God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.
And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good.
And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.
And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.
Four times in the story of creation God “saw that it was good:”
- When He created the heavens;
- When He created the earth;
- When He created the animals;
- When He reviewed all of His creation on the sixth day. And God used the word “very” in this instance only.
And so it would seem that before the “fall” of man, everything God created was good and He was pleased with His creation.
So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them
We are not the result of random pairings of proteins or an evolution of oceanic goop that somehow managed to sprout legs, crawl up out of the sea and evolve into man. We were created in the image of God.
Our greatest claim to nobility is our created capacity to know God, to be in personal relationship with Him, to love Him, and to worship Him. Indeed, we are most truly human when we are in fellowship with our Creator.[ref]Keith Krell, from the series The Book of Beginnings: Genesis, “The Crown and Climax of Creation”, Bible.org.[/ref]
In A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson marvels at what makes up human life: No one really knows, but there may be as many as a million types of protein in the human body, and each one is a little miracle. By all the laws of probability proteins shouldn’t exist. To make a protein you need to assemble amino acids…in a particular order, in much the same way that you assemble letters in a particular order to spell a word. [For example, to make collagen,] you need to arrange 1,055 amino acids in precisely the right sequence. The chances of a 1,055-sequence molecule like collagen spontaneously self-assembling are, frankly, nil. It just isn’t going to happen. To grasp what a long shot its existence is, visualize a standard Las Vegas slot machine but broadened greatly—to about ninety feet, to be precise—to accommodate 1,055 spinning wheels instead of the usual three or four, and with twenty symbols on each wheel (one for each common amino acid). How long would you have to pull the handle before all 1,055 symbols came up in the right order? Effectively forever. Even if you reduced the number of spinning wheels to two hundred, which is actually a more typical number of amino acids for a protein, the odds against all two hundred coming up in a prescribed sequence are 1 in 10260 (that is 1 followed by 260 zeros). That in itself is a larger number than all the atoms in the universe, yet we are talking about several hundred thousand types of protein, perhaps a million, each unique and each, as far as we know, vital to the maintenance of a sound and happy you. [ref]Preaching Today Citation: Bill Bryson, “The Rise of Life: A Short History of Nearly Everything,” 288-289; submitted by Kevin Miller, Wheaton, Illinois.[/ref]
So we can juxtapose man’s perfect beginnings and how God was pleased, against the backdrop of a world of fallen, sinful men in need of a Savior.
Sometimes when I ponder the deeper things of God I feel as though I am transcending time and space and standing afar, looking at the earth and wondering what God thinks of how we’ve turned out.
Was the physician who might have cured cancer aborted in the womb, leaving us to fight this awful disease?
If Christians had stood up against the raging maniac called Hitler, might Europe be a different place today?
On the other hand, sometimes I think God sits back, with chin in hand, and muses “okay, they figured that out:” simple things like how to harness the wind and soar through the skies; how Madame Curie discovered the science of X-rays; or that spores in a petri dish could create penicillin.
Yes, we have made enormous strides as a civilization in spite of really screwing it up at times. But when we do mess up, thankfully we have a God Who really has our best interests in His heart and wants mankind to once again become His reflection.
