In my roles at Grace, I think about God’s Creation daily. I have been reading the Creation account in Genesis 1 with students for years, but I recently began to take note of some important repetitions in the days of Creation that we read: “Let there be,” “And it was so,” “And there was evening, and there was morning.” However, there is also a phrase that is repeated and then abruptly changed at the end of the chapter. “And God saw that it was good” is repeated several times until, in verse 31, we read, “God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good.”
Initially, we might think the human part of Creation made it “very” good. But the Bible does not simply repeat, “and God saw that it was good,” after God created Adam and Eve. Instead, the Bible says that God considered “all” or “everything” He made depending on the translation, and that is what was “very good.” God is both evaluating and pronouncing His Creation as very good.