Knowing God: Experience & Love Him

The Goodness of God (Psalm 31:19)

Assured that all our Lord’s requests
and plans are good.

Paul J. Bucknell

Series Introduction| Knowing God | The Revelatory God | Goodness of God | Holiness of God

Goodness of God handout pdf | Video

Life Questions | Genesis 1 & Goodness | Other Scripture & Goodness | Two Worldviews of Self | Difficulties Believing | Satan's Tactics | Handling Evil | Power of Goodness | Psalms 31:9 | Distinctive of God's Goodness | Good, Evil and God | Study Questions & Projects

Genesis 1 and God's Goodness

Purpose: Genesis 1 clearly shows us how God wants us to rightly understand Him to be a good God. This study begins the first major section on the Goodness of God.

God is Good

As we draw close to the Lord, we are better able to understand His purposes for our lives, rather than being caught up with living in the world. As we pause before Him, we can discover what God wants to do through our lives.

The purposes He has for us are largely shaped by His person and desires. Our chief drive in life, then, becomes a quest to know God so that we can know and accomplish what He wants from my life. My deepest joys come from knowing Him.

This study of God’s character is our small attempt to catch a glimpse of what Moses saw and knew when he was called up to the top of Mount Sinai. Having seen God, we then know how to better please Him (also see Lesson #2 The Self-revelation of God).

A Genesis study

Genesis is our first place to discover what God says about Himself. What main lessons do we learn from God about Himself in the first chapter of Genesis?



When the Lord designed the world, it was indeed good. He kept repeating the phrase, ‘It was good.’ And when He came to the creation of man and woman, He stated, “It was very good.”

What can we learn from this? God wants us to understand from His works that He is truly good. He gives us plenty of occasion to discover His goodness by the things He made around us. Even though the created world is marred by sin, we still marvel at its glorious scenes. Don’t we thoroughly enjoy a walk by a creek?

How does God’s introduction in chapter one of Genesis differ from how you think God should introduce Himself? Note that He did not say He was loving, kind, wrathful, powerful, omnipresent, etc.

These are often in our mind when we think of God, but He spoke more of how good everything was, relating to us that He was intent in bringing blessing into our lives.

His power was certainly implicit in His ability to create the world, but God clearly did not want us to miss this message. This is perhaps because later in Genesis 3 we find Satan already tinkering with the human’s mind and undermining their faith and trust in the goodness of God.

Next page => A Psalms study

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Biblical Foundations for Freedom ( BFF )

Rev. Paul J. Bucknell