There is a word that runs like a golden thread through the opening pages of the Bible, repeated so insistently that no reader can miss it. That word is ‘good’. God makes the light, and it is good. He separates sea from land, and it is good. He brings forth vegetation and living creatures, and each time, God surveys his work and declares it good. Then, at the end, he looks at everything he has made — and it is ‘very good’ (Gen 1:31). This opening symphony of goodness is not accidental. It is the Bible’s foundational statement about the character of the God who stands behind all that exists.

Again and again the Bible proclaims the truth that ‘the LORD is good and his love endures forever (Psa 100:5).’ God is good, the true and eternal good, in himself, and from that flow all his actions which are consequently, inherently good.¹

All the goodness that there is in this beautiful world is caused by the perfect goodness of God. For a basic fact of Biblical doctrine is that God who is good in himself shares that goodness with others. God’s essential goodness — his goodness in himself — the goodness of his being and nature, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is given in all kinds of ways by the Creator for the good of creatures. That perfect Divine goodness is everywhere in Scripture, running clearly and consistently from beginning to end through the Bible’s grand storyline. In the heart of the Bible’s God and so ‘at the heart of the universe,’ there is goodness.²

Made for Relationships: The Shape of God’s Goodness

The goodness of creation is fundamentally relational. When God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness … male and female he created them’ (Gen 1:26-27), he was doing something remarkable. The plural in God — ‘let us make’ — creates a singular human likeness which is itself a plural. Man and woman together, in loving relationship, image the inner fellowship of the one God. From the very first page of Scripture, human goodness is about persons in loving, dependent relationship with one another and with God.

This relationality is threefold. First, between God and us — direct, intimate, personal. Even in the tragedy of Genesis 3 we glimpse this: God habitually walks in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and Eve encounter him there. Second, between human beings and each other, a differentiation sustained by mutually dependent fellowship. Third, between humanity and the rest of creation: Adam and Eve are given sovereign care over creation, for its good order and for the common good of humankind.

Blessing as God’s Defining Word to His Creatures

‘Blessing’ is the primary word by which the Bible conveys the Creator’s goodness to his creatures. ‘And God blessed them,’ we read (Gen 1:22, 28). Blessing is the bestowal of good, the communication of benefit. Words of blessing appear some 400 times in the Old Testament and about 70 times in the New Testament.³ God’s spoken blessing puts the gift of God’s goodness into words. Spoken blessing ‘involves a word invested with power’; that is, blessing transfers, imparts, and endows one who receives it with beneficial power.⁴ Words of blessing are God’s first recorded words to human beings.⁵

Among the chief blessings granted to human beings in the early stages of Scripture are life itself, marriage, parenthood, companionship, dominion, sonship, inheritance, mercy, redemption, righteousness, forgiveness, a new heart, preservation, protection, and restoration. It is a beautiful picture, crowned and framed by God’s covenant with his people. And that is the most important point about blessing: whatever specific benefits may be conferred — prosperity, enjoyment, ability, contentment — the benefits themselves are secondary. ‘The primary factor of blessing is the statement of relationship between parties … The focus is on relationship rather than content.’⁶

Good and Evil Defined by God Alone

The opposite of good appears first in God’s words to Adam — words of permission and prohibition: ‘You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die’ (Gen 2:17). In this way, the Bible begins to fill out the nature of Divine-human relations: their boundaries, commitments, and possibilities, including the horrors that result from breaching them.

This is critically important: creatures — human beings or angels — cannot define good and evil. According to Scripture, it is God, who is perfectly good, who governs what is good and what it is not. ‘When God made the world, he saw that it was very good, meaning that it perfectly realized what he intended. That kind of goodness is inherent in all created things, and we may suppose it reflects something in the character of God, because he is the perfect being.’⁷

For Adam, then, to eat the fruit of ‘the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’ was to make oneself, not God, the determiner of what is right and wrong. Thus, he turned his back on God, the only true source of all that is truly good. Only chaos, evil disruption in the relationship between us and God, and each other, and us and creation itself, can follow. The goodness of God is not an abstraction or wish. It is the living, active, relational foundation of all that exists. Creation was not a mechanical process but a personal outpouring of goodness by a God who desired fellowship. Every tree, every creature, every sunrise is a declaration that the one who made it is good — and that his purpose for the world he made is nothing less than the flourishing of everything and everyone within it.

1. For example: Psalm 34:1-14, Psalm 100:1-5, Mark 10:17-21s, James 1:17. ↩︎
2. Peter Jensen, At the Heart of the Universe: What Christians Believe (IVP, 1991). ↩︎
3. Anchor Bible Dictionary, 1:754; New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, 1:212. ↩︎
4. New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, 1:207. ↩︎
5. J. V. Fesko, The Giver of Life: The Biblical Doctrine of the Holy Spirit (Lexham Academic, 2024), 40. ↩︎
6. Anchor Bible Dictionary, 1:754. ↩︎
7. Gerald Bray, God is Love (Crossway, 2012), 157. ↩︎