The Goodness of God
“The fear of the will of God is one of the strangest beliefs the human mind has ever made…The very fact that the Will of God, which is what you are, is perceived as fearful, demonstrates that you are afraid of what you are.
What seems to be the fear of God is really the fear of your own reality”
ACIM 9.I.1.4; 2.2
There is a colloquialism used often when things don’t seem to be going well – ”Its’ all good.”– I’ve even heard atheists say this. Yet Goodness is the main adjective—besides love— used by people who try to describe God to us. Pretty much all theologies will tell us God is Love and of course Love would include Goodness.
What am I trying to say?
I am trying to say ALL IS GOOD. The totality of the world we live in is Good and that what we consider not good does not exist.
In the world of form, the wold of duality, the world of good and evil, the world of perception and subjectivity All is not good. In the world of subjectivity and perception what I like is “good” and what I don’t like is “bad” or “evil”. Our subjective world is the drama between good and evil, heaven and hell, sin and salvation etc. We only see the world we made not the world God made.
In the world of non-duality only God exists, so how we define God will of course color or vision. If God is omnipresent as most theologies consider her, how we see her is how we see the world. If evil exists then evil must exist within her as well as good. If hell exists then hell must also exist within her. “Hell has no fury like that of a scorned woman.”
One time I saw a televangelist attempt to explain the existence of hell within the context of an Omnipresent Good God. He drew a circle representing God then drew another much smaller circle outside of that then connected the two via a slim tube-shaped structure as if there was somewhere outside of the Omnipresent God that could have “room” for another “place” that God needed to be connected to. But of course Omnipresent leaves no room for any “outside”. “Outside” of an omnipresent God has no meaning.
Does Good include evil? Does Good include pain, suffering, death, victimization and bullying? Can we turn to a God who is Good as a refuge from pain, suffering, death, victimization and bullying if his Goodness includes the very things we are trying to escape? If evil is a part of God how can he protect me from Himself? The threat would always be present in my mind that if I did not behave I would be punished by her.
“You must not put up umbrellas against things which do not exist.Umbrellas are a burden in pleasant weather. By this I mean, if God is your world, what have you to fear? So your fears are a burden. Belief that I have made a mistake terrifies me. Belief that you have made a mistake terrifies you. And so with all the world. If now we are told so strongly that it takes effect in our blood and our bones, and if we are convinced that it is true that we never could make any mistake, then our fear is gone.”
SCMP by Emma Curtis Hopkins pg 182
As A Course in Miracles says in the Introduction; “The opposite of Love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite.”
Well these are some basic thoughts I will explore in more detail in further blogs.
God is Good 