There is grave danger in misunderstanding the goodness of God. Unless we have a good working understanding of the goodness of God, we may unwittingly fall into a type of devil-worship. The problem, ironically, simply comes from a misinterpretation of a perfectly valid, and, in fact, very important truth realization.
We have a dilemma that follows any contemplation of the goodness of God. The dilemma arises out of a single stem, that of God’s wisdom. It basically states that because God is so much wiser than we are, his judgment must differ from ours, including judgment of goodness and evil. Therefore, goodness as we perceive it may be utterly different from goodness as God defines it, and evil as we perceive it may be utterly different from evil as God defines it. Because of this difference in moral judgment, it follows that we should not say “God is good.” If we say that goodness is totally different in our minds than in God’s, we cannot say that God is good. That is a clearly self-contradicting statement. If we don’t know anything about that attribute of God, how can we form any basis for loving and following it?
The devil-worship comes in when we accept the doctrine of hyper-total depravity. If humans are literally totally depraved, then their perception of good and evil must be corrupted, and useless. The reason that the result can be considered devil worship is because once our perception of good is thrown out, we must pursue things which are completely contrary to it. In other words, we will turn to things that we actually perceive to be evil. That is a huge danger, and the reason why it is crucial to eliminate the confusion by thoroughly understanding the true nature of God’s goodness.
