Seven times in one chapter God inspects what He made and calls it good. That verdict is doing more work than you think.
Most arguments about Genesis 1 are arguments about age. How long were the days? How old is the earth? Those are worth having, and we have had them here. But there is a claim running through that chapter that both sides of that debate usually walk past, and it is the claim the modern world most needs and least expects.
God keeps stopping to render a verdict on matter.
“God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.”
Genesis 1:31, NASB1995
Light: good. Land and sea: good. Vegetation: good. Sun, moon, stars: good. Fish and birds: good. Beasts: good. And then, with man in the picture, the whole assembled physical order together: very good. Dirt, water, bodies, appetite, animals, time itself — evaluated by the One who made them and pronounced not merely acceptable but excellent.
That verdict divides Christianity from nearly every other account of the world, ancient and modern. And a great many Christians live as though it were not in the book.
Everyone Else Has to Devalue Something
Watch what the alternatives are forced to say about the physical world.
Ancient dualism — Plato’s heirs, and later the Gnostics — treated matter as a lower order of reality, at best a shadow and at worst a prison. Salvation meant escape from the body, not redemption of it. The Gnostics found the idea of a God who makes mud and calls it good so offensive that they invented a lesser deity to blame it on.
Eastern monism, in several forms, treats the world of distinct physical things as an appearance to be seen through — the goal is dissolution of the particular, not the perfecting of it.
Modern naturalism flips the error and lands in the same ditch. Matter is now all there is, but it means nothing. It is not good; it is not bad; it simply is. Carl Sagan’s famous line about the cosmos being all there ever was is a beautiful sentence about a universe that cannot answer the question “is any of this good?” — because on that view goodness is a chemical opinion.
So the options are: matter is contemptible, matter is illusory, or matter is meaningless. Genesis says something none of them can say. Matter is made, and matter is good, and it is good because a Person outside it inspected it and said so.
Goodness Requires a Judge
Here is the philosophical spine of the thing, and it is worth slowing down for.
“It was good” is not a description of a property you could measure. You cannot weigh the goodness of an oak. It is a verdict, and verdicts require someone competent to render them. In Genesis, goodness is not a quality the universe generates on its own and God notices; it is the assessment of the Creator against His own purpose for the thing.
Which is exactly why a purely material account of the universe struggles at this point. If there is no mind prior to matter, then value has to be manufactured somewhere downstream by brains that are themselves just arrangements of the same stuff. On that view, when you say a sunrise is beautiful or a child’s life is precious, you are reporting a state of your neurology, not a fact about the world. Most naturalists live as though value is real. Their system gives them no ground to stand on when they say so.
The doctrine of creation supplies exactly what is missing: a Mind before the matter, whose evaluation is the standard rather than a reaction to one.
“For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities — all things have been created through Him and for Him.”
Colossians 1:16, NASB1995
For Him. That little phrase is where meaning comes from. Things made on purpose can succeed or fail at that purpose, and therefore can be good. Things that are simply here cannot.
Then Why Does the World Feel Broken?
Any honest reader raises the obvious objection. Cancer is physical. Earthquakes are physical. The body that God called good is the same body that betrays you at sixty. Is that “very good”?
Scripture’s answer is precise, and it is the reason Christianity never slides into either optimism or contempt. The world is not evil by nature; it is good by nature and broken by history. The problem entered through a moral event, not through the material itself.
“For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”
Romans 8:20–21, NASB1995
Note the direction of the hope. Creation is not slated for deletion. It is slated for liberation. God’s plan for the physical order He called good is not to abandon it but to un-break it.
This is why Paul can turn around and flatly reject the religious instinct that treats the physical as inherently dangerous — the fasting rules, the food taboos, the marriage prohibitions people keep inventing in the name of holiness.
“For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with gratitude; for it is sanctified by means of the word of God and prayer.”
1 Timothy 4:4–5, NASB1995
Sin is not the misuse of a bad thing. Sin is the misuse of a good one. That distinction is the difference between a Christian and an ascetic — and between repentance and mere renunciation.
God Went Further Than a Verdict
If you want to know how seriously God takes the goodness of matter, do not stop at Genesis. Follow the storyline.
He did not merely approve of the physical world from a distance. He entered it.
“And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
John 1:14, NASB1995
The Creator took on the stuff He made — cells, blood, hunger, fatigue, a spine that could be broken. And then He did not shed it. He rose in a body that could be handled and that ate broiled fish in front of witnesses, and He carries that body still. The incarnation is God’s final answer to every philosophy that finds matter beneath Him.
And the end of the story is not disembodied souls floating in a mist. It is resurrection, and a new heaven and a new earth — a physical world made new, with a city in it, and God dwelling there with men. Christianity is the only major faith whose final chapter has dirt in it.
What This Costs You in Practice
Doctrine that changes nothing is not doctrine; it is trivia. So take three edges off this one.
- Your body is not a rental. How you sleep, eat, move, and use your hands is spiritual territory, not neutral ground. The man who says he cannot get his life together spiritually while treating his body like an inconvenience has divided something God joined.
- Your ordinary work counts. The first commission given to man was cultivation — to work a garden and keep it. Framing a wall, running a route, fixing a server, raising a two-year-old: these are not lesser things you do between the real spiritual activities. Matter is God’s field, and labor in it is worship when it is offered as such.
- Gratitude is the right posture toward physical pleasure. Not suspicion, not indulgence. Food, marriage, sleep, music, cold water on a hot afternoon — every one of them is a good gift with a Giver’s name on it, and thanksgiving is the difference between receiving a gift and stealing one.
The Verdict You Are Refusing to Believe
Now the confrontation, because there is one, and it is not about cosmology.
Some of you have no trouble believing God called oceans and mountains good. You have enormous trouble believing He said it about anything He made when He made you. You have quietly decided that your body is a liability, that your desires are proof of your worthlessness, that the physical, ordinary, unimpressive life you actually have is somehow beneath the notice of God.
That is not humility. That is a quarrel with the Judge. He inspected His work and rendered a verdict, and you were in the frame — made in His image, given a body, given a name, given a place in the world He called very good. Your sin is real and it must be dealt with, but your sin never made the material of you contemptible. It made it enslaved. And the whole point of the cross is that God does not discard what He values; He buys it back.
“Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you have been bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body.”
1 Corinthians 6:19–20, NASB1995
Bought with a price. Not evacuated. Not overlooked. Purchased — the whole physical man, dirt and all, headed for resurrection.
Genesis 1 is not only an answer to naturalism. It is an answer to self-contempt. God looked at what He had made, and He was not embarrassed by it. Stop arguing with Him about it and go live in the world He called good.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist