Day 200, Year 1

God Alone is Good

“And Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call Me good? No one is good except God alone.'” (Mark 10:18, NASB; same as Luke 18:19)

As mentioned previously, we should distinguish our inner thoughts, desires, or emotions from ourselves and subsequently understand the related meanings. Understanding involves discernment, and the foundation for the standard of discernment, as today’s verse indicates, is to acknowledge and obey God’s goodness. Summarizing the previous verses, we, believers, need to continually accumulate goodness that comes from God in our hearts in order to have the best discernment in us.

I suggest that we should understand everything that arises from our hearts and examine the standards we employ to distinguish between good and evil, so as to obey the good determined by God. In other words, while we pursue the goodness that comes from God, we should beware of the goodness that counterfeits God, as well as evil originating from humans and the devil, or what comes from Him but is twisted into evil. Considering the previous example, sexual desire is essential for human reproduction. It originally comes from God, but has often been distorted and become sinful easily. However, goodness from God is actually prevalent in the world. For instance, choosing life, integrity, righteousness, or virtues such as honesty, which will be mentioned later, are often found in many communities.

We need to learn the goodness of God to remove our inner foolishness, evil, pretense, and so on. Those who have a deeper understanding of themselves will likely realize that they really do not understand themselves very well. Only God’s judgment can reveal the hypocrisy and true goodness in humans. Even the best human efforts might not attain what is good in God’s eyes. In the process of pursuing His goodness, we would discover that goodness within people is pitifully little, while evil, hypocrisy, and distortion are rife. As we understand what lies within our hearts in this process of discernment, most of us become taciturn. Taking a step further, we can connect our only remaining goodness to Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and the Heavenly Father, and strive to accumulate various kinds of goodness from Them. When we have finally gathered enough of God’s goodness within us, we can become talkative (again) and share the truth of the Lord’s blessings with different people from time to time.

Reflection questions:

1) Do you think that God is the only one who is good? Why?

2) Are you willing to know and receive the goodness from God, and remove all the evil within you, including foolishness and pretense? If yes, where is your starting point?