God is Good

I say God is good.

The veil was torn top to bottom,

The thickness of sin and the separation from God

Obliterated

With that final breath.

I say God is good.

Why do you call me ‘good’? For no one is good except God alone.

I have no good apart from you.

I say God is good.

The testimony is my lungs,

Expanding as they inhale another grace-given breath,

And my eyes, still blinking, still seeing, opening this morning,

Ready to close again, to open again,

My heart, beating away,

I’m alive.

I say God is good.

The promise is in the fierce and firm belief that death

Has no hold

Over me.

For, sick with sin, I was drowning, I was dying with every breath,

Seeing but the dullness of the created world, but the fallenness,

Only the lies and nothing of truth,

For I had blinded my eyes to it, longing only for darkness.

Sinner. Wretched, filthy, hopeless sinner, your justice has come.

In that very justice, in that very judgment of sin,

I say that God is good.

For without judgment, sin reigns on,

But I am sick of it. I am sick of the darkness,

I am sick of the spots and blemishes, the imperfect, rotting souls,

I am sick of living half-alive.

And so justice must be done.

I must die to pay the debt I owe, for I have sinned against God and against man.

Yet I stood in the courtroom and I closed my eyes and waited for the sentence to be spoken,

For the axe to fall,

But it never came and when I opened my eyes I saw before me a Lamb standing,

As though it had been slain, and as though it had risen again,

Reaching out pierced hands, saying, “Touch me,

Your redemption has come.

I have paid in full.”

So I say God is good.

Not good like the person I thought that I was,

But holy and true and perfect and righteous,

Just and gracious and merciful and wrathful and beautiful,

Pure and faithful and patient and good.

And eyes washed with His spit, I finally see,

Hands washed with His blood I am finally clean,

By His wounds, I am finally free.

So I can say, with the multitude, with the host of heaven,

By the power of the one true God, the Creator of the Heavens and the Earth and all that is within them,

The Author and Perfector of our Faith,

The Prince of Peace, the Everlasting Father,

The Holy One, Jehovah Jireh,

The Perfect Lamb of God,

This God is good.