It is very good
A reflection on Creation
I invite you to reflect with me on the ancient and profound poem found in the opening verses of the Book of Genesis.[1] We read it as a prose text, but in Hebrew it is a poem. It was probably meant to be a sung doxology in praise of God our Creator. It dates from the 6th Century BCE, when Israel had been defeated by the Babylonian empire, Jerusalem and its Temple destroyed, and its leaders forcibly relocated to Babylon. There the exiled priests wrote this praise-poem to console and inspire God’s people. It continues to do so 2,600 years later.[2]
It is important to remember this context. This poem was not written to provide a scientific account of how the world began. It was not written to express a timeless, fixed cosmology in mythic language. It was written to proclaim God’s freedom, power, and intention for the fulfillment of creation in spite of the experience of chaos, powerlessness, and despair. In doing so, it expressed a theological conviction about the relationship between God and creation.
The first thing the poem declares is that God is not finished with us yet. There is an intentional ambiguity in the very first verse of the text. It can be rendered “when God created” or “when God began to create.” God both has created and is still creating the world. We are a work in progress. The emptiness and darkness we may experience is not tomb but womb. God continues to foster life, to inspire a new beginning, to create what has not been before and did not seem possible.
Creation is not an accident. It is neither random nor determined, but rather emergent. It unfolds in response to God’s creative speaking things into being. It is the divine word that creates, but there is also the response to the word that is spoken. This isn’t simply a monologue. It is a dialogue, one that culminates in the human being who responds. The emergence of something genuinely new and unexpected in the ongoing process of creation occurs by way of permission, not demand. God says, “Let there be . . .” not “There must be.”
The implication is that there is an ongoing relationship between Creator and Creation, characterized by both nearness and distance, fidelity and freedom. God permits, invites, even persuades. God speaks with authority, but is not authoritarian. Creation is not coercion, but rather a field of conditions and allowances that make life and its fulfillment possible. God works with what is there already, and from and with that makes something new. God works for us and with us. God leaves space for our response.
That doesn’t mean that anything goes. The poem hymns the fundamental orderliness and goodness of creation, a set of boundaries and limits that allow for creation’s flourishing. By “goodness,” the text is not expressing a moral judgment, but rather an aesthetic appreciation. The creation is balanced, beautiful, delightful, whole – in the sense of containing everything it needs.
Notice too, that God takes delight in all of it – not just human beings – the whole thing and each of its constituent elements is good. God has a relationship with the whole and with each element. God blesses the living creatures before creating and blessing the human being. It isn’t all about us, and God’s relationship with the rest of creation isn’t mediated through us. We are not the arbiters of creation’s value. God is. And God said that it is very good.
This isn’t to say that the human being isn’t privileged in the poem. The poem rejoices that the human being is uniquely created in the image of God. Here we find another happy ambiguity in the text. God created humankind – singular – in his image, in the image of God he created them – plural – male and female he created them. It is together in community, in our singularity and in our solidarity, that we image the divine. Creator and creation are in relationship, and human beings are in relationships as God is in relationship with everything that exists, and everything that exists is in relationship with everything else that is. In the beginning is the relation.
What follows from our imaging of God-in-relationship is that we have a responsibility to care for all of the relationships within creation. The task of dominion is not exploitation or abuse of creation, but rather nurturing its intrinsic generativity and goodness and protecting its God-given dignity and integrity. God blessed the creatures. God blessed the human being, and so we must bless the creatures if we are to image God clearly. To bless is to infuse with the energy of life. Our freedom and power, like God’s, is in the service of life.
There is yet one more blessing in the poem. God rests on the seventh day after the work of creation, and blesses it. The institution of the sabbath serves as the capstone of creation, the lens through which we are invited to consider its meaning. This day of rest is an act of trust, recognizing that not everything depends upon our anxious struggle to secure our lives, much less on our exploitation of others to do so. It is a recognition of creation as gift, rather than achievement. It is, finally, in God’s freedom and power that we find our peace and enjoyment, and not in ourselves. The world will go right along quite nicely without us, thank you very much. If God can rest, so can we.
All of this was good news for a people in exile, home-sick, whose security, identity, and existence was being threatened by the consuming maw of empire. It is good news for us.
Hang in there. God is not finished with us yet. There is always a new beginning. We are part of a whole that is very good indeed. The beauty and wonder and energy of creation is always there for us. God is with us. We are not alone. We are created in the image of God. That image is reflected in community, when we use our freedom and our power for the common good and the common wealth. Sabbath rest is the crown of creation. We can trust God’s provision and enjoy life with gratitude. The meaning of our lives is found in this sabbath peace; not in our anxious busyness. God created us because he thought we might enjoy it.
This poem has such enduring relevance, because we continue to forget the sheer wonder and glory of creation. It reminds us of how much we have been given, and that we are at home in the world. We are very blessed to be here together and to be part of the mystery of life. Despite the evidence to the contrary, the world is still very good. And our God is good. All the time.
[1] Genesis 1:1-2:3. This is the first of two creation stories in Genesis.
[2] For a good scholarly commentary on the text, to which I am indebted, see Walter Brueggemann, Genesis (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1982), p. 22-39.