Goodness
God’s goodness means more than giving us pleasant things. He may give, restrain, correct, oppose evil, or judge. The harder question is whether His character gives us sufficient reason to trust Him when we cannot see how a particular thread fits into the whole tapestry.
We use the word good constantly. A meal can be good because we enjoy it, a person because of how they behave, and a decision because of what it produces. Sometimes we even admit that something was “good for us” while also admitting we hated every second of it.
That range of meaning becomes important when we say God is good.
Do we mean He is pleasant? Kind? Morally upright? Helpful? That He gives us things we enjoy?
Those ideas overlap with goodness, but none of them quite defines it.
That means goodness cannot be measured only by whether something feels pleasant, benefits me immediately, or turns out the way I hoped. What is genuinely good may also be enjoyable, but the two are not identical, and sometimes the difference is very difficult to see.
Scripture Overview
Scripture does not merely describe some of God's actions as good. It repeatedly describes God Himself that way.
The psalmist writes, “You are good, and what you do is good” (Ps. 119:68). Psalm 34 invites us to “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps. 34:8), while Psalm 145 declares, “The Lord is good to all; he has compassion on all he has made” (Ps. 145:9).
When a man addresses Jesus as “Good teacher,” Jesus responds, “No one is good—except God alone” (Mark 10:18).
Goodness also appears at the beginning of the biblical story. Throughout Genesis 1, God looks at what He has made and calls it good. When creation is complete, He declares it “very good” (Gen. 1:31).
The biblical picture is broad but consistent: goodness belongs to God's character, appears in His works, and is reflected in what He creates.
Goodness Is More Than Pleasantness
It is easy to confuse good with pleasant because many genuinely good things are enjoyable. Food can taste wonderful. Friendship makes life richer. Rest feels especially good when we're exhausted, and beauty gives us something to delight in.
Still, pleasantness cannot be the standard.
A child may sincerely believe that an entire bag of candy would improve dinner. Avoiding an uncomfortable conversation may feel better than telling the truth. Staying in bed can be much more appealing than getting up to do something difficult but necessary.
A surgeon may cause pain in the process of healing. A parent can disappoint a child by refusing something harmful. A judge may impose a penalty that the guilty person very much resents.
Pain does not prove goodness, but neither does it automatically disprove it.
God Does Not Simply Decide What Good Means
Is something good simply because God says it is?
If the answer is yes, then the word good could mean almost anything. Whatever God commanded would automatically become good simply because He commanded it, even if the word no longer had any recognizable meaning.
But placing goodness above God creates a different problem. If some independent standard determines what is good, then God Himself would have to answer to something more fundamental than He is.
Christianity does not require either conclusion.
Goodness is grounded in God's character. His actions are good because they express who He is, not because He can simply label anything “good” or because He follows a moral standard existing somewhere above Him.
We cannot defend an action merely by saying, “God did it, therefore it must be good,” while quietly stretching good until anything can fit inside it.
If we are going to claim that God's character is good, the word must still mean something.
Goodness Can Restrain
Generosity and goodness overlap, but they are not identical.
A generous God gives freely. A good God may sometimes withhold.
Parents understand this almost instinctively. A child can desperately want something that a loving parent knows would not actually be good for them. Refusal is not necessarily a failure of love; in some situations, giving in would be.
Preventing someone from harming another person restricts freedom, but the restriction can be good. Telling the truth may wound someone who wanted reassurance. Refusing to participate in destructive behavior can feel mocking to the person asking for cooperation.
Goodness is not obligated to say yes.
Sometimes a boundary is the good thing.
Goodness Can Correct
Scripture also treats correction as compatible with love.
Hebrews describes God's discipline as directed toward the believer's good while openly acknowledging that discipline is painful rather than pleasant in the moment (Heb. 12:10–11).
Pain does not become pleasant simply because it serves a purpose. Discipline still hurts. Likewise, correction can be genuinely good while remaining difficult to endure.
We don't need to call every painful experience good in order to say that goodness may sometimes involve pain.
