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Goodness

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From Urantia Wiki, the encyclopedia of The Urantia Book

Divinity is creature comprehensible as truth, beauty, and goodness; correlated in personality as love, mercy, and ministry; disclosed on impersonal levels as justice, power, and sovereignty. 0:1.17

In the Urantia Book

“We know that all things work together for good to those who love God,” “for the eyes of the Lord are over the righteous, and his ears are open to their prayers. (4:1.4,11) (10:7.5-6) (48:4.7) (54:4.7) (67:7.8) (67:8.4) (94:6.4) (118:10.18) (182:2.1) | providence

  • our Father in heaven permits the good and the evil to go along together until the end of life, just as nature allows the wheat and the tares to grow side by side until the harvest. 4:2.6 130:1.5-6 132:2 159:5.10
  • The idealization and attempted service of truth, beauty, and goodness is not a substitute for genuine religious experience—spiritual reality. 196:3.23
  • we must base life on highest consciousness of truth, beauty, and goodness 110:3.7
  • While it is all too true that good cannot come of evil to the one who contemplates and performs evil, it is equally true that all things (including evil, potential and manifest) work together for good to all beings who know God, love to do his will, and are ascending Paradiseward according to his eternal plan and divine purpose. 54:4.7
  • The concepts of truth, beauty, and goodness are not inherent in either physics or chemistry. 195:6.11
  • The understandings of truth, beauty, and goodness, morality, ethics, duty, love, divinity, origin, existence, purpose, destiny, time, space, even Deity, are only relatively true. 115:1.2
  • Until we attain Paradise levels, goodness will always be more of a quest than a possession, more of a goal than an experience of attainment. 132:2.8

Defined as

  • Good is the carrying out of the divine plans 75:4.3
  • truth, beauty, and goodness represent finite maximums of ideational experience. 102:3.15 117:1.7
  • goodness is one of the fruits of the spirit 34:6.13 193:2.2
  • Socrates and his successors, Plato and Aristotle, taught that virtue is knowledge; goodness, health of the soul 98:2.6
  • Goodness, like truth, is always relative and unfailingly evil-contrasted. It is always growing toward new levels. Goodness is living, relative, always progressing, invariably a personal experience, and everlastingly correlated with the discernment of truth and beauty. 132:2.3-7
  • it is man’s effort to discern God in spirit 56:10.2
  • it is the nearness to divinity. Goodness is the mental recognition of the relative values of the diverse levels of divine perfection 3:6.2 56:10.12
  • truth, beauty, and goodness embrace the revelation of Deity to the realms of time and space. Goodness embraces the sense of ethics, morality, and religion—experiential perfection-hunger. 56:10.9-10
  • Divine goodness is more fully shown forth in the loving ministry of the manifold personalities of the Infinite Spirit. 56:10.17-18
  • Truth is coherent, beauty attractive, goodness stabilizing. 2:7.12
  • The concept of truth might possibly be entertained apart from personality, the concept of beauty may exist without personality, but the concept of divine goodness is understandable only in relation to personality. 1:7.3
  • In so far as man’s evolving morontia soul becomes permeated by truth, beauty, and goodness as the value-realization of God-consciousness, such a resultant being becomes indestructible. 111:3.7

Goodness of God (2:6)

  • God stretches out his beneficent hand to both the righteous and the wicked. 131:5.2
  • The infinite goodness of the Father is beyond the comprehension of the finite mind of time; hence must there always be afforded a contrast with comparative evil (not sin) for the effective exhibition of all phases of relative goodness. 4:3.6
  • In the physical universe we may see the divine beauty, in the intellectual world we may discern eternal truth, but the goodness of God is found only in the spiritual world of personal religious experience. 2:6.1
  • After all, the greatest evidence of the goodness of God and the supreme reason for loving him is the indwelling gift of the Father—the Adjuster who so patiently awaits the hour when you both shall be eternally made one. 2:5.5
  • The “richness of the goodness of God leads erring man to repentance.” 2:6.3 48:6.8 131:10.4 143:2.7 149:6.4
  • none is good but God 196:0.9 196:2.2
  • The sincere pursuit of goodness, beauty, and truth leads to God. 195:6.17

Jesus and goodness

  • Warned about dangers of uncontrolled goodness: indiscriminate kindness may be blamed for many social evils. 140:8.13
  • Jesus refrained from placing emphasis on evil by forbidding it, while he exalted the good by commanding its performance. 127:4.2
  • Jesus went about doing good 100:7.8 159:5.10 171:7.9
  • asked Nathaniel: “Master, shall we give no place to justice? The law of Moses says, ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. ’ What shall we say? ” And Jesus answered: “You shall return good for evil.” 140:6.9

Nature of goodness

  • On the mansion worlds they proclaim the great law of the conservation and dominance of goodness: No act of good is ever wholly lost; it may be long thwarted but never wholly annulled, and it is eternally potent in proportion to the divinity of its motivation. 48:6.7
  • all goodness takes origin in Father 8:2.7
  • since the quality of greatness is wholly determined by the content of goodness, it follows that, even in your present human estate, if you can through grace become good, you are thereby becoming great. 28:6.22
  • True goodness is like water in that it blesses everything and harms nothing. And like water, true goodness seeks the lowest places, even those levels which others avoid 131:8.3
  • Greatness and goodness simply cannot be divorced. 28:6.21 56:10.12 100:7.17
  • goodness effectually destroys evil. 188:5.2
  • goodness may be derived from time-limited evil 54:6.6-10
  • The righteousness of any act must be measured by the motive; the highest forms of good are therefore unconscious. 140:8.26 170:3.9
  • Human likes and dislikes do not determine good and evil; moral values do not grow out of wish fulfillment or emotional frustration. 100:3.2
  • no good act ever wholly lost 48:6.7
  • it is understandable by contrast with evil 4:3.6
  • Goodness, righteousness, and justice are philosophically interrelated and spiritually bound up together with living truth and divine beauty. 44:7.2-4
  • Goodness always compels respect, but when it is devoid of grace, it often repels affection. 171:7.2

Bible parallels

Passages that the paragraphs cited above parallel, quote or reinterpret, from Duane Faw’s Paramony cross-references. Hover a reference to read it.

Where it appears

Goodness is linked in 15 paragraphs of the text.

44:7.256:10.1075:4.376:2.694:6.495:6.297:3.3121:1.7131:9.3132:2.3147:4.6160:4.3171:7.2196:0.9196:2.2

See also

DeityEducationGoodJesusMedicineOil (vegetable)PatienceServiceSouls of GoodnessThought AdjustersTruth, beauty, and goodness
Categories: Concepts and teachings