God is necessarily good in regard to His nature, but freely good in regard to how His nature flows out to this or that particular object.

It is agreeable for the highest good to be absolutely free to dispense His goodness in what methods and measures He chooses, according to the free determinations of His own will.  He is guided by the wisdom of His mind and regulated by the holiness of His nature.  “He will answer none of man’s words”.  (Job 33:13).  God said to Moses, “I will have mercy on who I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion”.  (Romans 9:15).  When He acts, He cannot but act well, so it is necessary.  Yet He may act this good or that good to this or that degree, so that it is free.  As goodness is the perfection of His nature, it is necessary.  As goodness is the communication of His bounty, it is voluntary.

From the book Boundlessly Good

When His goodness moved Him to make a creature, His goodness necessarily moved Him to be beneficial to the creature.  This necessity does not result from any merit in the creature which God had framed, but instead stems from the excellency and generosity of His own nature and His own glory…….  What reason for praise and thankfulness could an innocent creature have if God had given him a miserable frame?  The goodness of God would not permit Him to make a creature without providing a means of its living, as long as He thought it good to maintain the creature and furnish it with all that was necessary to achieve the end for which He created it:  His own glory.

From the book “Boundlessly Good“

The very act of creation – communicating His being to anything outside of Himself – is itself an act of goodness, as well as an act of power……  In the act of giving existence, He is liberal and generous.  The being He bestows is a display of His own liberality:  He could not confer what He did not have to and what was not deserved unless He was bountiful.  The very act of giving being to nothing was an act of choice goodness.  God could not create anything without goodness being the chief and necessary motive.

His goodness could not require Him to make the world – His goodness could only move Him to resolve to make a world.  He was not bound to erect and fashion it because of His goodness, but He could not frame it without His goodness as the moving cause.

None is necessarily good but God:  He is as necessarily good as He is necessarily God.  [“Necessarily” means that His goodness inevitably results from His nature – He can act no other way].  His goodness is as inseparable from His nature as His holiness.  He can no more act contrary to this goodness in any of His actions than He can un-God himself.

It was not necessary that God create a world.  It was His own choice whether He should create or not, but when He resolved to make a world, it was necessary that He should make it good because He is goodness itself and cannot act against his own nature.  He could not create anything without goodness in it.

From the book “Boundlessly Good”

God does not carry a niggardly, miserly, and envious nature:  He is too rich to envy, and too good to have any desire to envy.  He is as liberal (generous) as He is rich, lavishing bounty according to the ability of the creature that His goodness is exercised on.

The divine goodness, since it is the supreme goodness, is goodness that is highly active.  God’s goodness is not an idle pent-up goodness like a closed spring or a sealed fountain bubbling up within itself, but God’s goodness bubbles out of itself:  a fountain of gardens to water every part of His creation.  “The fullness of Him who fills all in all” (Ephesians 1:23)

From the book “Boundlessly Good”

The notion of God includes goodness, and the notion of goodness includes diffusiveness, or the giving out of goodness.  Without goodness God would cease to be a deity, and without diffusiveness He would cease to be good.

The being good is necessary to the being God, for goodness is nothing else (in its simplest form) but a strong inclination to do good;  either to find or render an object good according to the inclination of the finder’s own good nature.  Goodness is a readiness to communicate itself, not for its own interest, but the good of the object it prevails upon.

And so God is good by nature, and His nature is not without activity.  He acts consistently with His own nature:  “You are good and do good” (Psalm 119:68).  And nothing benefits Him by communicating Himself to others since His blessedness is as great now (with all creation looking on) as ever it was before the erecting of the world.

From the book “Boundlessly Good”

God is omnipotent, therefore no good can be lacking in Him (if He were destitute of any part of His nature, He would not be all-mighty).  He is so good that there is no mixture of anything un-good in Him, whereas everything beside Him is lacking in some good.

Nothing can be so supreme an evil as God is supreme goodness.  He is all good and unmixedly good.  None is good but God:  a goodness, like the sun, which has all light and no darkness.

From the book “Boundlessly Good”

God is all good, and every creature carries a distinct variety of goodness.  God distinctly pronounced every day’s work in creation “good”.  Food communicates the goodness of its nourishment to our bodies.  Flowers speak the goodness of their aromas to our smell.  Every creature offers a goodness of comeliness to our sight.  Plants bring the goodness of healing qualities for our cure, and all present a goodness of objective knowledge to our understandings.

The sun , one sort of goodness, warms us, metals enrich us, living creatures sustain us and delight us.  All those have distinct kinds of goodness which are summed up in God, and are all only parts of His immense goodness.  It is He that enlightens us with His sun, nourishes us with bread…”Man shall not live by bread alone….” Matthew 4:4.

It is all but His own supreme goodness, conveyed to us through those varieties of conduit-pipes.  God is all good.  Other things are good in their kind…. but God has a good of all kinds richly in His nature.  He is no less all-good than He is all-mighty, and all-knowing.

Being good per se, and by His own essence, God must needs be the chief Goodness in whom there is nothing but good.  From the chief goodness there can proceed nothing but good.  All good in existence must be oriented back to that chief goodness, and it itself must be the final cause of all good.

Nothing can add to Him or make Him better than He is.  Nothing can detract from Him and make Him worse.  Nothing can be added to Him, nothing can be severed from Him, no created good can render Him more excellent, and no evil from any creature can render Him less excellent.   “You are my Lord; I have no good apart from You” says the Psalmist (Psalm 16:2).