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Japanese In the Bible, goodness belongs first to God. It is his generous, faithful character and the kindness he shows in what he does. “The LORD is good” comes back again and again in the Psalms, and Jesus said, “No one is good except God alone” (Mark 10:18). In people, Paul counts goodness among the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22).
Moses once asked to see God’s glory, and God promised him this: “I will make all my goodness pass before you” (Exodus 33:19). What passed by was mercy, patience and steadfast love. The Bible teaches us goodness much as God taught Moses, by letting us watch him pass by and see what he is like.
How does the Bible define goodness?
The Bible gives no dictionary definition. It uses the word for what is morally right, for what is pleasant or beautiful, and for what does good to someone, and it shows what goodness means through what God does. Psalm 119:68 comes as close to a definition as any verse: “You are good and do good.” In Scripture goodness is both what God is and how he acts.
The Hebrew word for good is tov. Genesis uses it for the light God made (Genesis 1:4), and the psalmists use it for God himself: “For the LORD is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations” (Psalm 100:5). The related noun tuv, “goodness,” is what God promised to show Moses: “I will make all my goodness pass before you” (Exodus 33:19).
The New Testament, written in Greek, has three words in this family. Agathos is the ordinary word for good, the one Jesus used when he said that no one is good but God. Agathōsynē, “goodness,” appears only four times, always as a quality of believers (Romans 15:14; Galatians 5:22; Ephesians 5:9; 2 Thessalonians 1:11). Chrēstotēs means kindness or generosity, and older translations sometimes render it “goodness”: the King James Version of Romans 2:4 speaks of “the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering,” where the ESV has “kindness.” Spanish Bibles keep the two ideas side by side: the Reina-Valera 1960 lists benignidad and bondad next to each other in Galatians 5:22.
Thomas Aquinas put the Christian understanding in philosophical terms. Creatures are good by sharing in a goodness they receive from God, but God has every perfection by his own essence, so “God alone is good essentially” (Summa Theologiae I, q. 6, a. 3).
Goodness in creation
Goodness is the first judgment the Bible makes about the world. In the creation account of Genesis 1, God looks at what he has made and sees that it is good six times (verses 4, 10, 12, 18, 21 and 25). After making human beings he looks at everything together: “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). The first thing God calls “not good” is the man’s being alone (Genesis 2:18), and the one tree forbidden to him is “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:17).
The goodness of God
The fullest description comes in Exodus. Moses asks to see God’s glory, and God answers that he will make all his goodness pass before him and proclaim his name (Exodus 33:18–19). When the LORD passes by, the proclamation is: “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty” (Exodus 34:6–7). The goodness Moses was promised turns out to be mercy, grace, patience, steadfast love (in Hebrew hesed) and faithfulness, and it does not cancel justice.
The Psalms return to this again and again. “Oh give thanks to the LORD, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever!” opens Psalms 106, 107, 118 and 136. “The LORD is good to all, and his mercy is over all that he has made” (Psalm 145:9). “Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good!” (Psalm 34:8). The last verse of Psalm 23 says, “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.” The prophets say the same: “The LORD is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble” (Nahum 1:7), and “The LORD is good to those who wait for him” (Lamentations 3:25).
When a man ran up to Jesus and called him “Good Teacher,” Jesus answered, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone” (Mark 10:17–18). He taught that the Father gives “good things to those who ask him” (Matthew 7:11) and “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good” (Matthew 5:45), and he called himself “the good shepherd” who “lays down his life for the sheep” (John 10:11). Paul wrote that God’s kindness “is meant to lead you to repentance” (Romans 2:4), and that “when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy” (Titus 3:4–5).
Goodness as a fruit of the Spirit
In people, the New Testament treats goodness as something the Holy Spirit produces. “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law” (Galatians 5:22–23). Paul tells the Ephesians that “the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true” (Ephesians 5:9). Near the end of Romans he tells the church he is satisfied that they are “full of goodness” (Romans 15:14), though earlier in the same letter he quotes the Psalms: “no one does good, not even one” (Romans 3:12). Goodness in believers, on this account, is the Spirit’s fruit in them.
The Catholic Church counts twelve fruits of the Spirit instead of nine. Its Catechism follows the list in the Latin Vulgate, which includes both benignitas and bonitas: “charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, generosity, gentleness, faithfulness, modesty, self-control, chastity” (Catechism 1832). Modern translations, Catholic and Protestant, follow the Greek text, which lists nine.
Other passages tell believers what goodness looks like in practice. “He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8). “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (Romans 12:21). “Let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith” (Galatians 6:10). “Whoever does good is from God; whoever does evil has not seen God” (3 John 11).
How many times is goodness mentioned in the Bible?
The number depends on the translation. A keyword search on Bible Gateway finds “goodness” in 48 verses of the King James Version, 22 of the English Standard Version and 19 of the New International Version. The older translation uses the word more often partly because it sometimes renders hesed as goodness: in Exodus 34:6 the King James Version says God is “abundant in goodness and truth,” where the ESV has “abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” The simple word “good” is far more common in every translation.
If God is good, why is there evil?
The Bible gives no single answer. It records Joseph telling his brothers, “you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20), and Paul writing that “for those who love God all things work together for good” (Romans 8:28). It ends with the promise that God “will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more” (Revelation 21:4).
Augustine argued that evil is not a thing God created but a lack in something good: “For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good?” (Enchiridion 11). The Catechism of the Catholic Church says that “no quick answer will suffice” and that “only Christian faith as a whole constitutes the answer to this question,” from the goodness of creation and the drama of sin to the Incarnation of the Son (Catechism 309).
So the answer is still being finished. The goodness that passed before Moses goes with us now, through the evil we cannot explain, toward the day when God wipes away every tear. Until then we can say what the shepherd psalm says: “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life” (Psalm 23:6).
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