God’s Word for You
Genesis 1:31 Very good
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Thursday, August 13, 2026
31 God saw all that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.
God does not only call created man good, but he says that everything created by him was very good. From this we must conclude that the fall of the evil angels and the fall of man had not yet taken place on the sixth day of creation, but that it happened sometime after.
God himself is good. He is essentially good. His perfection is seen in all of those things that belong in or to a most prefect being (holiness, righteousness, sinlessness, and so on). But we also see God’s moral (benevolent) goodness. This is his inclination to give or confer any and all good things to his creatures. And this goodness takes into consideration the misery of creatures. We call this goodness the mercy of God.
What does it mean, then, that the creation was “very good,” as opposed to the judgments of the previous days that were (if we could put it that way) “merely” good? I think that is because on each of the previous five days God saw that it was good, and in the way that we would say, “So far, so good.” It wasn’t done yet. Now, as the sun set into the west on the sixth day, everything was at last completed. It was very good.
This very good creation draws us. The very words tug at our imaginations. What would it have been like to be there, even just to visit there for an hour? If you or I were transported back in time to see that sunset on the sixth day of creation, we would have found ourselves in a fertile, fresh, green garden. Full-grown animals would have been walking or playfully chasing one another without fear or hungry intent through the long grass and on soft tufts of turf. The long neck of a giraffe or a dinosaur might catch our attention. The songs of birds and the chatter of many creatures would fill our ears. And there would be two adult human beings. Who would blame anyone for assuming that these people had been living in this place for at least a couple of decades? And yet they had only come into being in that last few hours. If we bothered to look, we might find a certain depth of the soil that was similar to what we know “back home,” and might conclude that the soil had formed over eons from bare rock at the same rate that we predict it does at all times. The stars above (if there were no clouds to obscure them) would look millions of years old since they are millions of light years distant. But every one of these conclusions would be unwarranted and wrong.
The stars themselves had been made just about forty-eight hours before. The birds singing in the trees above had been doing so for only twenty-four hours, and that fish that just splashed in the stream had been there the same amount of time, just a day old, even though “back home” it would be a keeper, and a whopper at that! The creatures in the brush making all that racket were only hours old. And the man and woman who looked like they were in their late teens or early twenties, fully mature and newly married, were not “born yesterday,” but were mere hours old. Eve, perhaps, might still have counted her age in minutes.
The world was created with an appearance of age; a necessary appearance. If we were to cut down an oak tree there in the Garden, and if Adam would have permitted it, would we have found that the two-foot wide trunk had no rings at all? Or would it not be full of rings? I would expect it would have more than a hundred rings in all, and therefore it would have the appearance of being a hundred years old, but in truth, would have been brought into being with all those rings just three days before.
One could ask, “Couldn’t God have created the world over millions or even billions of years, and it would still have been good, very good?” Certainly he could have. But there is no point in asking what he could or could not do when he tells us in his word what he did. When people try to reduce the creation account to the status of a myth, then what is there to stop all of the Bible from being reduced to a myth? Even the resurrection of the dead would be a myth; just a story to make the grieving grieve a little less. So here we turn to Paul, writing to the Corinthians, to explain the danger:
“For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men. But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.” (1 Corinthians 15:16-22)
On the sixth day of creation, man was made, and on the sixth day of the week, on Good Friday, man was saved by Christ. This is no myth. It is the most glorious truth we have ever been told. We are rescued from the burden of all our guilt and sin by the Creator himself, Jesus Christ our Lord. And this, like every one of God’s actions, is very good.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. To receive God’s Word for You via e-mail, please visit the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church website.