“As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up, knelt down before him, and asked him, ‘Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ ‘Why do you call me good?’ Jesus asked him. ‘No one is good except God alone.’” (CSB – Read the chapter)

What good is God? That’s a question that doesn’t often get asked in church, but it probably should. A good, clear answer to it can give someone a world more confidence in the reasonableness of their faith. On the other hand, a bad answer can wipe someone’s faith out of existence. Even better than a good or bad answer, though, is a philosophically sound one. So then, what good is God? Let’s think on that for a few minutes together today.

Critics of the Christian faith have occasionally accused believers of thinking we somehow have a corner market on goodness. Unfortunately, that particular criticism has at times been well earned. The notion itself is nonsense, of course, because we don’t at all have the corner market on goodness as followers of Jesus. But…we do serve the God who is its only source.

The idea that people are the source of goodness is not one that has any support in the Scriptures at all. Much to the contrary, the contributing authors are rather abundantly clear that we are utterly broken by sin on our own. Total depravity is one of the more closely held doctrines by many churches. It’s also the easiest Christian doctrine to demonstrate with evidence. Just listen to the news for a month and there really shouldn’t be any further questions. The idea, on the other hand, that God is the only source of goodness is not merely tacitly assumed in the Scriptures. It is explicit.

Jesus was once asked a question by a wealthy young man about how to gain access to the eternal life He had been teaching the people about. His question was this: “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

Jesus’ response was revealing. He eventually got to an answer, but He started with a mild rebuke of the questioner. “‘Why do you call me good?’ Jesus asked him. ‘No one is good except God alone.’” No one is good but God alone. There is no source of goodness in this world other than God. Any good thing we find in this world ultimately has its roots in God. If there is something that is good, that thing came from or was allowed by or was inspired by God and His character. Period.

In fact, let’s take that a step further. We wouldn’t really know what good is apart from God. Now, this doesn’t mean that people can’t do good apart from God. That’s a silly notion and one that is demonstrably false. The fact that people can do good without a direct relationship with God is clear from the Scriptures. And notice that I am using the verb “do” instead of the word “be” here. That’s on purpose. No one is good on their own. Paul makes that clear in Romans 1-3. That’s literally what Jesus says here in our passage for today. But people can do things that are good because we are all made in the image of God and we reflect that image even when we reject Him. We don’t reflect it consistently or well apart from Him, but we are made in God’s image whether we believe in Him or not.

Caveats aside, let’s go back to that first statement. We wouldn’t know what good is apart from God. Really? Is that true? Well, let’s think about it. Because God is not only the source of goodness, but He is the only being in the universe who is good by nature, then apart from Him – an awareness of Him, an understanding of His character, a belief in Him, having Him dwelling in us through the Holy Spirit – goodness isn’t something we can produce or create. We don’t even know what it is.

His character defines what is good. Apart from that objective standard, the best we are left with is personal preference. I read recently about a popular speaker and author whose worldview is thoroughly secular. One of the arguments he makes from out of his worldview is that because there is no God, then people have no intrinsic worth or dignity, and that everything that exists is natural. More specifically, this means that all sorts of sexual behaviors that are traditionally defined as deviant by various religions and especially Christianity are perfectly fine and acceptable. They exist and so they must be natural, and if they are natural, then they must be good and okay to pursue for those who desire them.

That is a position that is consistent with his worldview. At the same time, though, this cultural commentator argues that any kind of prejudice or persecution against those who would pursue things that are natural is wrong. The problem here is that he is trying to have it both ways. He believes and argues for the idea that humans are nothing more than molecules in motion and that there isn’t anything governing the interactions of those molecules. You don’t really love anyone, you simply experience a series of chemical interactions that create certain “feelings” in you. If this is the case then nothing has any real moral significance because there’s no such thing as morality in the first place.

This position makes his argument in favor of the broad acceptance of the full menu of sexual behaviors and desires philosophically consistent, but it completely undermines his argument against making any kind of moral judgment of such behaviors as wrong or treating them differently than traditionally accepted sexual behavior entirely inconsistent. If we are nothing more than random interactions of atoms and molecules, and if everything that exists is natural, then both the behaviors he supports as well as the behaviors he does not (i.e., prejudice and persecution against the behaviors he supports) are natural because they both exist. He has a personal preference against the latter, but that’s all it is. And just as on his worldview it is wrong to cast judgment on the behaviors he supports, it is equally wrong to cast judgment on the behaviors he does not.

If there is no God whose character objectively defines what is right and what is wrong, then everything is reduced to personal preference. Everything. Nothing can be pronounced objectively right. Nothing can be pronounced objectively wrong. Pick a behavior you don’t like. Absent God, you can’t rationally argue it is wrong. You can only argue that you don’t like it. Maybe you convince a whole bunch of others to not like it as well, but that still doesn’t mean it is wrong. It means a large group doesn’t prefer it. That large group may take steps to collectively prohibit certain behaviors among themselves – that is, a nation may pass laws against certain behaviors – but this doesn’t make them moral or immoral. It is nothing more than will to power. Will to power and morality are not the same thing.

Certain behaviors may cause disruptions for the lives of others, but absent God, this doesn’t make them wrong. They may devastate and destroy the lives of others, but this still doesn’t make them morally wrong. Pick your favorite horror of history. It really doesn’t matter which one. Apart from God, it doesn’t have any more moral significance than a high school science class experiment. It’s just molecules in motion.

What religion in general and Christianity in particular offers the world is the ability to clearly and coherently delineate certain behaviors we instinctively know to be wrong as wrong. It offers an objective standard by which all behaviors may be evaluated morally. This doesn’t mean that people espousing devotion to a particular religion – most definitely including Christianity – live consistently with that’s religions standards, but that means their inconsistencies can be pronounced wrong just as easily as every other violation of the standard can. Christianity has a self-correcting mechanism built into it that secularism simply does not.

The result of Christianity’s cultural dominance of the West for the better part of a thousand years is that everyone assumes on much of its moral framework. This is the case both for those who explicitly hold to it and those who explicitly don’t. Christianity’s moral framework opposing things like judgmentalism, intolerance, injustice, dishonesty, prejudice, persecution, and so on and so forth have become the water in which the rest of the world swims. Because those ideas have become such a fundamental part of our general outlook, we assume they are normal. We assume we can still maintain those ideas without the God whose character established them in the first place. We assume that secularism has the philosophical wherewithal to rationally, coherently, consistently maintain them. It doesn’t, and history will eventually bear that out. Again.

God gives us good. He gives us an understanding of what is good. He gives us the ability to align our lives with His character such that we can produce what is good in and through our lives. We need this because as Jesus told the rich man asking about eternal life, “No one is good except God alone.” Let’s make sure we are staying connected to Him so that we can continue to create and cultivate goodness in and through our lives to make the world a better place.