Is God really good all the time?

In the middle of a trial I was going through, the Lord spoke to me and said "Thank you for standing for My goodness."  This surprised me because in the midst of the trial I hadn't always felt like I stood for His goodness but more that I had doubted His goodness.  At times I had given the enemy permission to beat me up with my falling into doubts about God's goodness and His good purpose in the midst of what I was going through.  I have been impacted by the life of Moses and especially his intimacy with God.  A prayer Moses prayed from Exodus 33 has rung in my heart and that is "show me your glory.", this was in the midst of Israel being drawn to seek God for His blessings and not His Presence.  Through Moses personal revival and encounter with God, the nation of Israel is led back to worshipping God.  God responds to Moses prayer in Exodus 33:19, "Then He said, “I will make all My goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim the name of the LORD before you. I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.”  So Moses prayer to be shown the glory of God was answered by God giving Moses a revelation of His goodness.  So can we see the manifest glory of God without a revelation of His goodness?  God had recently spoken to our church staff and to me personally about the importance of us knowing and experiencing His goodness in this season.  As I began to study about God's goodness I was struck by an author's comments (Gloria Copeland), "Until you settle the fact that God is good and you can trust Him with your life, your faith is never going to be great because you will always draw back in fear. You will always be thinking, What if He doesn't come through for me? What if He is not listening to me? What if He asks me to do something that will harm me in some way?"  Gloria Copeland also says about God's goodness, "Because it is the foundation of our faith in Him.  In her writings she also says that this theme of God's goodness is not simply mentioned in the Bible but a consistent theme from Genesis to Revelation.  We can have some revelation of Father's love for us but it is incomplete without understanding His goodness.  Often throughout the Psalms David talks about God's hesed, which is His lovingkindness but this is often spoken of with His goodness.  If we truly believed that God was good all of the time and that we were recipients of His goodness, then we would be confident God would not hurt us, let us down, or abandon us.  This would result in us trusting Him with every area of our lives.  I am convinced that a lack of revelation of God's nature as good results in much of our turning to our own way as orphans, rather than finding rest in the loving arms of our Father.  Moses cried out for a greater revelation of God than he had, in order to move into the Promise Land but truly into revival.  It is one thing to see and experience God's blessings in your life but a revelation of His goodness moves us from an orphan heart into a place of trusting God as a Father who will care for us love us and meet our deepest needs.  I realized though I have had some revelation of Father's love there are still places in my heart where I do not truly know His goodness and so there is mistrust.  I believe our Heavenly Father is the Father of lights (James 1:17) and since there is no variation or shadow in Him, this means that there is no darkness.  Father is so good and brilliant that He shines even when there are dark or hidden places in us, He is no afraid of our darkness because He is Light (1 John 1:5).  The Father has been revealing Himself to me as pure, warm, good, and unrelenting light.  I believe this revelation comes as I open up areas of my heart that have been in the dark, like little boys who have been locked away in dark rooms.  I believe we in the Body of Christ, need a revelation of His goodness toward us, that we may be come a revelation of this same goodness to the world.

In His Goodness,
Bret