Goodness

Overview

I’m not sure anybody in our culture thinks that right now, in our time in history, people are becoming more and more good. There are a lot of ways to describe what’s going on in society, but almost nobody says people are becoming more good.

No wonder C.S. Lewis says what human beings need is not improvement—we need redemption. We don’t need to become nicer people. We need to become new people. When the Bible uses the word “goodness,” it means something like that. It’s much more radical than what the English word “good” usually denotes, which is some kind of bland niceness.

If you want to understand what the Bible means by good, you have to first ask an extremely important question. According to the Bible, it is the greatest question anybody can ask. Let’s look at this famous passage out of the Old Testament book of Micah and move through it like this: the great question, the wrong answers to the question, and the right answer to the question.