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A Good World Goes Awry
The Scriptures are clear that the one God, who is himself perfectly good, created a perfectly good universe, and that the crowning achievement of his creative activity was the formation of two perfectly good human beings in his own image. The Scriptures communicate this truth in the opening paragraphs of the first book in the Bible, Genesis 1:1–2:3. Unfortunately, the Scriptures also make clear that the world did not remain the way God created it, and they tell the story of what happened to God’s good world in Genesis 2:4–4:26.
A Good God and His Creation
Genesis 1:1–2:3 is an intricately crafted narrative whose form serves its message, and that message is clear. One transcendent being, God, designed the world, and his design was ordered, balanced, and good.
As students of this narrative have often observed, it is itself meticulously designed to emphasize the number seven. There are seven words in the Hebrew text of the first sentence (1:1). The narrative’s climactic concluding paragraph (2:1–3) features God himself resting on the seventh day, and it expresses this act in thirty-five Hebrew words, a word count that is equal to five times seven.1 Seven, then, is clearly the number that in some way corresponds to God.
Seven, as it turns out, is also the number that corresponds to God’s creative activity, the story of which appears sandwiched between the first sentence and the last paragraph. Seven times, God’s creative word (“Let there be light. . . . Let there be an expanse. . . . Let dry land appear. . . . Let the earth sprout vegetation. . . . Let there be lights. . . . Let the earth bring forth living creatures . . .”) or his provision (“I have given every green plant for food”) is matched with the phrase “And it was so” or, in 1:3, its equivalent (1:3, 6–7, 9, 11, 14–15, 24, 30). This pattern communicates that what God intends actually comes to pass and that both what he intends and what comes to pass in creation correspond to who he is.
Who is he? He is good, as the sevenfold repetition of the phrase “And God saw that it was good” demonstrates, especially in its more emphatic form at the end of the sixth day: “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31). The goodness of creation reflects the goodness of God.
The goodness of creation also appears in the order and balance of the creation narrative. The six days of creation are neatly ordered in two groups of three, with the first, second, and third day in each group corresponding to each other. God creates light on day one and the heavenly bodies that give light (sun, moon, and stars) on day four (1:3–5, 14–19). He creates sky and sea on day two and the animals that inhabit the sky and sea (birds and fish) on day five (1:6–8, 20–23). He creates land and plants on day three and the creatures that inhabit the land and will eat the plants (animals and human beings) on day six (1:11–13, 24–31).2
There is also a balance between plants on one side and animals and human beings on the other side in the narrative. God gives instructions to be fruitful and multiply only to the animals and human beings, and only to them does he give the plants for food (1:22, 28). Human beings are to eat the plants that yield seed and the fruit of trees, whereas animals on the land and in the sky are to eat “every green plant” (1:29–30). Everything inhabits a peaceful order, and the emphasis on the provision of plants for the food of every living creature hints that there is no violence among the creatures that have “the breath of life” (1:30).3
Within this peaceful order, human beings, both male and female, inhabit the most important place. Before creating them, God summons the other transcendent beings in his presence—or perhaps the other persons in the Trinity—to join him in what he is about to do: “Let us make man,” he says, “in our image, after our likeness” (1:26).4 Human beings alone, in their two genders, are made in God’s image (1:26–27). Moreover, they alone receive from God the authority to rule over all the earth and its animals, a mandate so important that the narrative mentions it twice (1:26, 28). The second mention is its fullest form:
Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.
Only after the final creative act of bringing a man and woman into existence and giving them this critical mandate is God’s work of creation finished. God can then pronounce all his creation not merely “good” but “very good” (1:31).
It is not the sixth day, the day of humanity’s creation, however, that is the most important day. That honor goes to the seventh day. God blesses the seventh day and sets it apart from all the other days because it is a day of rest for him after the work of creation is finished (2:1–3).5 This move implies a second mandate for human beings, and it is closely related to the first mandate. If human beings are created in God’s image, then their raising of human families and their exe...
