Our Highest Good

Exceprt taken from Our Highest Good: 90 Days of Knowing and Loving God by Mary Wiley

Chapter 1
Our Highest Good

You are good, and you do what is good; teach me your statutes. —Psalm 119:68

“God is good … All the time. All the time … God is good.” This is the call and response of our people, a battle cry of sorts. But do we truly believe it? Not just with our heads but with our hearts? I’m afraid we’ve become people who prefer the good that comes from God’s hands but don’t so much yearn for communion with the One who is good. It’s easier to enjoy His riches than to consider His requirements—to marvel at His handiwork rather than at His holiness. Yes, His work is miraculous and wonderful, but the goodness of His work only flows through the goodness of the One who is doing that work.

God is good, not only when He is giving good to His people but also in the darkest night of the soul, the most painful of trials, and the mind-numbing monotony of days held in waiting. He is good when things are good with us, and when things are not. We stake our lives not on the works of His hands, but on the One whose hands do the work. He is the good life we seek.

Philosophers have sought to define humanity’s highest good since the great thinkers began thinking. In Latin, the phrase is summum bonum, which literally translates as “the supreme good from which all others are derived.” Every school of thought has a recommended solution for finding the good life. Some recommend moral excellence, but we are incapable of it in our own strength. Others recommend beauty or rightness in itself, but without a rubric of sorts, both are judged by the eye of the beholder. It’s not in human relations, because those often fail us, leaving no aroma of good in their wake. Neither can flourishing success or happiness bear the weight of defining good, because neither lasts forever. The quest for what lies at the top of the ladder on which all good things find their rung is not more of the same of what is below it. It is wholly other, Creator unlike His creation.

Yet, the One who is good has not left us to stumble blindly through life, hoping we find the path to the good life. Instead, God came near, revealing Himself in a way that we can understand: a piece of literature—His Word—and a man, the Word made flesh. It is in His Word—the Scriptures—that we can know and love Him, seeing His goodness from before He laid the foundations of the earth to today clearly in its pages. And it is in His Son that we may see the “radiance of God’s glory and the exact expression of his nature, …” (Heb. 1:3).

If He is the highest good, then knowing and loving Him is our greatest good. We have been invited to participate in the divine life through the good work of the Son, the good plan of the Father, and the good gift of understanding through the Spirit. There is no greater way to spend our days than in preparing for eternity by knowing the One whom we will spend it worshipping. In His goodness, He knows us completely. There’s no dark corner of our hearts left unturned. And still, He has invited us to know Him. The unknowable has made Himself known because He is good. The One to whom we could not ascend has descended to us. He truly is the highest good, and all His ways follow suit.

No one can do enough goal setting, habit hacking, networking, or working overtime to achieve the good life because the harder you strive, the more elusive it is. The good life isn’t financial security, relational stability, health, or finding a way to do what you love and get paid for it. The good life is not found in a situation. It is found in a Person.

As the writer of Ecclesiastes finds chapter after chapter, there is no good if it is not God’s good. There is no purpose if it is not God’s purpose. Everything is vanities, a chasing after the wind. Everything is purposely monotony, spinning out of control in its unending resolutions, but with no intentionality or end. I have a dear friend who has refused to study Ecclesiastes with me for many years because in her words, “It’s depressing.” And it is. Because Jesus is the only right answer to the problem of Ecclesiastes. There is no good without God—and specifically, God made flesh: Jesus. But with Him, there is only good. He is the substance of good, its author. And all His ways are good because all His ways are love. His greatest good—and ours—is found in this: “No one has greater love than this: to lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).

Is He your highest good today? A day in His courts is truly better than one thousand elsewhere (Ps. 84:10). He is good. He is our highest good.

“God, and God alone, is man’s highest good.”
—Herman Bavinck (1854–1921)

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