2 Why do you call me good?
The rich young ruler called Jesus ‘good’:
“Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Luke 18: 18 [NIV]
No one would have described a rabbi as ‘good’. That was a term you could only have used about God himself. The rich man was only using the word as flattery.
So Jesus responds: “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.”
Taken at face value, the man is right: Jesus is good because he is the Son of God. Not that the man knew who he was addressing, of course.
So Jesus takes the man’s question at face value. It is as if Jesus is saying, “OK, I’ll go along with you. If you want to earn eternal life, this is what you need to do – keep all the commandments perfectly”.
“You know the commandments. ‘Do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not give false testimony, honour your mother and your father’.” Luke 18: 20 [NIV]
But the man claimed to have kept all of these commandments from his youth. However, the commandments Jesus quotes are about our duty to other people, not about our duty to God. The man knew that he did not have eternal life, so he cannot have been keeping all the commandments. Some obedience was missing.
Martin Luther wrote,
Good works do not make a man good, but a good man does good works.
Doing good works, keeping the commandments, will not change God’s view of us. Only God himself can make us good by forgiving our sins. And when we are good, then we will be able to do good works because God himself will be working through us. [See Ephesians 2: 10]
Lord, please fill me with your Spirit so that I will be better able to serve both you and other people.
David Long
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