What is Good?

I think the word “good”—the idea of goodness—carries a shallow value in the human heart. Luke 18:18–19 tells me my definition of “good” is too small:

A ruler asked [Jesus], “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.”

The definition of “good” that I begin with is something trifling like “good is something that is a net positive,” or “good things are those which are pleasant.” That’s not what Jesus says. He says the only good person in existence is He who created and sustains everything. He says that only one person is good, and everything and everyone else is less than that.

In English, we distinguish between levels of goodness by saying good, better, best. If we want to say that something is absolutely good, we say it is perfect. But our idea of perfection is still rather flimsy.

If someone is a perfect student, they score 100% on all their homework and tests, never miss a day of school, are never late, never break the rules, etc. From a compliance standpoint, they hit every one of the criteria on some whittled-down checklist.

But if perfection is just adhering to a checklist, that’s pretty lousy. Even when athletes set new world records, even when someone builds an unbreakable system, that still isn’t perfect. It’s only perfect when evaluated against its own set of expectations. If someone sets a new record—if someone builds a better unbreakable system—now there’s a higher level of perfection. You can’t have less perfect and more perfect. The new record, the new system, becomes the new definition of perfection; but just like before, it’s a relative perfection waiting to be surpassed again.

Then there’s perfectionism, which I honestly hate. Perfectionism is the belief that by hitting every check mark and every tick you can avoid being bad. In reality, perfectionism so often squeezes the life out of whatever it touches that it’s a rather horrid thing.

By logical progression of language, I would have to say that God is infinitely perfect. Jesus just says that God is good. He doesn’t bother with our systems of complicated language that so quickly break down. He just starts with a simple truth from before time began: God is good, and God alone.

God’s goodness is boundless as the sea. It is as high as the heavens are above the earth, as far as the east is from the west. It goes on and on forever, to a degree of greatness that our minds cannot comprehend.

Romans 11:36 gets at the depths of God’s goodness: “For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be glory forever.” People understand that something can be good by itself in a static nature. It’s against our nature to believe that God’s goodness is so great that it cannot remain so staying by itself. God’s goodness is so great that it has to move outside of God to express its full self. (That’s called love, by the way.)

Before eternity, God the Father lived in perfect fellowship and delight with the Son and with the Spirit. But even perfect delight and fellowship with Himself was not enough to fulfill the full expression of His goodness. From the overflow of His goodness He created a world and people to pour His goodness into, to sustain, to inhabit, and to redeem unto Himself.

I think fantasy writers may glimpse a tiny bit what this is like. They cannot express their full imagination unless they create a world to pour their thoughts and dreams into. But even the best of fantasy legends compares as nothing to the full expanse of this world with everything and everyone in it. For as long as humanity has existed, we still have yet to understand the depths of subatomic particles, human psychology, the origin of species. We will spend thousands of years learning the brilliant complexities of this life and this world, and then we will spend even thousands more learning the things we find we don’t know along the way. And even then, every bit of this world we may learn about through to the end of time will stand faintly brilliant compared to the goodness of the God who created it all.

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! —Romans 11:33 (ESV)

When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we first begun. —John Newton, “Amazing Grace”