#DailyDevotion There Is No One Good But God
Mark 10:17–20
17As Jesus was coming out to the road, a man came running to Him and knelt before Him. “Good Teacher,” he asked Him, “what should I do to inherit everlasting life?”18“Why do you call Me good?” Jesus asked him. 19No one is good except One – God. “You know the commandments: Do not murder. Do not commit adultery. Do not steal. Do not lie. Do not cheat. Honor your father and mother.” 20“Teacher,” he told Him, “I’ve kept all these since I was a child.”
Well this guy has some sort of humility. He runs to Jesus and kneels before him. He even calls Jesus, “Good teacher.” Well Jesus will have none of that. While he is God this young man does not know that. He won’t accept the flattery. He corrects him right away, “No one is good except One – God.” It is written in 1 Sam. 2:2 “There is no one holy like the LORD; there’s no one besides You, there is no rock like our God.” Psalms 14:3 says, “They have all turned away together and become corrupt. Not one does right, not a single one.” Of course Jesus is good and he is God. But there is a huge difference between being good and being nice. I’m sure the guy was nice. There are a lot of nice people in the world. There are no good people in the world. If people were good then we wouldn’t need Jesus.
So the young man asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. It seems like a reasonable question. Who doesn’t want to inherit eternal life? Certainly there must be a way to enter into the good life after this one. There was a whole TV show series called “The Good Life.” It asked this question. Unfortunately, while very humorous, it never got around to the right answer. Jesus points the young man to the commandments. After all, Jesus has told the Israelites as he was making a covenant with them in Lev. 18, “5Follow My rules and My decisions. By doing them a man lives. I am the LORD.”
I notice that Jesus here only speaks the second table of the Law. Tomorrow we will get more into that. The young man responds, “I’ve kept all these since I was a child.” I’m sure the guy thinks he has. He may have even kept them outwardly. When he says “since I was a child” he is probably referring to since his bar mitzvah where he became a son of the commandments. He probably has done a pretty good job of it. A lot of people out there think they do a pretty good job of keeping the second table of the Law. The characters of “The Good Place” certainly represent a fair amount of people we run into. We all think we are pretty good people. We think we have kept the commandments. The truth of the matter is, at best, we have been more or less nice. We have not followed God’s rules and decisions. We have not done them and lived in them. Paul quotes Psalm 14 in chapter three of Romans 3, “10as the Bible says: No one is righteous, no, not one. 11 No one understands. No one is searching for God. 12All have turned away and have one and all become worthless.”
The young man had not done what is necessary to enter eternal life and never would. You haven’t done what is necessary to enter eternal life and you never will. You may only receive it as a gift earned and won for you by Jesus through his life, death and resurrection. He offers it to you freely today.
Heavenly Father, have mercy upon us so we may turn aside from our and trust only the works of your son Jesus Christ for our salvation. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.