There may be no compliment more common (or more meaningless) than calling someone “nice.” He’s a nice guy. She’s a nice person. The pastor was nice. The doctor was nice. The church was nice. But what have we actually said?
Usually something like pleasant, agreeable, easy to be around. They did not upset us. They did not make things awkward. They smiled. They listened. They made us feel comfortable.
None of this tells us much about whether someone is good. A coward can be nice. A liar can be nice. A con man had better be nice. An abusive husband can be charming at dinner. A dishonest pastor can shake every hand on Sunday morning. Some of the most dangerous people you will ever meet learned long ago how useful it is to be likable.
Nice tells us what someone is like to be around. Good tells us something about who they are. We have increasingly allowed the first word to swallow the second.
A good person has come to mean someone who affirms us, does not judge us, does not confront us, and does not say the thing that ruins dinner. Once nice becomes our working definition of good, discomfort begins to look like evidence of wrongdoing. If you upset me, you have done something wrong. If you confront me, you are unkind. If you tell me something I do not want to hear, you are judgmental. If your words hurt, your words must be harmful.
We have taken a word about character and turned it into a word about comfort.
I know what you might be thinking. Your reading this saying ”No, that’s not what I mean.”
Think about this. Suppose a surgeon walks into your hospital room. He does not smile or make small talk. He looks at your scans and says, “You have an aggressive tumor. Without surgery, you will probably be dead in six months. We’re operating this afternoon.” He signs the chart and walks out.
Was he nice? No.
As a chaplain, there is a good chance I would hear about him later. “That doctor was a jerk.” Perhaps he was. His bedside manner was terrible.
But that is not the question you most need answered. Is he good?
You do not know yet. You need to know whether the diagnosis is true, whether surgery is necessary, whether he is competent to perform it, whether he will enter the operating room sober, whether he has honestly explained the risks, and whether he is recommending the procedure for your welfare rather than his profit. Those things tell you whether this is a man you can trust with your life.
A charming surgeon can be incompetent or corrupt. An unpleasant surgeon can tell you the truth and save your life. Pleasantness, competence, and character are different things. Whether you like the doctor is simply not the most important question when you are about to hand him a scalpel.
A Strange Little History of “Nice”
Ironically, nice did not begin as a compliment. English received the word through Old French from the Latin nescius, meaning “ignorant” or “not knowing.” In its earliest English uses, calling someone nice could mean foolish or ignorant. Over the centuries it passed through meanings such as fussy, delicate, precise, agreeable, and eventually pleasant or likable.
None of this means that nice secretly means “idiot” today. Words change. Today the word principally tells us that someone is pleasant to encounter. That is far too little information to tell us whether someone is good.
Many of us spend our lives looking for the nice doctor. The nice therapist. The nice sponsor. The nice pastor. The nice chaplain. The nice church. We notice who makes us feel affirmed and who makes us uncomfortable, and then we turn that experience into a judgment about who is good.
“How did that make me feel?” becomes “Was that good?”
An unpleasant doctor may be a bad doctor. A confrontational therapist may be wrong. A pastor who offends people may simply be an offensive man. Discomfort proves goodness no more than comfort does. The mistake is using comfort to decide the question at all.
Once comfort becomes the measure, we can keep searching until we find someone who tells us what we already wanted to hear. We change counselors. We change sponsors. We change churches. We find voices that reassure us and avoid voices that might tell us the truth.
Then we bring the same definition to God. Christians say, “God is good.” Yet if good has come to mean pleasant, agreeable, affirming, accommodating, and unlikely to make us uncomfortable, we will judge God accordingly. Commands that frustrate our desires will seem suspect. Judgment will seem incompatible with love. Correction will feel like rejection. A God who refuses to affirm us will appear morally deficient.
We will think we are asking whether God is good when we are really asking whether God is nice. Those are two very different judgments.
God Is Not Nice. He Is Good.
The Bible does not merely say that God does good things. It describes goodness as belonging to the character of God himself.
Exodus 33–34 begins with a disaster. God has delivered Israel from Egypt, entered into covenant with them at Mount Sinai, and given them his commandments. Israel responds by making a golden calf and worshiping it as the god who brought them out of Egypt. They break the covenant almost as soon as it is made. Moses intercedes for them, and the question hanging over the story is whether this holy God will continue to dwell among a people who have already proved unfaithful.
So Moses asks God, “Please show me your glory” (Exodus 33:18). God answers, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name ‘The LORD’” (33:19). God answers a request for his glory by promising his goodness and his name. These are not three unrelated ideas. Moses has asked to know God, and God will answer by declaring who he is.
God does so in the next chapter, “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty.” Exodus 34:6–7
Israel hardly needs an explanation of these words. It has just lived them. The golden calf has made “iniquity and transgression and sin” concrete. The fact that there is still an Israel for God to address has made mercy concrete as well. Their rebellion has been judged, but judgment has not ended God’s covenant with them. Nor has Moses persuaded a reluctant God to become merciful. The mercy Israel receives belongs to the character God now names as his own. And “will by no means clear the guilty” prevents forgiveness from becoming mere indulgence. Mercy and judgment are not rival impulses in God negotiating a compromise. Exodus places both within the goodness God promised Moses.
Israel keeps returning to this description of God. The language of Exodus 34 appears in Numbers 14:18, Nehemiah 9:17, Psalm 86:15, Psalm 103:8, Psalm 145:8, Joel 2:13, and Jonah 4:2. God tells Moses who he is, and Israel learns to speak about God with the words God has given them.
