God Is Good, All the Time: Why Our Understanding of Goodness Needs a Second Look

I am not a big fan of the social ritual that is common in the way we often greet one another. Think about it: We greet someone, and then we ask how they’re doing. More often than not, the question is little more than a formality. The cashier doesn’t really want to know how your day has gone, and the cold-caller pitching you a product you never wanted certainly isn’t losing sleep over your wellbeing. Yet the reply is predictable: “I’m good.”

This is a habit worth noticing, because it reveals something. We use the word “good” so loosely that it has almost stopped meaning anything. A meal is good. A singer is good. We ourselves, we tell each other, are basically good—not perfect, to be sure, but good enough. It’s human to err, after all.

This is precisely the assumption Jesus confronts in Luke 18. A ruler comes to him and asks, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus’ reply is arresting: “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone” (Luke 18:18–19). He isn’t denying his own goodness, and he certainly isn’t denying his deity. He is stopping this young man in his tracks, forcing him to reckon with what he has just said—and with what he has just presumed about himself.

If you asked most people—at least most religious people—whether God is good, they would answer yes without much hesitation. But what does that actually mean? Is there some standard outside God that he must measure up to, some external bar he must clear to qualify as “good”? Scripture won’t allow that thought. God is not composite—he is not made up of parts the way we are. Cut off my arm, and I am still, in some sense, myself; lose part of my memory or personality, and the question of who I am becomes harder to answer. We are built out of pieces. God is not. He simply is, which is why he revealed himself to Moses as “I AM WHO I AM” (Exodus 3:14).

God’s attributes, in other words, are not qualities he possesses the way we possess things. They are his essential, inherent perfections—who he is. He does not derive his goodness from anywhere outside himself. He is the source of it, the very definition of it. So when Jesus says no one is good but God alone, he is making a profound claim: No one is good because no one is God. Goodness exists because God exists.

Since humans were created in his image, goodness does resonate somewhere in every human heart. We are moved by stories of it, drawn to it in films and in life. But at the fall, Eve was told that eating of the forbidden fruit would make her “like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). She ate, and Adam with her, and their eyes were opened—but to their own shame, not to divine wisdom. They became less like God, not more. Isaiah’s warning captures our condition ever since: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil … who are wise in their own eyes” (Isaiah 5:20–21). We are that people: quick to judge others, slow to see the log in our own eye, and, like the rich young ruler, altogether too comfortable calling Jesus “good” while quietly assuming the same of ourselves.

Jesus takes the ruler through the commandments, and the man confidently interrupts: “All these I have kept from my youth” (Luke 18:21). But Jesus exposes him with a single instruction: Sell everything, give it to the poor, and follow. The man leaves saddened, because his self-righteousness has finally been seen for what it is.

The law was never meant to make us feel good about ourselves. It is a description of God’s character, a picture of what goodness actually looks like, which is exactly why we fail to keep it. As Jeremiah puts it, “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? Then also you can do good who are accustomed to do evil” (Jeremiah 13:23). The law is holy, righteous and good (Romans 7:12), and it shows us that we are not.

Here is where the sorrow can turn to joy. Scripture doesn’t merely assert God’s goodness as doctrine; it invites us to taste it. “Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good!” (Psalm 34:8). Peter urges believers to “long for the pure spiritual milk” the way a newborn cries out for food (1 Peter 2:2)—not half-heartedly, but with insistent, whole-hearted need.

Because God is good, he could not simply overlook sin. He had to deal with it. And because he is good, he sent his Son to bear that dealing himself, dying as a substitute for all who trust in him (Romans 5:8). There is not only forgiveness offered here, but transformation. Through the Holy Spirit, God conforms his people into the likeness of his Son, so that goodness becomes not just something we admire in him, but something he works out in us. “Let us do good to everyone, especially to those who are of the household of faith” (Galatians 6:10).

Every good gift comes from him (James 1:17), even the discipline we don’t always welcome (Hebrews 12:10–11). He is good in salvation and good in judgement, good in mercy and good in justice, good in comfort and good in affliction. We are not called to sit in judgement over him, deciding whether he meets our standard. He is the standard. And because of that, we can rest in this simple, sturdy truth: God is good, all the time, and all the time, God is good.