Scripture
31 God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. There was evening and there was morning, a sixth day.
Audio Commentary
Abstract
The chapter closes with God’s own evaluation of His finished work: “very good.” Because God knows all things, that verdict is objective — the creation is flawless and perfectly fit for its purpose, and the shift from “good” on the earlier days to “very good” on the sixth marks the world’s readiness, once humanity is made, to receive man and to declare God’s glory. That God, who could have created in an instant, chose instead to work six days and rest reveals Him as a free agent of His own will and sets a pattern for human labor and rest — leaving a finished creation through which all people still glimpse His general revelation.
Brief Observations
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A flawless, finished work — The chapter ends with God evaluating His completed creation and finding it without flaw.
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”Very good” is an objective verdict — Because God knows all things about what He made, His judgment that it is very good is objectively true; there is no ground for supposing the original creation fell short of what it could have been.
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The example of self-evaluation — That God assesses His work models a Christian duty: to reflect on one’s choices and judge them by their fruit, communing with God in prayer at each day’s end over what was done and left undone.
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Judged only when complete — God waits until the work is finished before pronouncing it good — and if anyone had the right to judge prematurely, it is He.
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”Good” means fit for its purpose — To call the creation good is to say it is fit to satisfy the purpose for which it was designed; this is why the earlier days are “good” but the sixth, once humanity is made, is “very good” — the world being good insofar as it is prepared to receive man and to declare God’s glory.
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Six days by choice, as an example — God could have made everything in an instant; that He took six days and rested on the seventh shows Him a free, authoritative agent of His own will and sets a pattern of labor and rest for us — closing the account with a creation He has declared very good, through which all people still experience His general revelation.
Full Commentary
This final verse of chapter one wraps up the creation with an evaluation of God’s finished work. The results were without flaw. Everything God made was very good and was given for a very good purpose. Two facts worthy of note in this evaluation are these: God’s work is perfect, and God will always finish what He started. This verse also gives us the first explication of God’s omniscience. Scripture says God saw all that He had made. This means He could see everything He had made all at the same time. This remains true of God today. All the work of His hand is still under His eye. The omniscient Creator God who made all things still sees all things. This includes ourselves at every turn of our daily lives.
God knows all things about His creation and so for Him to judge it as very good means it was objectively very good. There’s no theological grounds from which to suggest God’s initial creation was somehow less than it could have been. This means the Fall of man and the redemptive work of Christ — planned in the eternal mind of God from before the creation itself — was part of God’s very good design. Watching God reflect on the products of His own wisdom and power sets an example for our own contemplation today.
God has given us the ability to reflect on our ways and to judge the quality of our decisions based on the fruit they produce. It is a Christian obligation of sanctification to continually self-evaluate and aspire to a truthful understanding of yourself. Where are you falling short? What parts of your life are bearing bad fruit? These are indicators of the things which must be changed as you are shaped into the image of Jesus Christ. Psalm 119 encourages us to consider our ways and turn our feet to the testimony of the Lord. This means using the scripture as plumb-line to determine what’s righteous, true, and good in our lives.
At the close of each day it is wise for a Christian to reflect on his or her choices and the quality of one’s work. We should commune with God in prayer and ask Him what we did which we shouldn’t have done and what we failed to do which we should have done. This process should repeat in kind when we arrive at the end of a week and begin our Sabbath rest. Self-evaluation and meditation on the word of God should be a part of every healthy Christian’s life consistently until they finish the race at the end of their lives. No Christian should come to the end of their life unaware of the sins standing between himself and God. The principal office of God’s Holy Spirit is to point these things out to us and equip us to overcome them so that when we face the grave — we can do so faithfully and we can do so in repentance for our sins.
Notice how God waits until His work is complete before He declares it to be very good. If anyone has the authority to make premature assumptions about the quality of His work — it’s God. As Christians we should resist making pronunciations until we’ve heard the entire case or until the work is complete. Very often we don’t notice how many mistakes we’ve made until we get to the other side of something. Part of Christian humility is understanding we’re going to perform poorly at new tasks until we’ve developed a mastery of them. Unlike our first efforts, God’s first attempt at creating the heavens and the earth was entirely well-executed and there was no flaw in anything He made. The definition of flawless in this context simply means the created order perfectly matched the vision God had in mind before He made it.
To call the creation “good” also implies it was fit to satisfy the purpose for which God designed it. In philosophy this is called a platonic ideal — it just means we’re able to objectively judge the quality of something based on that thing’s ability to fulfill its purpose. So if I say I have a bad knee, a bad knee is different from a good knee only insofar as a bad knee is incapable of performing the purpose of a knee. The purpose of the creation was to provide habitation for humanity and to glorify its Creator God.
The purpose of the creation is what accounts for the difference between God evaluating it as “good” across the first 5 days and then “very good” on the sixth day once He creates humanity. The world God creates is good insofar as it is prepared to receive human beings and itself declares the glory of God. The entire project becomes “very good” with the arrival of man because man is the fulfillment of the creation’s purpose in that man receives the Earth’s abundance and man verbalizes the creation’s declaration of the glory of God. Man puts into words the same praise and honor the creation itself extends to its Creator. The creation of man marks the emergence of God’s most complex work and the finishing stroke to the harmony He had developed across the six days of creation. The creation exists is layers of harmony much like a sophisticated piece of music.
As we’ve studied the first chapter of Genesis we’ve had the privilege to walk through the scriptures and appreciate how God made the world in six days. Based on what we know of God, we may conclude He could have easily made all of this in an instant. In one instant He declared “Let there be light.” and there was light. It would have been just as easy for Him to say “Let everything come into being.” and everything would appear in an instant. God is able to bring the dead back to life in an instant as Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians 15 when he says, “Now I say this, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Behold, I tell you a mystery; we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet; for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For this perishable must put on the imperishable, and this mortal must put on immortality.”
So if nothing is too difficult for God to perform in an instant, why did He take six days? One reason is to show us He is a free, authoritative agent of His own will. God does His work in His own way and in His own time — even when His ways and His timing make no sense to us. If God’s going to freely choose to take His time in the creation of the universe — when He obviously doesn’t need to — we should rest assured when He takes time in answering our prayers or providing for our own lives.
God also worked six days and rested on the seventh day in order to set an example for us. Although we can strive to comprehend God creating an entire universe in an instant, it’s difficult for us to relate to that kind of omnipotence. We ourselves would suffer negative consequences if we never took time to rest. God resting on the seventh day is what makes the Sabbath holy and gives us reason to follow it. God knew that Sabbath would be so integral to us stewarding our relationship with Him that He demonstrated it for us in the creation of the universe.
The creation account in Genesis 1 finishes by reminding us God has reflected upon His creation and declared it to be very good. This is why all of us today are able to experience a general revelation of God in the things He has made. Yes it’s true that creation groans under the curse of the Fall, but it remains the very good creation God made from the beginning. Perhaps most importantly, to witness the power and omniscient wisdom God demonstrated to create the universe gives us more reason to praise and worship Him. His works testify to the glory of His name and may we join that everlasting chorus for as long as we live and forever into eternity.