<p>19:17&nbsp;<em>And he said to him: Why do you ask me about what is good?- </em>Or: &quot;Why do you call Me good?&quot;. The Greek of the subsequent sentence may not mean that the Lord was implying &lsquo;Only God is good- I am not good&rsquo;. Translators have added a number of words to try to flesh out the meaning of the words. The sense could just as well be &lsquo;None is as good as the one God&rsquo;- and therefore, we should keep&nbsp;<em>His</em>&nbsp;commandments. In other words, the Lord is not so much saying that He Himself is not &lsquo;good&rsquo; but rather refocusing the man&rsquo;s direction away from Himself towards the Father. For the man had come running to Him asking what he should do in order to inherit or rightfully have eternal life. And the Lord is refocusing the man upon the Father and the Father&rsquo;s commandments. The Lord may therefore have a rhetorical sense in His question &lsquo;<em>why</em>&nbsp;do you call Me good?&rsquo;. His sense would have been: &lsquo;Why are you so keen to call me &ldquo;good&rdquo;, setting me on a level with God? Instead, focus on obeying God&rsquo;s commandments and tackle your hardest challenge- to give away your wealth, and then follow Me in the itinerant life towards the cross&rsquo;. The man&rsquo;s overly high and unrealistic view of Jesus, as if He were God Himself, was really an excuse for his own refusal to face the challenge of living the Christian life. Every false doctrine has a psychological basis, and the idea that Jesus is God and the Trinity are no different. To accept Jesus as less than God, as totally human, is a far deeper challenge to our living than accepting Jesus as being God Himself. If Jesus was human, sharing our own flesh, in which there dwells no good thing (Rom. 7:18), and yet was able to be perfect- this lays down a huge challenge to each of us. It&rsquo;s far less challenging to accept Jesus as God and therefore good and perfect by nature. This is why I suggest the Lord is probing&nbsp;<em>why</em>&nbsp;the man called Him &ldquo;good&rdquo;- and redirected him towards the need for keeping the commandments and living the committed life in practice. So we have here a passage of deep significance for discussions about the Trinity. The Lord cites the unity of God as meaning that He alone is ultimately &lsquo;good&rsquo;, and challenges the man who wanted to treat Him as God as to whether this was not just an excuse for not doing the hard work of following Him in practice.</p>
<p><em>There is only One who is good. If you would enter life</em>- This is in response to the man&rsquo;s request that to know what to do that he might&nbsp;<em>have</em>&nbsp;eternal life. He saw the eternal life as beginning at judgment day, and thought he could do one great act now in order to assure getting that life then. The Lord tells him that he must &ldquo;Come follow Me&rdquo; (:21)- it was a way of life rather than one great act of sacrifice that was required. And we enter into life now, in that we can begin living the kind of life we will eternally live. The man had separated the future Kingdom from present life in a way that we are all tempted to. The future begins now in this respect. The Lord Jesus is the Kingdom of God (Lk. 17:21);&nbsp;<em>He&nbsp;</em>is the salvation of God rather than anything physical (Lk. 3:6). The Lord paralleled entering into the Kingdom with entering into &ldquo;life&rdquo; (Mt. 19:17 cp. Mt. 19:23; Mt. 18:3 cp. Mt. 18:8). He saw being in the Kingdom as essentially being about a&nbsp;<em>life</em>&nbsp;that would be enjoyed.</p>
<p><em>Keep the commandments</em>- The Lord uses&nbsp;<em>tereo</em>&nbsp;for &quot;keep&quot;, and the young man replies that he has &quot;kept&quot; the commandments from his youth, using&nbsp;<em>phulasso</em>&nbsp;(:20), which more has the sense of 'preserving'. His legalistic mind prides itself on having preserved the statement of faith, as it were; he has not [as the Scribes endlessly feared] added to the commandments but has preserved the correct text. But the Lord uses a word which implies more to obey and live by the commandments. The same mentality is perceivable in the one talent man, who kept his talent in pristine condition- but didn't use it (25:25). One problem with legalistic attitudes to statements of faith is that they can give the impression that the entire duty of man is to preserve them to the letter; when the Christian life is a call to obedience and action, rather than mere intellectual, theoretical preservation of ideas, however correct those ideas may be as theories.</p>
<p>The question of course is why the Lord chose to repeat the last six commandments of the ten commandments. Perhaps He perceived that they had special relevance to this rich young ruler. Harry Whittaker makes an interesting but not totally convincing case that the rich young man here was Barnabas and these commands were very relevant to him as a Levite- see&nbsp;<em>Studies in the Gospels&nbsp;</em>chapter 148.</p>
