This series is a theological / spiritual commentary on Psalm 107. I don’t pretend to have great expertise in critical Biblical studies, which I find incredibly valuable, but this is an exercise in theological and spiritual exegesis.
Good.
Psalm 107 opens with a familiar refrain:
Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good;
his love endures forever.
This is the most basic statement of God’s character in scripture. The LORD is “good.” The word “good” in this text is the same word used for the creation in Genesis 1. This tells us much about what it means to say that God is “good.”
Water and sky, land and trees, fish and birds, are “good.” These things nurture and sustain us. They are life. Without them, we shrivel and die, we cease to be. Our human being itself is “very good” (Gen. 1:27-31). God is “good” as life itself is “good.”
The word “as” in this sentence suggests that this is an analogy. When theologians speak about “analogy” we mean that because God is truly God, we can say nothing that fully measures or contains Him. To say God is “good” as trees and water and birds are “good” is not to limit God to the “goodness” of those created things. Rather, it is to say that if we imagine the highest “good” of any of those things, we must try to imagine it infinitely more so when we try to think of God. If water gives quenches our thirst, sustains our bodies, and revives our spirits, how much more does God do the same? If a lack of water causes us to shrivel and die, how much more does a lack of God do the same?
Of course, we cannot truly understand the “infinite,” so to say that God sustains us infinitely more than water is already to admit that the excess of God’s “goodness” over that of creation is itself something our human minds cannot contain. “The LORD is good” therefore is no modest claim. Is it a claim we can truly learn to trust?
Photo Source: Terry Ratcliff / Flickr (Creative Commons)