelites in the wilderness, drawing on the account found in 1 Corinthians chapter 10. Everyone came out of Egypt. Everyone passed through the Red Sea. Everyone ate the same spiritual food and drank from the same spiritual rock. No one had a different starting point. No one earned a superior position.

And yet, with many of them, God was not pleased. Why? Because they forgot. They looked back. They rebelled. They convinced themselves that what they had before was better than what God was providing.

Paul's warning is direct: let the one who thinks he stands take heed, lest he fall. There is a particular kind of spiritual vulnerability that comes with seasons of faithfulness. When things are going well, when we are reading the Word and serving and witnessing, something subtle can shift. We can begin to think that we are something. And the moment we begin to think we are something is often the moment we are closest to a fall.

This is not a call to false humility or to denying the work God does in a life. It is a call to remember where we came from and who gets the credit.

Judgment Belongs to God Alone

Romans 2 is clear: the judgment of God is according to truth. Psalm 9 echoes this — the Lord endures forever, his throne is prepared for judgment, and he judges the world in righteousness. He is the only one qualified to judge, because he is the only one who judges according to perfect truth. We judge according to incomplete information, personal bias, and our own unexamined sin. God judges according to his Word, which is truth.

This should produce humility in us. Proverbs 5 reminds us that the ways of a man are before the eyes of the Lord, and that he considers every motive. Motives matter to God. Why we do what we do matters as much as what we do.

The Father Who Runs

Nowhere is the goodness of God more vividly displayed than in the story recorded in Luke chapter 15. A younger son demands his inheritance, wastes it in reckless living, and finds himself starving in a distant country, feeding pigs and settling to eat what they were eating. And then something shifts. He comes to himself. What enters his mind is not fear of punishment. What enters his mind is the goodness of his father.

That memory of goodness is what moves him. He rises, rehearses his speech of repentance, and begins the long walk home. But before he arrives, his father sees him at a great distance and runs to meet him. There is no lecture. There is no waiting period. There is a robe, a ring, shoes, and a celebration, because the son who was dead is alive again.

This is the goodness of God. This is what Romans 2 verse 4 is pointing to when it says that the goodness of God leads us to repentance. It is not the threat of punishment that draws a broken person back. It is the memory of how good the Father is.

But the parable does not end there. The older son, who has been in the field working faithfully, hears the music and refuses to go in. He is angry. He catalogs his own faithfulness and resents the celebration. And the father goes out to him too, with the same tenderness. The question the story leaves hanging in the air is whether the older son ever walks through the door.

That question is for us.

Running Toward, Not Away

The goodness of God is not passive. It pursues. It runs. It goes out to both sons. The only question is whether we will receive it, and whether we will let it shape the way we see the people around us.

Whatever pig pen you may find yourself in today, whatever distance has grown between you and the Father, the goodness of God is still running after you. And whatever posture of judgment or resentment may have settled into your heart toward someone else, the Father is standing at the door of that too, gently asking you to come inside.