There was a golden age of comedy from the mid-2000s to the early twenty teens on network TV. These were the sitcoms that didn't have laugh tracks, that everybody knew, and you could crack jokes with each other because you were all watching the same shows. Four great, funny, smart sitcoms from that era from the network. So that means we can't counter rest the development because Fox, I think it's a, you know, it's different. The four big network ones. What were they? You got them? Okay, number one, I'm stalling, so you can think them through and you can get this right, and then we can mentally high-five over it. Okay, but I'm done stalling. Number one, The Office. Two, Thirty Rock. Three, Parks and Recreation. Four, what do you have? I think it's community, right? I really like community. Wildly talented cast, great writing, goofy, believable, cartoonish exaggerations of characters with traits that you've seen and that you've been around before, and that's what made it so fun. It ribbed everything. It happened right before everything got sanctimonious, and you just couldn't joke about half of the things anymore. Everybody got made fun of, everybody got redemption arcs, everybody got villain arcs. It worked great for the first three seasons, and I'm reminded of that as I'm watching through it again right now when I've got a few minutes to kill here and there and just pounding through an episode. There's one character in particular who I love. Her name is Shirley Bennett. She's an African-American lady, she's a single mom. She's in community college trying to make things work, and she's got this little circle of friends there in her study group that's kind of become a family to her, which is a very endearing character build, I should say. She's also a Christian, and she's a Christian who cherishes niceness because a lot of bad things have happened to her, and she likes it when things are nice. And so she constantly says that's nice to things. And it just delights me because it's such a loaded thing, and it's so safe. She likes nice because she likes safe. Because she's been through hard things. So every time she says it, I'm laughing at that, but also I feel affection for her. Like I said, it's great writing, great characters. Well, likewise, when we get to Galatians chapter five, there's a bunch of these fruit of the spirit here in this list, and most of them are going to elicit an immediate reaction as you read through it. You know, you see joy, and you can picture it, you got a sense of what just boisterous joy looks like. Patience. Well, you can picture impatience, and it's easy to picture what patience might look like. Gentleness, you can picture somebody who's rough and tumble and always breaking things, and then you can picture a gentle spirit, a gentle soul. But goodness that one in English is so milk toastified that it almost reads like that's nice. Like niceness is what it is. Just this generic, safe HR, overly guardrailed nebulous statement of the preferences and the comfort. Maybe it's a synonym almost for fair or sporting or uncomplicated. That's good. That's good. The goodness. It doesn't immediately pop off the page in English for us. And maybe as much as any of the words in this list of the fruit of the spirit, it requires a little bit of effort for us to zip around the Bible and try to figure out okay, well, what does this word that is way genericified in English mean when the Bible uses it in this context? Well, I don't think we're gonna have to brainstorm real hard to think of the first time that good gets prominently used as a concept in the Bible. But I'm still gonna stall for the second time in the episode to let you think about it for a minute. What do you got? Earliest occurrence of good that comes to mind in the Bible. It's Genesis, right? It's the creation account. We don't even get out of the first chapter of the Bible before we have the word good being used. And the contrast between the way the word good gets used in Genesis chapter one versus how we use it. Oh, that's good, man. Uh good. Hey, how's it going, man? Yeah, it's good. It's very, very significantly different because in Genesis 1, the word good gets used by God to describe the making of all existence. So we get done with six days worth of creation happening. Before there was nothing, now there's something. Light hadn't been invented six days ago, the physical universe hadn't been invented six days ago, animals hadn't been invented six days. So, I mean, a lot's happened in this week, and this is the way the chapter rounds out. God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning the sixth day. This is among the best things that could possibly be imagined in all of imagination, but you couldn't imagine it unless this had already happened, because imagination didn't exist, at least outside of God prior to Genesis chapter one. And then the word we get at the end in English is good. That's good. All right, good. Yeah, it falls a little bit flat. You see the way words move and migrate and deteriorate from overuse in any given language. I mean, it almost hits like God saw it and he was like, all right, okay, okay. But it's not, it's good, through and through good. And I