Supremely Good

 God saw everything he had made: it was supremely good. (Genesis 1:31a, Common English Bible version)

I love preaching on passages from Genesis 1-3. It is such rich space. But always when I preach, I don’t have the chance to bring up everything I want to discuss. Or I get to share something that keeps swirling around in my brain and I can’t complete the thought in the preaching moment, because it keeps unfolding. I have decided to invite you behind-the-scenes into the mind whirlpool that these chapters are for me. It is my hope that you find yourself thinking differently or deeply or outrageously about these three chapters as we go through this series of blogs together.

Today I want to think about how God thinks about creation as it is described in the first of the two creation stories recounted in these chapters. God keeps announcing how good all of these new things are. “God saw how good the light was.” (1:4) God sees how good the Earth and seas are. (1:10) God saw how good the plants were. (1:12) God saw how good it was to separate the lights into day and night. (1:18) God saw how good the fish and birds were. (1:21) Then God made the land animals and the humans.

And then God looked at all of creation and pronounced it “supremely good.” (1:31)

Why not perfect?

After all, this is the purest moment of creation. This is creation just before God rests from God’s comprehensive work. This has to be as good as it gets, right?

Two things are at work here. One is a linguistic reality. And the other is my mind swirling.

First, biblical Hebrew doesn’t have a word for perfect. That may give you pause. You might be thinking, wait, I am pretty sure Jesus is described as perfect. You are correct. Jesus is described as perfect. In Hebrews. But not in Hebrew. Hebrews is written in Greek. The Greeks definitely had a concept of perfect. Hebrew does not.

So now I want to let my mind swirl. Why reveal creation through a language that has no word for perfect?

Well, one thing it does is let this perfectionist human being let go of that expectation. The best creation ever was, is, and will be is supremely good. I fail a whole lot at perfection. But I have a shot at supremely good. And more than that, I think we all together have a shot at supremely good. That is motivating. Trying to aim for perfection seems so unattainable. It reminds me of the wisest advice I received as I was trying to pull together my dissertation: “There are two kinds of dissertations: perfect, and finished. You have to pick one.” I picked finished. That advice gave me the permission that I needed to just get it done.

Since unattainable is off the table, then possibility is what we have. Possibility. I think that was what God always envisioned for creation. God did not see creation as finished. God saw creation as unfolding. That’s why we are invited to be part of its care. Because there was still so much to cultivate. There was still opportunity. There was still freedom. Supremely good is an invitation. An invitation to co-create with God and in that work to strive for goodness.

If you are feeling overwhelmed by the bad news about our planet these days, I hope you will take the invitation to goodness. To doing better, but not perfectly. Then remember that creation unfolded. It was piece by piece by piece work. One action on top of another action on top of another action. All of those actions were good. And all of them together made supremely good. And that, my friends, is definitely possible.