Psalm 119:68 reduces the claim to one line, “You are good and do good; teach me your statutes.” God is good and God does good. His actions proceed from his character. The psalmist can therefore trust God’s statutes as well as God’s gifts. If the Lawgiver is good, his commands are not arbitrary exercises of power. They express the character of the One who gives them.
This also rules out a weaker meaning of good. To say that God is good is not simply to say that he is good at accomplishing his purposes. The distinction is the same one exposed by the surgeon. A surgeon can be technically brilliant and morally corrupt. Skill is not character. The Christian claim about God is not merely that nothing can frustrate his will. It is that the God whose will cannot finally be frustrated is himself good. There is no deceit in him, no private interest bending his judgment, no vice hiding behind his power. “You are good and do good.”
The Psalms refuse to make that goodness abstract. “The LORD is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations” (Psalm 100:5). God’s goodness can be trusted because God does not cease to be what he is. “The LORD is good to all, and his mercy is over all that he has made” (Psalm 145:9). His goodness issues in generosity toward the creation he made and continues to sustain. “Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!” (Psalm 34:8). The point of calling God good is not simply that one can say something true about him. One can entrust oneself to him.
Nahum makes a sentimental account of that goodness impossible. Nahum prophesies against Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, an empire that built its power through conquest and terror. He begins by calling the LORD “jealous and avenging” and “wrathful” toward his enemies (Nahum 1:2). Then he describes this avenging God with the language of Exodus 34, “The LORD is slow to anger and great in power, and the LORD will by no means clear the guilty” (1:3).
The verbal connection controls how Nahum’s language should be read. “Slow to anger” and “will by no means clear the guilty” are the language God used when he revealed himself to Moses. Nahum’s God has not acquired an angry personality. The God judging Nineveh is the God of Exodus 34. His patience is real, and so is his refusal to make peace with evil.
Nineveh had already learned about the first. In the book of Jonah, an earlier generation hears the warning of judgment, repents, and is spared. Jonah complains because he knows God is “a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love” (Jonah 4:2). Jonah is quoting Exodus 34 too. The same confession explains why Nineveh is spared in Jonah and why Nineveh is judged in Nahum.
Nahum can therefore say in the middle of an oracle of judgment, “The LORD is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble; he knows those who take refuge in him” (Nahum 1:7). The judgment of Nineveh belongs to that goodness. Assyria’s victims need a refuge because Assyria has made one necessary, and God’s care for them takes the form of opposition to what is destroying them. Indefinite tolerance of oppression would amount to indifference. Goodness protects what is good by opposing what destroys it.
But by what standard do we call God good? When a wealthy man addresses Jesus as “Good Teacher,” he replies, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone” (Mark 10:17–18). God alone is good in the unqualified sense. Human goodness is received, we learn what is good, grow or fail in it, and are measured by a moral order we did not make. God’s goodness is underived.
The standard is God’s own character. If goodness stood above God, something would be more ultimate than God. If good meant whatever sheer divine power happened to command, calling God good would tell us nothing about his character. God wills what is good because God is good. His will expresses who he is.
That makes human guilt a problem for more than human beings. Romans 3 says “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (3:23), then describes sinners as “justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (3:24). Paul puts the emphasis on God’s righteousness as well as our salvation. God put Christ forward as a propitiation “to show his righteousness,” “so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” (3:25–26).
Exodus 34 had already placed the problem before us. God “forgives iniquity and transgression and sin” and “will by no means clear the guilty.” Romans locates the answer in Christ. God deals with guilt and justifies the guilty. The cross makes forgiveness an act of righteousness. God is “just and the justifier.”
Scripture’s claim can finally remain as simple as the psalmist made it, “You are good and do good.” God’s mercy, faithfulness, judgment, commands, and salvation proceed from the same character. Goodness belongs to who God is.
We Need Lions
Christians have quoted Lewis on Aslan so often that the line risks becoming cliché. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Susan learns that Aslan is a lion and asks whether he is safe. Mr. Beaver answers, “Who said anything about safe? ’Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.”
The line works because safe and good answer different questions. Safety concerns what Aslan might do. Goodness concerns who Aslan is. His character is what makes his enormous power trustworthy.
That is close to the distinction we have lost. Nice tells us that someone is pleasant to encounter. Good tells us whether they can be trusted.
A therapeutic culture makes the same mistake at scale. Feeling affirmed becomes evidence that something is healthy. Discomfort becomes evidence that something is wrong. Niceness thrives under those conditions because it works. It is socially efficient. Agree, affirm, avoid the difficult subject, and people generally think well of you. What began as a pleasant disposition can easily become a way of moving through the world without ever paying the social cost of conviction.
That becomes a problem when we are expected to lead. Leadership cannot merely facilitate whatever people already want. It has to distinguish better from worse, wisdom from foolishness, truth from falsehood, the road that leads somewhere from the road that does not. There are moments when leadership requires the nerve to say no, stop, this is wrong, or simply follow me.
We are living through one of those moments. People are being destroyed by appetites and ideas they were taught would liberate them. At the same time, there is a real hunger for Jesus. The fields are ripe. This is no time to substitute pleasantness for character.
We have enough nice Christians. We need lions. I would take one good Christian over a room full of nice ones.