"Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan" (What God Ordains Is Always Good) is a Lutheran hymn written by the pietist German poet and schoolmaster Samuel Rodigast in 1675.

[3] He was closely associated with the founder and leader of the pietist movement, Philipp Jakob Spener, who moved to Berlin in 1691 and remained there until his death in 1705.

On the other hand, it is known that the melody of the first half is the same as that of the hymn "Frisch auf, mein Geist, sei wohlgemuth" by Werner Fabricius (1633–1679), published by Ernst Christoph Homburg in Naumburg in 1659 in the collection Geistliche Lieder.

Educated at the University of Wittenberg, Klesch was a Hungarian pietist minister who, after the Protestant expulsions in Hungary, served during 1676–1682 as rector at the Raths-Schule in Jena where Gastorius acted as cantor.

The Klesch hymnbook names four of the 44 hymn melodies it contains as being known and two as being composed by a king and a count; it describes the remaining 38—without further precision—as being written by Severus Gastorius and Johann Hancken, cantor in Strehlen in Silesia.

Taking into account the appearance of the melody in the Klesch hymnbook and the history of the hymn given in the 1687 Nordhausen Gesangbuch, the Swiss theologian and musicologist Andreas Marti has suggested that it is plausible that, as he lay on his sick-bed in Jena, the cantor Severus Gastorius had the melody of Fabricius spinning around in his head as an "earworm" and was inspired to add a second half.

[20] There was a precursor of Rodigast's hymn with the same title to a text by the theologian Michael Altenburg,[7] first published in 1635 by the Nordhausen printer Johannes Erasmus Hynitzsch, with first verse as follows: Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan, Kein einig Mensch ihn tadeln kann, Ihn soll man allzeit ehren.

[24] In the original German, the hymn has six stanzas, all beginning with the incipit "Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan".

Dabei will ich verbleiben; Es mag mich auf die rauhe Bahn Not, Tod und Elend treiben, So wird Gott mich ganz väterlich In seinen Armen halten, Drum laß' ich ihn nur walten.

The organ partita, originating "in the devastating experience of the death of Pachelbel's family members during the plague in Erfurt", reflects the use of "Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan" as a funeral hymn.

[30] For his inaugural cantata in Leipzig in 1723, Die Elenden sollen essen, BWV 75, Bach chose chorales on the fifth and last verses to end the two parts.

Indeed, before being appointed as Thomaskantor, Bach had been required by the Consistory in Leipzig to certify that he subscribed to the Formula of Accord, and thus adhered to the orthodox doctrines of Luther.

[33][26] Amongst Bach's contemporaries, there are settings by Johann Gottfried Walther as a chorale prelude and Georg Philipp Telemann as a cantata (TWV 1:1747).

In 1862, following the death of his daughter Blandine, he wrote his Variations on a theme of J. S. Bach, S180 for piano based on Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, BWV 12, with its closing chorale on "Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan" on the penultimate page above which Liszt wrote the words of the chorale.

Walker (1997) describes the Variations as "a wonderful vehicle for his grief" and the Lutheran chorale as "an unmistakable reference to the personal loss that he himself had suffered, and his acceptance of it.

The first piece, Trauerode, is dedicated to the memory of those who fell in the war during 1914–1915: initially darkly coloured, the mood gradually changes to one of peaceful resignation at the close, when the chorale Was Gott tut is heard.

According to Anderson (2013), "the acceptance of divine will in the first is answered by praise of the omnipotent God in the second, a commentary on the sacrifice of war in a Job-like perspective.