wonder if the best way to think about this word, I'm kind of cheating ahead to where we're going in the conversation, is to think of it sort of in the way that the ancient Greek philosophers thought about it, as they did their virtue philosophizing at the school in Athens, or you know, the metaphorical school in Athens, we think of, you know, we associate with Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, but there's a ton more of these ancient world philosophers who were always thinking about virtue, like what is good? And they all seem to arrive at some idea of goodness being demonstrative or flowing out of or in keeping with true virtue, true truth, true beauty, things that are truly beneficial, things that are truly praiseworthy, things that are truly symmetrical and pleasing. And when you think of it that way, well, then the word seems to hit a little bit harder. Now, obviously, Genesis wildly predates the school of Greek philosophy that I'm talking about. And it looks like the Hebrew word here, by the way, if you think I'm horrible at Greek despite having gone to school for this, you should see my Hebrew. Theoretically, I was there for some of that, but you want to talk about things that did not stick. I have to use all the cheats and all the resources to do anything language-wise with the Old Testament. I'm a complete hack, so I just need to admit it. I'm bearing my soul before you. I don't know what I'm talking about. Tons of you do way better than I do. Thank you for not judging me that much. Tov, I think, is the word that is used for good in the Old Testament or used for good in this context, which is a great bit of trivia, but it kind of leads to the question of like, well, okay, yeah, the super ancient Hebrew. Like, how did people understand the word at the time of Jesus? How did people understand the use of that word in Genesis at the time that Paul is writing here in Galatians? And there are two words in Greek that are both very close when it comes to the word good. One is Kalos, and the other is Agathos. And if you're like Agathos, like the name for older ladies, Agatha, yeah, exactly that. Agatha is derived directly from this Greek word for good, which makes it a really interesting joke that in the Marvel cinematic universe, you've got a super evil Salem witch trials witch who's immortal and is sneaky and deceptive and looks good, but she's actually evil, and it was her all along. Whose name is Agatha? Props to whoever thought that up over there at Marvel Comics back in the day. Nice job. Well, that ancient Greek translation from the Hebrew of the Old Testament to a Greek version of the Old Testament renders that word Tov as kalos. In Galatians 5, in the fruit of the spirit passage, the literal word is agathos, or a slight derivation thereof, because we're not just saying good, we're saying goodness, and I don't remember what it is, and I don't have it in front of me. But one of the things that's interesting about this particular word, this concept good, is whether you're using either of those Greek words or the Hebrew word, you can fly all over the Bible, and they're all pretty much doing the same thing. They're all pretty much carrying the same meaning. Kalos and Agathos are virtually inseparable. I'm not good enough at Greek to understand why both words even existed, but uh in English, we have certain words that eventually evolve out to mean the exact same thing as each other, and it's just different flourishes as to which one you use. So I'm sure there's some wrinkle of difference between the two, but dang, they look identical to me. And because of that, it feels like it's pretty fair game to just go anywhere in the Bible where we're talking about good, and we're gonna get a decent concept of what we're talking about with that term in the ancient world versus the ambiguity that we get from that when we use it today. So where do we start? I don't know. I wrote down a bunch of stuff. These are fun exercises, by the way, to just brainstorm uh good. What comes to mind? Let's just click the pen and write it in my little TMBH Galatians notebook, and we'll just go with whichever one comes up. There are probably better verses and better examples, but this is what came to mind. James 1:17. Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the father of the heavenly lights who does not change like shifting shadows. I don't think that one was a Bible camp memory verse. I think that was a senior year New Testament memory verse. I went to a Christian high school and we had two semesters, I think, of New Testament classes, and we memorized a lot of Bible, and we memorized a ton of what concept, what's the gist of each chapter of the New Testament, and man, I hated that. And man, I am grateful they made me do it. I'm not satisfied with the level of Bibling that we have done on the word good or goodness just yet. So this is going to be a two-day enterprise. We're going to pause right here. And tomorrow we are going to continue to try to disambiguate between the modern, vague, nebulous notion of goodness. That's nice. And whatever goodness means in the actual Bible. All right, that's plenty for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.