Attributes of God - Charnock - XLVI - Chapter 12 (God's goodness) continued

Required reading
Attributes of God by Charnock (Available from Amazon or free on the internet, here for example) - Continue Chapter 12 (A discourse upon the goodness of God) by reading up to the paragraph commencing 'The second use is a use of comfort.'

My summary
Now we begin Charnock's fifth main point which is about the 'uses' of the doctrine of God's goodness.

The use we see today is that of instruction. 

Charnock explains that if God is good:
(i) how unworthy is the contempt and abuse of his goodness;
(ii) it is certain argument that man is fallen from his original state;
(iii) there can be no just complaint against God if men be punished for abusing his goodness;
(iv) here is a certain argument both for God's fitness to govern the world, and his actual government of it;
(v) we may infer the ground of all religion, it is the perfection of goodness;
(vi) then God is amiable;
(vii) then God is a fit object of trust and confidence;
(viii) then God is worthy to be obeyed and honoured.

What grabbed me
I appreciated Charnock's points about how God's goodness is abused by man.  Particularly this way that we abuse it: 'A convenient inquiry may be here, How God's goodness is contemned or abused? 1st. By a forgetfulness of his benefits. We enjoy the mercies, and forget the Donor; we take what he gives, and pay not the tribute he deserves; the Israelites 'forgot God their Saviour, which had done great things in Egypt' (Ps. cvi. 21). We send God's mercies where we would have God send our sins, into the land of forgetfulness, and write his benefits where himself will write the names of the wicked, in the dust, which every wind defaceth: the remembrance soon wears out of our minds, and we are so far from remembering what we had before, that we scarce think of that hand that gives, the very instant wherein his benefits drop upon us. Adam basely forgot his Benefactor, presently after he had been made capable to remember him, and reflect upon him; the first remark we hear of him, is of his forgetfulness, not a syllable of his thankfulness. We forget those souls he hath lodged in us, to acknowledge his favours to our bodies; we forget that image wherewith he beautified us, and that Christ he exposed as a criminal to death for our rescue, which is such an act of goodness as cannot be expressed by the eloquence of the tongue, or conceived by the acuteness of the mind. Those things which are so common, that they cannot be invisible to our eyes, are unregarded by our minds; our sense prompts our understanding, and our understanding is deaf to the plain dictates of our sense. We forget his goodness in the sun, while it warms us, and his showers while they enrich us; in the corn while it nourisheth us, and the wine while it refresheth us; 'She did not know that I gave her corn, and wine, and oil' (Hos. ii. 8): she that might have read my hand in every bit of bread, and every drop of drink, did not consider this. It is an injustice to forget the benefits we receive from man; it is a crime of a higher nature to forget those dispensed to us by the hand of God, who gives us those things that all the world cannot furnish us with, without him. The inhabitants of Troas will condemn us, who worshipped mice, in a grateful remembrance of the victory they had made easy for them, by gnawing their enemies' bowstrings. They were mindful of the courtesy of animals, though unintended by those creatures; and we are regardless of the fore-meditated bounty of God. It is in God's judgment a brutishness beyond that of a stupid ox, or a duller ass; 'The ox knows his owner, and the ass his master's crib: but Israel doth not know, my people do not consider' (Isa. i. 3). The ox knows his owner that pastures him, and the ass his master that feeds him; but man is not so good as to be like to them, but so bad as to be inferior to them: he forgets Him that sustains him, and spurns at him, instead of valuing him for the benefits conferred by him. How horrible is it, that God should lose more by his bounty, than he would do by his parsimony! If we had blessings more sparingly, we should remember him more gratefully. If he had sent us a bit of bread in a distress by a miracle, as he did to Elijah by the ravens, it would have stuck longer in our memories; but the sense of daily favours soonest wears out of our minds, which are as great miracles as any in their own nature, and the products of the same power; but the wonder they should beget in us, is obscured by their frequency.'

Oh how we so easily forget the goodness of God!

Next week's reading
Conclude Chapter 12 (A discourse upon the goodness of God).

Now it's your turn
Please post your own notes and thoughts in the comments section below.