God is Gooder

I was thinking about the nature of good and evil this morning. Not on a deep philosophical level or anything but it did occur to me that the words 'good' and 'evil' (and 'bad' for that matter) are not comparative. Something's either one or the other. One person can't be gooder than another (yes, they can be better, but that's not really the same thing at all). It's one of life's little dichotomies: like red or blue; City or United; Marmite or Bovril.

And that got me thinking a little bit more. At the moment the modern Western World seems to be having something of a love affair with greyness. Look at the TV shows that have been popular in the last few years: we have scheming nobles; lovable gangsters; drug dealing teachers; conscientious serial killers; noble vampires; and the list goes on. We don't seem to be satisfied with the simple concepts of good and evil anymore, everything and everybody needs to be nuanced into a state of complex ambivalence, to such an extent that we're losing sight of who or what we can trust anymore.

This modern view seems to be in such a contrast to a traditional Biblical worldview, which I guess is a reflection of our society as a whole. The Western World has been rebelling against its Christian roots for decades and who knows just where that's all going to end.

In contrast to the populist view, Jesus is quite black and white on the subject of good and evil. When the rich young ruler called Jesus 'good', his response was, 'why do you call me good? No one is good - except God alone.' That's pretty stark and pretty clear. There's 'good' - God, and then there's everything and everybody else. Jesus didn't have to get into a discussion about sin, or good and bad choices because, well, he knew the bottom line and the bottom line is that we're all going to fall without some serious life-changing redemption. It's a good job our good God had a plan and it's a good job Jesus, being God himself (and the only person who's walked on this Earth and qualified in the good category by his own merits), knew what the plan was and was willing to see it through. God is not just good, he's gooder than all the bad that has ever and will ever exist and thankfully He devised a plan that draws us into that good category too, by absolutely no good actions of our own.

Grey may be entertaining but it can never show us the Truth because, at the end of the day, Truth has always ever been black and white.