God Can Bring Good From Evil Without Calling Evil Good
Joseph's story gives us one of Scripture's clearest examples.
His brothers sell him into slavery. What follows includes enslavement, false accusation, imprisonment, separation from his family, and years of circumstances Joseph certainly did not choose.
Much later, he tells his brothers:
“You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good” (Gen. 50:20).
Joseph never needs to rehabilitate what his brothers did. He plainly identifies their intention as harm while recognizing that God's intention through those same events was good. The two purposes are not the same.
The evil does not become good merely because God eventually works through it. Scripture instead presents God as capable of taking what human beings genuinely meant for harm and bringing from it an outcome they neither intended nor controlled.
But there is an elephant in the room, and it would be intellectually dishonest of me to ignore it. Genesis does not tell us whether God directly influenced the brothers' betrayal, but Scripture elsewhere gives us examples of much more active divine involvement. In 1 Kings 22:22, God permits a spirit to deceive false prophets, and Exodus 9:12 explicitly says that God hardened Pharaoh's heart.
So the question is bigger than Joseph: if God sometimes influences actions that are themselves evil, can we still call Him good?
That is a massive question that deserves a massive answer. What I can offer here is the framework that makes the most sense to me:
Merely contributing to an outcome that involves suffering does not, by itself, make an actor morally evil. Knowledge, authority, intention, and the reason for producing the outcome all matter. God possesses complete knowledge and rightful authority in a way human beings do not, and He can direct events toward a genuinely good purpose without sharing the corrupt motive of the person committing the evil act.
Herman Bavinck compares this kind of distinction to a parent handling a very sharp knife. The parent may rightly handle something that would be dangerous and inappropriate for a child because the parent possesses knowledge and authority the child does not.
The analogy is imperfect, but the principle is useful.
God can remain good even when He influences an evil action because His involvement does not make the evil itself good, nor does it mean He shares the evil intention of the person committing it. His moral responsibility is different because His knowledge, authority, purpose, and relationship to the outcome are different.
God uses evil.
God is not evil.
Scripture doesn't flinch from holding those two truths together. We don't have to resolve the tension by denying either one.
But if that still leaves you scratching your head, welcome to the club.
I will say, recognizing that God cannot act contrary to His own goodness helped me lean into trust. I've learned to recognize that God's character has to come before my interpretation of His actions. If my interpretation requires God to become something contrary to the goodness Scripture attributes to Him, then I need to question my interpretation before I redefine God's character.
Goodness Does Not Require Maximizing Every Possible Good
Oftentimes, things that are genuinely good pull in different directions.
Justice for one person may require restricting someone else's freedom. Protecting vulnerable people may require restraining someone dangerous. Telling the truth can disturb peace, while preserving meaningful human agency leaves open the possibility that people will use that agency terribly.
And all of that is relatively simple compared with another problem: it may not actually be possible for every person to receive the maximum amount of every good thing at the same time.
That does not mean God's power has somehow run out. When Christians say that all things are possible for God, we do not mean that God can make contradictions true. He cannot make a square circle, nor can He call a square a circle while remaining truthful. In the same way, God cannot act contrary to His own character.
Suppose, for example, it would genuinely benefit me to receive a billion dollars. Great. I'll take it.
But if giving me a billion dollars is good, why not give everyone a billion dollars?
If everyone suddenly had a billion dollars but there were still only the same number of houses, cars, cheeseburgers, and everything else to buy, prices would shoot up. Suddenly my billion dollars would not make me anything close to what we mean by a billionaire today.
The point is that you cannot always give everyone more of a good thing without changing the very conditions that made it good in the first place.
Pain gives us an even clearer example. Why doesn't God simply remove our ability to feel it? Surely a life without pain would be better.
Except pain performs an important function. People with congenital insensitivity to pain can suffer serious injuries without realizing what has happened. Imagine getting bitten by a rattlesnake and receiving no painful warning that something is terribly wrong. Someone please tell me what is good about that.
Fine. Maybe pain does not need to disappear entirely. Maybe God could just turn the volume down.
