What is the ultimate good? What is the highest purpose toward which all of God's goodness aims? Contemporary culture would answer with words like happiness, self-fulfillment, or personal peace.

Contemporary culture has tried to make goodness therapeutic. The highest good, we are told, is personal well-being, emotional health, and the satisfaction of individual desires. This vision of goodness is about feeling better about ourselves.

When we call someone ‘good,’ we usually mean something like this: they try hard, have noble intentions, and generally succeed in doing what's right. But this is not what the Bible means when it calls God good.

‘God is the Blessed One because he is at rest in the fullness of his perfections,’ wrote Herman Bavinck. ‘He is blessed in himself as the sum of all goodness, of all perfection.’

All the above grounds and reinforces a striking conviction: that radical self-denial is the true path to genuine and lasting joy (Heb 12:2). This may be the most counterintuitive aspect of Jesus' teaching and the most difficult for our contemporary culture to accept. We are told constantly that self-fulfillment, self-expression, and self-assertion are the keys to happiness. Jesus teaches the opposite: self-denial is the route to lasting joy.

Because Jesus reigns over all in the kingdom of God, death itself may be faced with calm assurance (Luke 12:4; John 8:51). This is among the most radical claims of the Christian faith — not merely that death is not the end, but that death has been fundamentally defeated and need no longer inspire terror in those who belong to Christ.

Jesus grew up and lived as a young man ‘in the Jewish homeland under Roman occupation,’ during the era of ‘postexilic Judaism.’ He was steeped in the traditions and practices of mature Jewish religious faith, shaped by the vision of the Law and the Prophets — that sweeping understanding of a good world, plagued by evil yet existing wholly under the dominion of God, where goodness, life, and love lie at the centre of the universe.

It is significant that God – YHWH in the Hebrew Old Testament – is first known as ‘Providence’ (YHWH-JIREH), within the explicit context of redemption history, as he supplies a lamb for Abraham to sacrifice instead of Isaac (Gen 22:14, 8).  From the outset, therefore, that is, the doctrine of providence rests on the doctrines of both creation and redemption, grounded in God's foreordained purposes for mankind in Jesus Christ. As we will see below, the providence of God, his governance of creation and history, stretches outward from his saving purposes, which came to their fulness in Jesus Christ and embraces every dimension of life.

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, who are not God.

The good news begins with God. For the gospel’s main message concerns ‘God with us’ in the Lord Jesus Christ ‘to save his people from their sins’ (Matt 1:21, 23). The fundamental focus of the Christian good news regards ‘God incarnate, Jesus of Nazareth, who did for us what we could not do for ourselves, in order to bring us, a lost people, back to God.’ So the first great reality of the gospel is God himself. God is where the gospel begins.

At the Paris Olympics this summer, people cheered on their nation’s athletes as they took part in many different sports, disciplines, and events.

Revd Dr Bekele Deboch, a prolific evangelist and church planter, organized John Stott’s first trip to Ethiopia, and is now involved in training pastors at the Ethiopia Graduate School of Theology. Great Truths caught up with him recently and asked him about the pressures and possibilities for gospel ministry in Ethiopia.