As I get ready for church this morning, I am still thinking about the vast difference between the God presented by Calvinism and the God revealed in Scripture. The Calvinist conception of God demands awe and fear primarily because His sovereign will must be fulfilled and because whatever He decrees must, by definition, be called good, even when it appears evil, cruel, or morally abhorrent. His purposes may never be questioned, His character may never be evaluated by the goodness He has revealed about Himself. We are simply told, “He has a reason.” But how can we meaningfully trust such a God? Under Calvinism, God could decree every heresy and deception, command people to believe the truth while withholding from them any genuine ability to do so, and create our own children with no possibility of salvation—destining them from eternity to suffer His wrath for a response they were never able to give. And we are expected to call all of this “good” merely because God decreed it. Some Calvinists have even suggested that we may regard those God allegedly created for damnation with contempt (even our own children) because human beings are beneath Him—“lesser than rats.” That is not the God revealed in the Bible. The true God is certainly sovereign, holy, and worthy of reverent fear. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10), and His majesty should bring us to our knees. But biblical fear is not terror before an arbitrary ruler whose character cannot be known. It is reverent awe before the God whose character is perfectly righteous, whose judgments are true, and whose steadfast love endures forever. And whose love and character we may KNOW. We trust God not merely because He is powerful, but because He is good. He cannot lie (Titus 1:2), cannot deny His own nature (2 Timothy 2:13), and cannot tempt anyone with evil (James 1:13). Every good and perfect gift comes from Him, “with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17). His sovereignty does not make evil or goodness meaningless, His unchanging goodness is the very foundation of our confidence in His sovereignty. This is the God who is “gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love” and who is “good to all” (Psalm 145:8–9). He takes “no pleasure in the death of the wicked,” but calls them to turn and live (Ezekiel 18:23, 32). He is patient, “not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). He loved the world enough to give His only Son so that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16). This is the God who demonstrates His love in Christ—not toward people who had earned it, but “while we were still sinners” (Romans 5:8). He invites us not merely into servile submission, but into adoption: we have not received “the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear,” but “the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Romans 8:15). Jesus even tells His disciples, “I have called you friends” (John 15:15). Yes, we fear Him. Yes, we stand in awe of His holiness and majesty. But we also trust Him because He has shown Himself trustworthy. We love Him because He first loved us (1 John 4:19). And we draw near to Him because His perfect love casts out the fear of punishment (1 John 4:18). The God of the Bible does not demand that we call evil good simply because power has ordained it. He reveals what goodness is through His own holy, loving, truthful, and unchanging character. His power is never divorced from His goodness, and His sovereignty is never separated from His love. That is why He is not merely a God before whom we tremble. He is the Father into whose arms we may confidently run.