And Behold, It Was Very Good – June 25, 2000
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. . . . And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.”1
The world is a wondrous place, full of gifts from a generous hand. Life is teeming with endless varieties on land and sea. From insect to animal to bacteria, these lives are purposeful and ordered. Air, water, and soil renew themselves over and over again. Here is evidence of a loving Creator, whose work is very, very good.
Surrounded by such beauty and abundance day after day and year after year, we may find it easy to forget who the Author is and begin to take it all for granted. We end up seeing only partially the glories around us.
One has only to watch a child to be reawakened to the wonder of the world. Tiny fingers plucka blade of grass and feel newness in the smooth thinness. The heft and shape of a small pebble are taken and treasured.
Ralph Waldo Emerson realized the heavens and the earth are not ordinary. “If the stars should appear [only] one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown.”2 Should the wonder be any less because the glories of creation are not rare?
Would that we could always see the glory of God in His work as evidence of Himself. A poet has written that even though the earth “wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell, [still] the world is charged with the grandeur of God.”3
The Psalmist’s eyes were not dulled to the wonders of creation: “I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained.”4
This majesty and order of creation is evidence of a glorious plan, a divine purpose, and a marvelous work—a work that is very, very good—that testifies of the Creator.
Program #3697
1. Genesis 1:1, 31.
2. Nature (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985, facsimile of the 1836 edition), 9-10.
3. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur,” The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 66.
4. Psalm 8:3.