What God creates is good

The church where Timothy was working had a problem that threatened its stability and growth. Some fundamentalists were stirring up the group with false teaching about how to live the Christian life. Paul calls them “hypocritical liars” with consciences “seared as with a hot iron” (1 Tim. 4:2). They taught that it was wrong to marry and that there were a number of foods that believers shouldn’t eat. “Not so,” exclaimed Paul. “Everything that God has created is good and should be welcomed with prayer and thanksgiving” (v. 4). God was responsible for the various foods that the fundamentalists were forbidding so they could be nothing but good. What God does is, by definition, good. He’s a good God! What the legalists were excluding should not be rejected by Christians; it is holy and to be received with a prayer of thanksgiving (v. 5). God doesn’t create things that serve no purpose. He doesn’t need someone to approve of what he does. No middleman has to inspect his creation and okay it for the human race.
       That picture reminds me of the self-appointed opinion makers on TV who announce what the one in charge of the welfare of the nation should or should not have done, said or thought on every known subject. Every comment is delivered as though the speaker was a qualified expert who had studied all the relevant data. Modesty would call for each pronouncement to begin with something like ”It is my opinion that . . . “ Error loves to appear as an expert. It was no different in Ephesus. Can’t you see the stern faces of the self-appointed legalists telling the group, “No, you may not eat that carrot! Don’t you know that carrot-eaters are on their way to hell!”
       That God is good is a basic truth. What we call goodness is good because God made it that way. In his goodness he spoke our universe into existence with the desire that we, as a part of that creation, would live in a way that would display his goodness. It was our disobedience, begun with Adam and perpetuated by each of us, that cast the dark cloud over our world. So, today let’s rejoice in the goodness of God who provided us with all that we need and much more. Some foods may upset your stomach but no food will ever make you unclean in God’s sight. Let’s thank him for his inexhaustible supply of the good.  
       I wonder what Paul might have said in that context about marrying? Well not really because elsewhere in Scripture we have that spelled out. (Read 1 Corinthians 7:1-16 for instructions on married life and vv. 25– 40 for how the unmarried should conduct themselves. Putting man and woman together for a loving relationship and the propagation of the next generation was a very good thing for him to have done. Wouldn’t you agree?