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.’