You can’t make things good by accident. It’s not possible. No good thing that occurs happened by mere association with goodness. Goodness is not contagious. It is a choice, and it is a process. On the flip-side of that coin, bad is contagious. It occurs by accident. It occurs when one is not careful. It is the natural order of this fallen world. Bad things can and do occur from mere association with badness.

I’ll start you off with a common example and then we’ll move onto the Bible verses that prompted this article. Let’s talk about bread. Bread starts out as a bunch of inedible pieces that are put through a process to become edible. You take your yeast, flour, sugar, and salt, mix them together, cook them, and then you’ve turned a bunch of parts into something good. The baker has to do this intentionally. He can’t just put the ingredients next to each other, walk away, and come back to a good loaf of bread.

Now let’s talk about the enemy of bread—no, not carbs—mold. It’s the killer of all nice bread products left to sit for too long. I guarantee you: let that bread sit around long enough and mold will start growing on it making it bad to ingest. Making it useless for its intended purpose. It’s the inevitable result of something good being left to rot. And mold starts small, too, just a few spots here and there that got the worst exposure to air and moisture. But it spreads like a disease, and soon enough, it has taken over all the good, delectable bread, turning it bad.

That’s how good and bad works. You have to work to be good, while badness is innate in us all. By mere tangential association, you can be changed from good to bad if you don’t work quickly to catch it and remove it.

So, on to the Bible verses. Haggai 2: 12-13 says:

“‘If a man is carrying consecrated meat in the fold of his garment, and with his fold touches bread, stew, wine, oil, or any other food, does it become holy?’

The priests answered, ‘No.’

Then Haggai asked, ‘If someone defiled by contact with a corpse touches any of these, does it become defiled?’

The priests answered, ‘It becomes defiled.’”

I don’t know all the technicalities about purifying objects to make them holy, but I can assure you of this: there was certainly a process that each thing must go through to be made holy. Just like the bread before, there is a process to take something that is not good and make it good. You can’t sit touch something bad with something good and make it good, too. Just like you can’t place a loaf of bread next to flour and expect a second loaf of bread.

But as with mold, no such process exists to make something bad. You only need to touch something bad to defile yourself and anything you touch afterwards. You don’t have to do a ritual or intend to defile something. It just happens.

That’s how doing good and bad things work. Bad things happen by the laws of a sinful world. It is innate, born into our character as sinful human beings. You don’t have to try hard to do something bad to someone. You don’t have to scheme. Sometimes, you just do things that are bad because it’s all around us.

Have you ever heard the saying, “Garbage in, garbage out?” It means that whatever you intake in your life, you will output into your own life and the lives of others. In our case, the garbage is all around us. It’s like the oxygen we breathe to live in that we don’t consciously choose to breathe or to touch evil. It’s just there.

But good is intentional. It’s a process. It is, literally, sanctification, which is the process of being made holy. You can’t do good by accident; you most certainly can’t do good when you’re only associating with the bad. You have to be cleansed, purged of the mold that is suffocating you all the time, and purposefully go through the process God has lined out in the Bible to strive for righteousness.

You have to choose good all day, every day, in order to do good. You have to choose to cut away the mold and be what you were intended to be: good. You have to step out and make the good things happen for others and point them to the process of sanctification, of belief in Christ, so that they, too, can become good. Merely associating with them is not enough. It will only infect you with the mold once more. You have to choose to be good.