Kootenai Church Morning Worship

Jim Osman continues his exposition of Psalm 145 by turning from God's greatness to His goodness, and he starts by defining terms. What does it actually mean to call God good, given how loosely English uses that word for everything from pizza to a football game? Osman works through the Hebrew range of the term before landing on a fuller definition: God is the perfect sum, source, and standard of all that is wholesome, virtuous, beneficial, and beautiful, a goodness that is entirely underived and infinite.

From there he walks through the three aspects of that goodness David lays out in verses 7 through 9. In verse 7, God's goodness is abundant in measure, pouring forth in a way David describes as continual and uncontrollable, like a bubbling spring. In verse 8, His goodness is gracious in character, and Osman traces this verse straight back to God's self-revelation to Moses in Exodus 34, tying David's language to one of the most quoted descriptions of God in the entire Old Testament. In verse 9, that goodness is universal in scope, extending even to the wicked, though Osman is careful to distinguish, quoting J.I. Packer, that God is good to all men in some ways and to some men in all ways.

The message closes by confronting a hard question directly: how God's judgment of sinners fits with His goodness rather than contradicting it, and why believers will spend eternity praising Him for both.