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. But the Bible presents a radically different vision: goodness that is costly, sacrificial, and saving. At the heart of this vision stands Jesus Christ, who calls himself ‘the Good Shepherd’ (John 10:11, 14).

The Christian gospel is good in the fullest sense: it addresses every dimension of reality while directing all things toward God himself, who is good in every way and at all times. But its goodness is not primarily therapeutic – mental and emotional – comfort. It is saving goodness — goodness that rescues, redeems, and transforms.

Christ as the Fullness of God’s Saving Goodness

The good news of the Christian gospel is not diffuse or vague but sharply focused. It centres on the saving good that God has accomplished in Jesus Christ, our living Lord and Saviour. Here lies the heart of divine goodness in the gospel: in who Christ is, in what he has once for all achieved, and in what he now continues to accomplish for his people.

The goodness of the good news concerns God’s goodness in its most concentrated and costly form. The gospel’s goodness is goodness in the face of badness, goodness in response to badness — indeed, goodness that overcomes objective badness. The condition which the Christian gospel addresses is not superficial but real and grave. Yet God’s goodness acts decisively within it: replacing death with life, hostility with peace, emptiness with fullness, and guilt with forgiveness and reconciliation.

The Good Shepherd

Central to this vision is Christ’s self-identification as the Good Shepherd. The shepherd is ‘good’ not in a sentimental sense but in the dignity and value of his actions: he labours, protects, provides, and, if necessary, suffers for the sake of his sheep. ‘Many people are inclined to think of shepherds as somewhat effeminate, with their arms full of cuddly lambs. But in Jesus’ day the shepherd’s job was tiring, manly, and sometimes dangerous. The word kalos [translated ‘good’] suggests perhaps nobility or worth: therefore meaning the noble shepherd or the worthy shepherd.’¹

The true measure of this goodness is revealed in his willingness to lay down his life. On what came to be called Good Friday, Christ fulfilled his earthly calling by freely offering himself in obedience to the Father: ‘I lay down my life … No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord’ (John 10:17-18). ‘The assumption is that the sheep are in mortal danger; that in their defence the shepherd voluntarily loses his life; that by his death they are saved. That, and that alone, is what makes him the good shepherd.’²

Saving Goodness, Not Mere Therapeutic Comfort

Christ’s goodness is most fully shown and given in his sacrificial suffering and death, through which he redeems his people and overcomes the powers of sin and death. To repeat, Christ’s goodness is a saving goodness: ‘By his passion he made atonement for our evil passions, by his death he cured our death, by his tomb he robbed the tomb, by the nails that pierced his flesh he destroyed the foundations of hell.’³

This stands in stark contrast to contemporary visions of goodness. Modern therapeutic culture promises to make us feel better about ourselves as we are. The gospel promises something far more radical: to make us actually different than we are. Christ does not offer to improve our self-esteem but to give us new life. He does not promise to affirm our choices but to transform our hearts.

The Comprehensive Scope of Gospel Goodness

Yet the saving goodness of the gospel is not narrow. Jesus presents himself as the one who supplies all that is truly necessary for life. Throughout his teaching, the images he uses — bread, water, banquet-giver, wedding host, and winemaker — are drawn from among the most basic and universal goods of human experience. These are not only sources of pleasure but also the essential means of nourishment, satisfaction, and fellowship.

In identifying himself with such realities, Christ reveals that he himself is the fundamental good, the one who sustains and satisfies human life now and forever. The gospel speaks to every aspect of human need while pointing everything toward the supreme good: reconciled fellowship with God through Christ. ‘In Jesus Christ God’s goodness is limitlessly potent. Its redemptive power is not closed off or confined, but open, extensive, and enduring.’⁴

Jesus himself spoke of his deeds as ‘many good works from the Father’ (John 10:32), and Peter affirmed that ‘God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power… He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him’ (Acts 10:38). The gospel is thus ‘the good news about Jesus’ (Acts 8:35), in whom the fullness of God’s saving goodness is given and made known.

1. Leon Morris, The Gospel According to John (Eerdmans, 1971), 503. ↩︎
2. Morris, The Gospel According to John, 504. ↩︎
3. John Chrysostom, quoted in Joel C. Elowsky, ed., Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: John 1-10 (IVP, 2006), 345. ↩︎
4. John Webster, ‘God’s Perfect Life,’ in God Without Measure: Working Papers in Christian Theology (T&T Clark, 2016), 35. ↩︎