Is God Good?

I frequent a blog called "Glory to God for All Things" which is contributed by Fr. Stephen on Eastern Orthodoxy. This blog has been winning the Best Individual Blog by Eastern Christian New Media Awards for three years in a row.

Belows is the quotes I found really worth quoting and pondering on:

Everything is beautiful in a person when he turns toward God, and everything is ugly when it is turned away from God.

Fr. Pavel Florensky

The problem of good and evil has been bothering me these days. What confused me is that if Good and Evil can only be understood in pairs, as there can be no understanding towards goodness if there is no evil, and the other way around, then how can God be ultimately Good? If God is by definition an ultimate good, then doesn't that premise on the existence of an equal amount of evil? If it is contended that God's Goodness is more than the goodness of human beings, and sometimes God can allow evil to be rampant in the world for our ultimate good, then isn't it logical enough to say that God is, to a sense, transcend our so-called "good" and "evil"?

But still there are quite a lot of theologians who won't hesitate in claiming that God is not transcendent to "good" and "evil", but the ultimate Goodness.

It is within this thinking context that I found the following words in Father Stephen's writingreasonable.

Good and Evil

I think evil is always small, and that good is infinite. Evil closes itself to God and thus becomes even smaller; Good opens itself to God and thus becomes infinite. Evil cannot become so large as to fill even the universe. God became so small that He could fill Hell and then burst it asunder because it could not contain Him. Every good deed will have eternal remembrance, but even the largest deeds of the evil will be forgotten.

Father Stephen's Blog can be found here: http://fatherstephen.wordpress.com/