This week we are going to talk about what the phrase “it was good” means because God says it not once, but six times in Genesis 1 and He even says “it was very good” once. Again, because the Bible is a book about God, we’re going to take a look at what “it was good” says about how different He is than all the other false gods being worshipped by the nations surrounding Israel.
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Hi, this is Miss Tyler and welcome back to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you a bunch of cool stuff that most adults don’t know. Today’s Episode is called “It was good! Making the Universe Just Perfect for Us” because, in the beginning, that’s exactly what God did, He made the perfect world for humans to live in—with everything we could ever possibly need. And to talk about that, we also need to talk about why this was written and what God was telling us about Himself because the Bible is God’s story—the story of God showing us who He is and how He is different from all the false gods who people worshipped because they didn’t know any better. The Bible also shows us how different God is from us and how trustworthy and wonderful He is beyond anything we can imagine.
Before we start today, I want to explain something very important. Did you know that people who are smart, and who are believers and love God, can disagree about things? That’s right! You and your parents can hear me teach something and disagree with me but we can still love one another. I want you to grow up to be the kinds of believers who are loving and gracious and humble. It’s important that when you disagree with someone that you don’t assume they are stupid or know less than you do. I read a lot of books about the Bible written by some wonderful people, and when they are also believers I call them my brothers and sisters. I don’t always agree with what they think but I love them and I respect them and I am happy that they love God enough to write books about Him to try and teach others. Nobody has ever been entirely right about their thoughts and opinions about God except for the One who was with Him at the beginning, and that is Jesus. Not even Moses or Abraham or any of the Prophets. They are all just humans. But Jesus, God’s powerful Word made into a human, knows everything about God. So, everyone else is going to be at least a little bit wrong about things. That’s okay. Even when someone is wrong (and on a lot of things we won’t know for sure until we see God face to face after we die), they are still loved by God and so we love them too, just like we want to be loved when we are wrong and we are all wrong about a lot of things! So, if you or your parents disagree with me, just think about that. You can still love me and still listen to me because even if I am wrong about something, I won’t be wrong about everything. And we can all learn together.
So, in Genesis chapter one, there is this phrase that gets repeated over and over and over again. “And God saw it was good.” And it even says, “It was very good!” once. On the first day, after He made light appear on the earth, and made the very first day, God said it was good. On the second day, He didn’t say that anything was good. On the third day, He made up for it by saying that it was good twice, when He made the land appear and when He made the plants sprout up. On the fourth day when He made the sun, moon and stars, He said it was good. Then on the fifth day, He created sea creatures and birds and said it was good. On the sixth day, He made all the land animals and said it was good and then He made people and said that it was very good. But what does it mean, that it was good? That’s what we are going to talk about today! Hold on to your hats, or your socks, or whatever you are wearing that’s handy.
When Moses wrote the Torah, which is the first five books of the Bible—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—very few people were worshipping our God. In fact, sometime between the death of Noah and when God called Abraham, knowledge of God had been all but lost. Abraham’s father Terah was an idol worshipper. We know this because it tells us this in Joshua 24:2. Possibly Abraham was an idol worshipper too but we don’t know because the Bible doesn’t tell us. There are some legends out there that claim one thing or another but the Bible doesn’t tell us for sure. What we do know is that when Abraham is called by God to leave His people and follow God, He didn’t show up there and find a synagogue or a church waiting for him when he got there! Everyone around him was worshipping false gods instead—the Canaanites, the Egyptians, the Hittites, the Sumerians and the Babylonians, etc. But where did these false gods come from when only one God created the whole entire universe? Why did people believe in all these gods? Why didn’t they believe in our God anymore? Well, we don’t know the answer to the last question for sure because the Bible doesn’t say. We have theories but we don’t know for sure. Some people say it was because of Nimrod, but the Bible doesn’t say that. And we don’t know anything about Nimrod from history either. All we have are legends written over two thousand years later, and most of them were only written within the past two hundred years. You see, when the Bible doesn’t say much about someone, people like to make up stories to fill in the blanks. That’s okay as long as we remember what is actually written in the Bible and only accept that as the truth. So, we don’t actually know why people forgot about God. It’s sad though.
In the ancient world, people were curious just the same as we are. In fact, I want you to close your eyes and imagine something for me. I want you to think about the sun and the rain. Imagine the sun going across the sky over the course of the day. I want you to think about rain falling and landing on you and the ground. Imagine that you don’t know that the sun is a star 93 million miles away. Imagine that you don’t know about the water cycle, how water evaporates from the lakes and oceans and ends up in the atmosphere, gathering in clouds and then raining down on us. You and I only know those things because someone else figured it out. If you didn’t know those things, what might you think? How does the sun get from the east and cross over the sky, and then dip below the horizon to the west? And how does it happen every single day? Where does the rainwater come from and why isn’t it falling all the time? In the ancient world, they had an explanation for that. They had gods who did all those things. The Egyptians had Ra (or Re), the Canaanites had Shapash, the Assyrians had Utu and the Babylonians worshiped Shamash. The Egyptians, for example, thought that Ra was rowing his sun-boat across the sky every day. At night, he would have to row through the underworld, fighting the giant serpent Apophis. If he didn’t win the fight, the sun wouldn’t come up the next morning—which had to be really stressful for the Egyptians to think about. And you thought school was stressful! Each culture had different stories about the gods and they believed that their gods were different from the other gods. The Babylonians, for example, did think that Ra and Shamash were the same god. They believed that Ra only moved the sun for the Egyptians and that Shamash was responsible for the sun over Babylon. We’ll talk a lot more about regional gods in the future—and that’s just what we call gods who only have authority over a small area. Like, Ba’al could only make it rain in Canaan. Dagon only made the crops grow in his own region. Some other god was responsible for doing this for the Egyptians. Don’t ask me which one, I actually haven’t studied that. There are just too many gods responsible for too many things in too many cultures. It was madness!!!!
