And God Saw That It Was Good

Today's Scripture

Genesis 1:31 — "And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good."

Psalm 19:1-4 — "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard. Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world."

Psalm 24:1-2 — "The earth is the LORD's and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein, for he has founded it upon the seas and established it upon the rivers."

The Big Idea

Before the Bible tells us what nature is for, it tells us what nature is: God's handiwork, made with delight and called good. Creation was good before any human existed to use it. If the world is God's beloved work, then how we treat it is never a side issue — it is part of how we treat him.

Reflection

Seven verdicts

Genesis 1:1 — "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." That is the Bible's first sentence, and it sets up a refrain that runs through the whole chapter like a drumbeat: and God saw that it was good.

Count the verdicts. Light is good. The gathered seas are good. Plants are good. Sun and moon are good. Fish and birds are good. The land animals are good. Six times God looks at what he has made and approves it — and humans have not shown up yet.

No farmer had planted anything. No fisherman had cast a net. No human eye had ever seen a sunset. And God already called it all good. The goodness of the world does not start when it becomes useful to us. It starts with the Maker's own delight. Then, after people arrive, comes the seventh verdict: Genesis 1:31 — "behold, it was very good."

"Good" here is not a shrug, the way we say a sandwich is good. It is a craftsman's verdict — the word of an artist stepping back from the canvas, satisfied. Genesis 1 shows us a God who likes what he made and is not embarrassed to say so, seven times.

John Calvin, the great teacher of the Reformation, said the right response to all this is not analysis but enjoyment:

"Meanwhile being placed in this most beautiful theatre, let us not decline to take a pious delight in the clear and manifest works of God." — John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion

A theater is a place you go to watch something wonderful. Calvin is saying the world is that place, and delighting in it is a form of worship — not a distraction from it. Jonathan Edwards, the American preacher, went even further. He saw the character of Jesus shining through ordinary scenery:

"When we are delighted with flowery meadows and gentle breezes of wind, we may consider that we see only the emanations of the sweet benevolence of Jesus Christ. When we behold the fragrant rose and lily, we see his love and purity." — Jonathan Edwards, Miscellanies

"Emanations" is an old word for something streaming out from a source, the way warmth streams from a fire. For Edwards, a meadow is not just pretty. It is kindness, leaking out of God.

The world will not stop talking

Psalm 19 makes a strange claim: the sky talks. "Day to day pours out speech." Creation is a broadcast that never goes off the air, telling anyone who will listen about the glory of its Maker — no words, no sound, yet the message reaches "to the end of the world."

Here is the uncomfortable part. The broadcast never stops, but we have mostly stopped listening. We check our phones eighty times a day and look at the sky almost never. The notifications are louder, but they are not saying anything nearly as important.

Augustine, the North African bishop, once described putting creation on the witness stand and questioning it like a detective:

"I asked the earth, and it answered, 'I am not He'... I asked the sea and the deeps, and the living creeping things, and they answered, 'We are not thy God, seek above us.'... And with a loud voice they exclaimed, 'He made us.'" — Augustine, Confessions

Every creature gives the same testimony: He made us. Nature is glorious, but it keeps pointing past itself, like a signpost. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who was also a priest, compressed the whole idea into one line:

"The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil." — Gerard Manley Hopkins, "God's Grandeur"

"Charged" — like a wire carrying electricity. The glory is in there, humming, ready to flash out at you from a puddle or a sparrow if you actually look. C.S. Lewis said the real problem is not that God is hidden but that we are asleep:

"We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito." — C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

Incognito means "in disguise." The world is crowded with God. The question is whether we will notice.

Good before useful

Our culture grades almost everything by one question: what does it do? A phone is judged by what it does for you. A class, a job, even a friendship gets the same test. And without thinking, we grade nature that way too — a forest becomes so many board-feet of lumber, a river becomes a power source, a mountain becomes a view that raises property values.

Genesis refuses that math. God called the world good five days before there was anyone around to use it. And the Psalms tell us what creation's first job actually is. Psalm 148:7-10 — "Praise the LORD from the earth, you great sea creatures and all deeps, fire and hail, snow and mist, stormy wind fulfilling his word! Mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars! Beasts and all livestock, creeping things and flying birds!"

Sea creatures in deeps no human will ever visit. Snowstorms no one sees. According to this psalm, they are not wasted — they are worshiping. Creation's first calling is not production but praise. Usefulness to humans was never the point; delight in God was.

Thomas à Kempis, a quiet monk from the 1400s whose little book on following Jesus has been read for six centuries, said the problem is not that creation has stopped speaking — it is that something in us has stopped hearing:

"If thine heart were right, then every creature would be a mirror of life and a book of holy doctrine." — Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

A right heart finds sermons in sparrows. A heart trained only to ask "what's it worth to me?" walks through God's gallery seeing nothing but raw material. Learning to value what God values — good before useful — is where creation care begins.

Whose world is this?

Now comes the verse that changes the whole conversation about the environment. Psalm 24:1-2 — "The earth is the LORD's and the fullness thereof." Not humanity's. Not the market's. Not even "ours to save." The earth belongs, every acre of it, to God.

Psalm 104:24 says it with wonder: "O LORD, how manifold are your works! In wisdom have you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures." Psalm 104 is a long song about God enjoying his world — feeding lions, watering trees, playing with sea creatures. People appear in the psalm, but they are not the center of it. God is.

If you ever doubt that, read God's speech to Job. Job 38:4-7 — "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?... when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" God spends four chapters touring Job through wild weather, wild oceans, and wild animals that no human has ever tamed or even seen. The point lands hard: the world was never about you.

In 1970, Francis Schaeffer wrote a little book answering critics who blamed Christianity for the environmental crisis. His answer did not start with politics. It started with love:

"If I love the Lover, I love what the Lover has made." — Francis Schaeffer, Pollution and the Death of Man

Think of how this works in ordinary life. If your grandmother knit you a sweater, you do not throw it in the mud — not because the sweater is sacred, but because she made it. Carelessness with the gift is coldness toward the giver. Schaeffer's point is that a Christian who shrugs at the trashing of creation has a love problem, not just an ecology problem.

Made through him, made for him

So far this could sound like a duty: God made it, so behave. But the New Testament turns the lights all the way up, and what it shows us is Jesus.

Colossians 1:16-17 — "For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible... all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together." The Son of God is not only the rescuer of souls. He is the one through whom every forest, ocean, and galaxy was made — and the one holding every atom together right now, including yours.

And here is the gospel — the good news at the center of everything: the Maker stepped into his own creation. The Word became flesh. Jesus ate broiled fish, slept in a wooden boat, made mud with his own spit to heal a blind man, and rose from the dead with a real body you could touch. God did not save us by pulling us out of the material world. He saved us by entering it, dying in it, and rising as the firstfruits of its renewal.

That is why heaven's worship is a creation song. Revelation 4:11 — "Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created." And it is why Paul can say, 1 Timothy 4:4 — "For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving."

We do not care for creation to earn God's love. We care for it because in Christ we have met the One it belongs to — the Lover behind everything the Lover has made. Gratitude, not guilt, is the engine.

Going Deeper

Sometime today, take ten unhurried minutes outside without your phone. Name five created things you can see or hear — a specific tree, a specific bird, the exact color of the evening sky. For each one, say a single sentence to God: "You made this, and it is good." That is not a science exercise. It is joining a choir that has been singing since the morning stars sang together (Job 38:7) — and learning to hear the broadcast again.