The Showcase of God's Glory: Essential Goodness

God is able to do good, however, because He is necessarily good. Just as without natural knowledge God is not God, so is His goodness necessary to His nature. Whatever God is, He is good. Erickson writes that there exists an objective, universal set of values that define moral good and evil. However, these values are not external to God, but rather inherent in His very being and constitution. He is the highest good by His very nature. As the first category of Biblical teaching on God’s goodness illustrates, even without His actions God, essentially is good.
Because He is necessarily and essentially good, God’s chief concern is His own glory. Whereas selfishness and self-worship are viewed as negative qualities in human beings, His love and worship of Himself is fundamental to God’s nature and His goodness. The divine egocentricity exemplifies how God may be both necessarily and nominally good. He must, because of His very nature, pursue His own glory as He has no higher standard than Himself. Furthermore, He must worship and love Himself above all things, for to do so is the highest commandment of His Word. To make anything else the supreme objective would be idolatry and betray His goodness.
From eternity past, God’s goodness has sought and been exemplified by His own glory. In the creative act, God chose His Kingdom to be the centerpiece and showcase of that glory. The Creation event, in and of itself, is a demonstration of God’s goodness to be comprehended. Because of His goodness, He must pursue His glory in all things, and this requirement necessitated that all aspects of the Kingdom He created must glorify Him supremely from creation onward. His eternal will, which seeks His own glory, is synonymous with His will for the Kingdom, as in this world the same pursuit of His eternal goodness and glory is to be accomplished. A lesser pursuit of His glory in this world would mean that God did not accomplish what He set out to do, which would undermine either His omniscience to plan such a world, His omnipotence to create such a world, and/or His goodness to choose such a world. If any one of these elements were true, then God would be not-God, and such a scenario is a logical impossibility.