And they couldn’t create anything. In fact, they were created. The gods of the nations weren’t like our God, who created everything and wasn’t created by anyone. Those gods often had parents, just like us. They had mommies and daddies and they also had children of their own. You see, the gods of all the nations (who aren’t real, obviously) were a lot like us. They couldn’t create anything and they could only do their one job. They were really rather incompetent as far as gods goes. We would expect them to be a lot more powerful than people thought they were but they were just like us, only more powerful. They weren’t even immortal (living forever) because they could be killed. Sometimes they did get killed. Imagine if one day our God just up and died. The Universe would probably just disappear. Fortunately, that can’t happen because He isn’t like us. Thank goodness, right?
I am going to give you an example of one of their mythologies. Mythology is an important word that doesn’t mean what a lot of people think it means. A mythology is a story that describes how things came to be the way they are when there is no historical evidence of what really happened. Mythology was the ancient way of explaining the reason why things are the way they are. The sun god rowing his boat across the sky to explain why the sun moves is a mythology. Oh, cool fact about that. Have you ever seen an obelisk? From archaeology, we know that the Egyptians built those as “sun needles” where Ra could rest at noontime. That’s what it looked like from the ground, like the boat was parked there taking a breather. When I post the transcript, I will include a link. Actually, when the Greeks first saw the sun needles they thought they looked like meat skewers and named the sun needles obeliskoi, because that is what they called their meat skewers. So, maybe Ra was up there enjoying a shish kebab for his lunchtime break!
But in the Creation mythologies (and that means the ancient stories about how the world came to be in different cultures) their gods didn’t create the earth like our God did. In fact, in the Mesopotamian mythology Enuma Elish, which archaeologists found less than two hundred years ago—and this is super gross. Gross is cool because you will never forget this. Anyway, there was a war between the gods, Marduk and Tiamat, a giant sea monster/goddess. When Tiamat died, Marduk split her body into two pieces and half became the earth and the other half was suspended over it. The rain was the water leaking through her dead skin. EWWWWWW. I mean, I don’t think they gave much thought to this. Could you imagine the stinkiness factor? Would you want to drink the water that came through her dead body? Super gross but super cool. Oh, and I have to tell you how they said people came to be created. Marduk punished all the junior gods who sided against him in the battle by making them do work and grow food for the gods to eat. They got tired of working and so Marduk took the blood of another god named Kingu and made people out of that. They were created to be slaves and their only purpose in life was to make sure these gods were taken care of. And this is very important because when Moses wrote Genesis 1, he knew all this. He grew up in Egypt so he knew all of their gods, and he was educated in the palace of Pharaoh so I bet he knew all about the gods of other countries as well and their creation mythologies. When God inspired Moses to write the story of the making of the universe, Moses would have known how different God was saying He was, from all the other made up gods on earth. And when Moses read the account to the Israelites who had grown up in Egypt as slaves, and all of the mixed multitude of former pagans who also came with them, they would have been amazed.
Genesis 1 tells us amazing things that weren’t true about any other gods. First, it said that no one created God. He didn’t have parents. He didn’t create the earth by killing anyone else and, in fact, we don’t see anything about any war at all! God made light appear—why? So He could see? Nope. He created light for someone else, so that they could have days and nights and so that time could begin. God made a place for weather to happen between heaven and earth. Why? Who needs rain? Not Him. God made the dry land appear and then made plants grow. Why? So He could eat a salad? Nope. God made the sun, moon and stars. Did he need them? What on earth would He need them for—was He cold? Then God made the birds and the fish. Is He hungry? Not hardly. On the sixth day, He made animals of all sorts. Did He need a pet or did he need to travel a long distance on a camel or a horse? I don’t think so. So why did God create all these things and call them good? He doesn’t need any of those things. The Bible says that God is Spirit, without form:
John 4:24 “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”
Well, somebody without form doesn’t need things like light and food and land to stand on or transportation. So, who do you think God created all those things for? Was it because He wanted the world’s largest and most beautiful zoo to look at? Certainly, where He lives with the angels must be very beautiful. I bet it is more amazing than we can even imagine. So why does He need the earth and air and fish and birds and plants and light and darkness and animals? He doesn’t. He didn’t create them for Himself. He created them because we need them. In fact, He created them before He ever even created humans.