But now imagine that rattlesnake bite hurts just enough to alert Jane Doe that something happened, yet not enough to demand her attention. Her nose is buried in her smartphone, scrolling through ever-so-slightly addictive social media, and the pain is easy enough to ignore.
Making the pain less bad has not necessarily made the situation better.
These are easy examples because we can see how the pieces fit together. The harder cases are the ones where we cannot.
Why, for instance, does God allow infertility? Surely He could simply give every person who desperately longs for a child the child they want.
I don't have an easy explanation for that.
But the easier examples teach us something important: what looks like an obvious increase in good from our limited position can turn out not to increase good at all. If that happens repeatedly in situations where we can actually trace the consequences, then we have reason to be cautious in situations where we cannot.
That does not tell us why a particular person experiences infertility, and I don't want to pretend that it does.
It does mean that “God could give me more of this good thing” is not, by itself, enough to establish that giving it would produce the greatest genuine good.
If maximizing the apparent “good” repeatedly fails to produce genuine good in A, B, C … X, and Y, then I have at least some reason to question whether my assumption about Z is right.
What About Judgment?
Scripture presents God as compassionate, generous, and patient, but also as Judge. Judgment can involve loss, exclusion, restraint, or punishment. None of that is likely to feel pleasant to the person experiencing it.
Still, justice is itself a genuine good.
Protecting victims may require restraining those who harm them, and accountability means very little if serious wrongdoing carries no consequence. A society does not become more loving simply by refusing to judge or restrain evil.
Our own outrage at injustice assumes the same thing: goodness should oppose what destroys good.
That doesn't make every biblical judgment passage easy. Some are extremely difficult and deserve to be examined on their own terms rather than dismissed with a slogan.
But judgment itself is not automatically a contradiction of goodness.
Jesus Shows Us What Divine Goodness Looks Like
Christianity does not leave us with a philosophical definition and ask us to imagine what divine goodness might look like in practice.
It points us to Jesus.
He moves toward people others push aside, touching the socially excluded, welcoming children, feeding hungry crowds, and healing the sick. Yet His goodness is not simple agreeableness. He confronts hypocrisy, tells uncomfortable truths, and refuses to flatter people into following Him.
The same Jesus who comforts sufferers also calls sinners to repentance and ultimately gives Himself for His enemies. That matters because He claims to reveal the Father:
“Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).
If Jesus truly reveals the Father, then we need not guess what God's goodness looks like.
Goodness Does Not Mean We Will Always Understand
Calling God good does not mean every event will make sense to us. Sometimes a possible good is visible, while at other times I cannot see one at all.
Christians can become very uncomfortable with that second category. Someone suffers horribly, and almost immediately we begin searching for the lesson, the purpose, the hidden blessing—anything that will make the event fit neatly inside an explanation. But sometimes we need to stop and admit that if we do not know why God permitted something, then we simply do not know. An unknown purpose is still unknown, and we should not invent one merely to defend God.
The Christian claim is not that every painful event can be reverse-engineered until we discover exactly why God allowed it. Instead, we are being asked to make a much harder judgment: whether God's character can be trusted when part of the story remains hidden from us.
And that judgment needs evidence. I cannot simply argue that God must be good because God is good. Christianity instead points to what God has revealed of His character throughout Scripture and, most clearly, to the God revealed in Christ.
We may know Him truly without knowing every reason He has.
Where That Leaves Us
Calling God good means more than saying He is nice to us or that He makes pleasant things happen.
Goodness may give freely, restrain what harms, correct what is disordered, oppose evil, and exercise judgment when justice requires it. God can also bring genuine good from terrible circumstances without asking us to pretend the terrible thing was good all along.
What I feel in a particular moment cannot, by itself, tell me whether God is good.
That leaves a harder question when life hurts: does what I know of God's character give me sufficient reason to trust Him when I cannot see how a particular thread fits into the whole tapestry?
Christianity answers by pointing toward Jesus—not because every difficult question disappears when we look at Him, but because the claim that God is good ultimately depends on the character of the One we are being asked to trust.
All Scripture quotations are from the New International Version (NIV).