There’s no denying the fact that God intentionally withholds information from us. Instead of defending specific decisions, He justifies all of His behavior with the general claim that He is good and perfect and does all things well. God operates on a “the ends justifies the means” basis, and He is the only One authorized to do so. Human beings are not allowed to operate by this principle—if we attempt to do wrong to do right, we are held morally accountable for the wrong. We are bound to the laws God makes, while He is bound by nothing and does whatever He pleases. Where then is our assurance that God won’t run amuck and cross some inappropriate line? God’s perfect character is the only guarantee He offers. Because God is good, everything He does and allows is good by definition.

We might not like the way God operates, but we can’t do anything to change it. Being close to God requires absolute submission to His authority and that means accepting all of His decisions. God is quite clear in the Bible that He constantly does wrong to do right. During the graphic fall of Jerusalem, He called a sadistic army in to rape, torture and kill His chosen people and then He declared the whole thing to be a display of righteous judgment. We struggle with this because we don’t see any positive outcome, we only see the horror in the moment. Yet when we read about another Man getting publicly degraded and tortured to death, tears of gratitude well in our eyes for we know His death brought about the salvation of the entire human race. The cross is rare in that it is one case in which God really gives us a bigger glimpse of the good end result of His using evil. As much as we hate the suffering Jesus had to endure, we would never wish it away for it was that very suffering which saved us. When we compare the suffering of the cross to the good that came out of it, it’s obvious which is greater. And so it is every time God employs evil methods in this world: the final resulting good is exponentially greater. At some point, we must take His word for this.