Thoughts On God's Goodness

I am posting some thoughts I posted to a bulletin board over at The Ooze. It was reccomended to me by a fellow named Calvin I met at camp this weekend.

My thoughts are in response to the entire thread called "I Can't See How God Is Good" but most importantly this quote,

"Often I can't even experience love because my fallenness is so heavy upon me."

Here is my response:

I think this is the crux of the entire thread. One camp argues that God can not be good because he allowed evil in the world. He allowed the fall and therefore since I am fallen I can not "experience love" and therefore God can not be good.

Allow me to reword and you tell me if my rewording is valid. "God made me to love, and to desire love, yet I can not experience what I was made by him to experience, therefore he is not good."

I am in the other camp. The camp that says God is good because by the power of incarnation I can be RESTORED to the ability to love again. The incarnation is about FREEDOM.

I beleive we all agree that we were created for Love, Life, and Peace. We were givent the choice to choose these things we were created for, or to choose to our own desires.

The choice of the Fall unilatterally destroyed all three of the reasons we were created for. Now we had the result which was fear, seperation, and death. We call the results of dealing with these consequences evil. They are not evil, instead they are as the old cliche goes, "the abscence of God"

Now in the act of incarnation, culminating at the events of the cross God proved his own goodness in choosing to experience fear, seperation, and death himself so that we could be restored to the freedoms that we were created for, which were Love, Life, and Peace.

The alternative here is not a God who did not allow evil, instead it is a God who did not allow free will. Since God did allow freewill his goodness is not proved by the lack of evil, but instead by the gift of incarnation.