Reflection - Does Everything Work for Good?

By Rev Dr Clive W Ayre

Does everything really work for good for those who love God? How do we square our experiences of lived reality with the sometimes glibly quoted text, “that all things work together for good”? The Revised English Bible is arguably closest to the original when it says, and in everything, as we know, he cooperates for good with those who love God and are called according to his purpose. The difference is important, even if rather subtle. It is a question of whether we say, “All things work together for good….”, or “In everything God works for good….”

Grief in the face of deep personal loss is a normal process, and one that is of critical importance if we are to regain personal emotional health. God is not honoured, and we are not helped by a denial of our human feelings. So right at the outset it is important to affirm that faith does not call for the suspension of our normal judgment of what is good or bad. Remember the story of Job. We don’t have to persuade ourselves that bad things are somehow good, or that our God does bad things to us. Where this is leading is to an understanding of who God is, of God’s nature, and therefore of the kind of relationship we have with God, which helps us to deal with our experiences, including our traumas.

The evidence of the Bible is that God, in infinite love, wills only good for us. Paul reminds us that We are more than conquerors through him who loved us. This is the bold affirmation that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. This is the transforming relationship that helps us to see our life’s traumas in a new and positive perspective. Left to our own devices, as Ferris says, “suffering is more likely to harden and embitter than it is to ennoble and dignify.” But when we live in relationship with God, a whole new attitude becomes possible.

But let me be quite personal. I have never thanked God for the curse of alcoholism that killed my father at the age of 53. It was the personal tragedy of a brilliant man; it wrecked my parents’ marriage, and generally made a mess of three young lives. None of that was God’s doing. But God was at work in that painful process. I thank God that out of that situation I have been able to understand both the dangers of alcohol abuse, and some of the deep issues that drive people to such abuse. I thank God that I have wanted to make my own marriage something of richness and beauty that my parents’ marriage never was, or that I am better able than I might have been to feel the hurt and pain of others. And that, I believe, is essentially what this text is saying to us – that in our experience we can know that God inter-mingles all things for good, with those who love him and are called according to his purpose.

The key is not in what happens to us, but in what we do with what happens to us; faith opens up pathways of fresh possibilities under God.