God is good. So many people struggle with this, they struggle to reconcile the God of the old testament with the God of the new. The revelation that God is good and that He is in a good mood was very life changing for me. To see Him with a smile on His face every time I approach Him and every time I read the bible has just increased my desire to know Him more, to love Him more and to be living in His perfect will.

The old testament often trips us up when we are thinking of God as a good God, but I choose to see the times that God showed up time and time again to redeem His people.

Then the Lord came down in the cloud and stood there with him and proclaimed his name, the Lord. And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.” Exodus 34:5-7

This is the perfect example of Gods goodness, He reveals himself to Moses in the midst of his chaos. Moses had cried out to Him and the Lord answered him. God reveals His goodness to Moses, God is compassionate, gracious and slow to anger, He abounds in love and faithfulness and He loves and forgives us when we rebel or when we have sinned. The guilty will have to live with the consequences of their sin but He still loves and still forgives.

Choose to look for Gods goodness in the chaos. Even in the old testament God was still good it is just that we always tend to focus on all the negative things and not on the positive things that are happening. We need to not focus on the punishment they received but on His goodness.

We get hung up on that last line… “he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation”.

But instead we should be hung up, zeroed in and placing all our focus and attention on the fact that… “the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin”

God wants us to know that we will have to live with the consequences from the choices we make but more importantly is that He wants us to know that He is good. Always.