A "good" person?

Matthew 19:16-17  

And behold, one came and said unto Him, “Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life?”

And He said unto him, “Why callest thou Me good? There is none good but One, that is, God. But if thou wilt enter into Life, keep the commandments.”

If you are a Christian, you should really avoid labeling people as good people or bad people. Those categorizations are not biblically sound. There’s no such thing as a “good” person.

For proof:

• Isaiah 64:6
• Romans 3:10-20
• Mark 10:18

At the heart of false doctrine is false notions. And it starts from the smallest and simplest things. “A little leaven leavens the whole lump.”

The “good person” label is problematic because it distorts the essence of the cross. If we could be “good people”, why would God need to send Jesus to pay the sacrifice for us? God could have stopped after giving us the Mosaic Laws and expected us to comply with them. But that was inadequate, because the best of our righteousness is as filthy rags to Him. There is a higher definition of goodness, and we humans can only attain it through divine intervention. 

Another flaw of the “good person” label is that it gives us the false sense that we can adequately discern good and evil. This was the experiment our first ancestors Adam and Eve attempted, eating from the fruit of the tree of Good and Evil so they could make that decision for themselves. It woefully failed then, and is still failing us till now. Thousands of years of civilization, and humans have not been able to unify on a common definition of good and evil. Our perception of what’s good and what’s evil as humans is subjective: it’s shaped by a combination of societal conditioning, traditions, lived experiences, which differ from one person to another. We also are not unified on a metric system for measuring “level of goodness”. See how we struggle to label the person who donated hospitals and fights for social causes but molests his young daughter. Or the drug baron whose trade has ruined countless lives but who generously finances scholarships, buys houses, and gives gifts to the needy. 

So what we have is a broken definition system, and anytime we label a person good we have determined our definition system to be superior than others, assuming ourselves as the moral compass for the universe. That gives us 7 billion different compasses and makes absolutely no sense. The sensible approach is to look to God as the true North and rely on His own definition (“Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.”).