17 And as he was setting out on his way, one individual ran up and knelt down before him and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do so that I will inherit eternal life?” 18 So Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. 19 You know the commandments: ‘Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony, do not defraud, honor your father and mother.’” 20 And he said to him, “Teacher, all these I have observed from my 
youth.” 21 And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, “You lack one thing: Go, sell all that you have, and give the proceeds to the poor—and you will have treasure in heaven—and come, follow me.” 22 But he looked gloomy at the statement and went away sorrowful, because he had many possessions. -Mark 10:17-22
“No one is good except God alone.” Ponder that, think about it. I have been lately, it’s the premise of the whole thing. If we are going to see God, we must likewise be good. But we are creatures, and fallen creatures at that. How are we supposed to bridge the gap between God, who alone is good and Holy, and we ourselves, who are fallen and sinful human beings? We somehow have to come to have ‘eyes to see and ears to hear’ the Holy face and voice of God.
Humans are worshipping beings by design. Born into a fallen and ruptured state with the living God, we think ourselves to be all knowing gods, and this by nature. God alone is good according to Jesus. If we are to see and hear God, we must also be good. Good not in the sense of relatively good (i.e., compared to our neighbors), but good in the absolute sense; like God. This is the only avenue that leads to being able to see God in His fullness, and not die.
Many in the world falsely comfort themselves with the idea that: “I’m not that bad, I’m a good-hearted person etc.” But where does the notion of good even come from for such people; where do they derive their notion of goodness from? For people in the culture, writ large, goodness, as alluded to above, is largely derived from what counts as good in their own eyes. They look around at people who are “worse” than them, societally speaking, and conclude from their that they are a relatively good person. Even if that’s the case it still doesn’t explain where the notion of goodness comes from in the first place.
Some natural theologians would appeal to the idea of natural law, natural theology, general revelation, and conscience to explain how people seemingly just have some flickering notion of what goodness is. But I protest (surprise!) I would argue that the notion of goodness that Jesus has in mind is of another world, the world He came to mediate us into; as He came into the far country of His fallen creation as one of us. In other words, as we read above, Jesus’ interlocutors, as a matter of simple and seemingly self-evident engagement with Jesus, simply presumed to call Him ‘good.’ But He knew they were doing so based on superficial appearances, by what they could see with their own eyes. He knew that they couldn’t see the depth dimension of goodness, like He could as the Son of God. And it was this goodness that He was calling people to, a goodness that can only obtain as the heart of stone is replaced with the living heart of flesh that Christ alone formed for them, for us in His resurrected humanity. What Jesus was telling them, telling us, is that there is an alien (relative to us) goodness that can not be perceived by the human mind alone; that there must be an irruption, an in-breaking from the heavens if human beings are to experience goodness as it really is in the triune God.
Hence, there is nothing ‘natural’ about goodness according to Jesus. Goodness doesn’t underwrite this world system, nor any of its children. Goodness can only be encountered as a person is confronted by God’s goodness for them in Jesus Christ. So, the idea of a natural theology, a general revelation, or a conscience funding some sort of abstract or general notion of goodness is confounded. According to Jesus, God is good, and the only way this can be known is through Jesus. Even in the account we are looking at in Mark, ironically, it is Jesus telling his questioners that the goodness they thought they knew was more than flesh deep. That goodness is more than humanity alone can imagine; that goodness must break into this world afresh anew, each and every moment, by the Holy Spirit’s Christ conditioned ministry for the world; that goodness isn’t something any human being possesses, but can only become possessed by as the Holy Spirit comes to reside in them, and He unioning them, us to the goodness of God in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ (who is God for us enfleshed).
This is why Christian witness is so significant. The world has a sense of goodness not because it is something inherent to them, to the ‘natural’ universe. The world has a sense of goodness because God broke into this world in Jesus Christ, and revealed Himself to the world; even while ‘hidden’ in the flesh of a man of sorrow acquainted with grief. It is the Christian witness that serves as the Light to the world, that Christ is risen and God is good. But as is typical of the world, and those Christians who subscribe to natural knowledge of God, this reality of God’s goodness, as given in Christ, by the Holy Spirit, and in the Christian witness to Christ, is abstracted and collapsed into a notion of goodness that they discovered. And it is this notion of goodness that gets superimposed onto a natural construction of godness through which people come to have control over God; that they are then able to make Him a predicate of their wills, their desires, their suppositions about metaphysics, so on and so forth.
Jesus came to tell the world that this notion of goodness, one abstracted by the human mind (by whatever means, and under whatever conditions) is false. His interlocutors presumed to know what ‘good’ entails, but Jesus clearly confounded them by pointing them to God alone as the circumscription of what goodness is. He pointed away from Himself, only for the Father, by the Spirit, to point back to Him and say: “this is my dearly beloved Son, hear Him!” This is how the triune God operates, by finding their life in their relationship with the other; this is God’s oneness in action. Likewise, our life, and the goodness therein can only come to be known and lived as we look away from ourselves, and look upward to God, as He has made a way for that in and through Christ’s vicarious eyes for us. As we participate in this vision, in this life, we can bear witness to genuine goodness, to the living God, and provide the salt the world needs to come to have the flavor of heaven it needs to “taste and see that God is good.”