You see, when God made light appear and separated the light from the darkness and said it was good, what He was really saying was, “Job well done, this works exactly the way it needs to. It’s perfect to do exactly what I designed it for—for nights and for days. Because someone is going to be created who needs the light to see during the days and to sleep at night. I am going to create something that can’t exist unless there is time for them to live and grow in.”
When God made the dry land appear, He said it was good because someone was going to need a place to stand, unless they planned to tread water for a very long time. Now there’s something to consider. How long can you tread water? And when God made plants grow, and fruit trees spring up, He also said it was good. Someone was going to need lettuce, and carrots, and bananas, and apples. It was good because He looked at it and saw that it was absolutely ready for someone special. He’d done a very good job, a complete job of providing food—but for who?
Then God made the sun, moon, and stars. Did He need the warmth of the sun to be comfortable? Did He need the moon so that He wouldn’t be stumbling around at night? No way! Someone else needed those things. The Bible said that they were needed for days and for years and for seasons. The Hebrew word for seasons is moedim, a word that means “meeting.” Well, that’s strange. There isn’t anyone to meet with anyone else, only God and His Word, which we talked about last week, and His angels, right? As Alice in Wonderland would say, “Curioser and curioser.” And once more, He said it was good. Another step in the Creation process was just right.
Next, God created fish, flying insects, and birds. He even pronounced the first blessing in Scripture on them. So, the birds, and fish, and insects are blessed by being able to have babies and fill the air and skies. But what could God possibly need those for? And again, He called it good. Good for what? Is He planning on going fishing or birdwatching?
Now, on the sixth day, God created all sorts of animals. He created livestock (cows, sheep, and goats), and wild animals (like cats and dogs and pigs and camels), and creeping things (lizards and land insects). And He said that it was good. Everything was exactly how it should be. In fact, everything was perfect and ready for God’s final creation. And this was a creation that God would call very good. After this next creation, God would stop creating and rest and take His place as the King over all creation.
God created people. He created them in some ways totally unlike Himself. God is spirit and we call God Him but God isn’t a “Him” like the pagan gods were all a bunch of hims and hers. Calling God “it” would be rude and impossible in Hebrew anyway. God created people like He created the animals, with males and females so there could be babies and they could fill the whole earth with more people. But the Bible doesn’t say that God blessed the animals like He blessed the birds and the fish (I have no idea why). God blessed us instead. He blessed us to be able to have babies and not only that. He blessed us to fill the earth and to gain control over it. He blessed us to rule over the animals and birds and fish and everything that lives on earth.
28 And God blessed them. And God said to them, “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.” 29 And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food.”
To people who lived in a world where they believed that everything was run by gods and goddesses, and who believed that they were totally at the mercy of wild animals, and that they couldn’t control anything or do anything to change their lives, this was amazing news. Not only weren’t they menial slaves, expected to grow food for the gods, but they had a loving God who made food for them instead. They didn’t have gods who cruelly and selfishly ruled over them with an iron fist. They were created to be rulers over the earth, to change it according to their needs (instead of their gods’ needs) and to use the animals as they needed to. Instead of being created just to be lowly slaves, they were created with dignity. They could be proud to be humans because they were made in God’s image, both of them, male and female (we’ll talk more about being made in God’s image some other week). They were both blessed and both given the job of filling the earth and using it for whatever they needed and ruling over the animals. The only thing that God didn’t tell people was to rule over one another—that’s God’s job. And God said that Creation was now very good. Everything was perfect and just the way it needed to be. God was done creating.
And that is an amazing story about an amazing God who wasn’t like any of the gods whom people had made up. That’s why you can trust God because He didn’t make us to be menial slaves laboring away just to feed Him. The Psalms say that we are fearfully and wonderfully made and not only us, but the world is also wonderfully made—just for us. It is perfect for us, in fact. It is good.
But God created something else in secret. Something that He will hint about in Genesis 3:15 and in a great many places in the Bible. Especially in the books of the Prophets. We talked last week about the Word of God, and how that Word became Jesus. John told us that Jesus was with God, as His powerful Word, in the beginning, and when God spoke and everything came into being, that powerful Word was Jesus. When we look at the Creation story and see that everything was created for us, we need to remember that the Word was also created for us. Most people call Him Jesus here in the United States but all over the world people have different names for Him depending on the sounds they have in their languages. In my house, we call Him Yeshua, which is Hebrew, but maybe you call Him Jesus (Spanish), or Yesu or Isa. That Jesus was with God in the beginning as His Word means that God knew that we would get into trouble and need to be saved someday. So not only did He give us air to breathe and earth to stand on and plants and animals but He also made a way for us to be with Him forever. He loves us so much that He made sure to supply for all of our needs before we even needed them. So guess what? That means that you can trust Him to help you with your problems, no matter what they are, and to not hurt you. He loves you. That’s why He made the earth just perfect for you.
I love you too. And I am praying for you. And I hope you have a wonderful time this week studying Scripture with the people who love you.