Two Ways News is a weekly collaboration between Phillip Jensen and Peter Jensen – a newsletter and podcast on a topic to encourage gospel thinking for today (subscribe at twoways.news).
In this Two Ways News, Peter and Phillip venture into the meaning of God calling the world good and the implications that has for living in this world and the next.
The previous episode is Words and Relationships.
For more on this topic listen to the highlights of the Forum session Good, Very Good.
THE GOODNESS OF GOD
When God declares his creation to be ‘good, very good’ what is he saying?
Phillip Jensen: Welcome again to Two Ways News. It’s good to think again about our great God and the work of revelation he gives us in Genesis chapter 1. He creates different parts, but then he finishes each section by telling us that it’s good.
Peter Jensen: I can remember being astounded at the word ‘good,’ which didn’t cross my mind. Then at the end, he doesn’t just say ‘good,’ he says, ‘very good.’ What on earth is he getting at?
Phillip: ‘Good’ is a funny word. It’s one of those words where you all know what it means, but it means so many different things at the same time. My Oxford dictionary has seven groups of meanings for the word ‘good.’ There were 30 or so different kinds of shades of meaning on this one word, ‘good.’
Peter: We put our own sense into it, but just think back – the Greek philosophers spoke about the good life. Have you lived the good life? How would you define that?
Phillip: For them, that was virtue, wasn’t it? A virtuous life was the good life.
Peter: There is a sense of being good in terms of satisfaction. It’s being what you were designed to be.
Phillip: As God looks at things and sees, this is good. It is what I intended.
Peter: That’s the intention in Genesis 1. This is fit for purpose. This is what I intended.
Phillip: It has to do with the intentionality of the creation. Good then becomes utility. The word ‘good’ often is a subjective reaction to something, and I say, “Oh, that’s good.” It means I like it. Whereas I think I’m saying something objective. It’s not just that I like it; it is, in and of itself, good.
Peter: I used to attend church at St. Barnabas Broadway. The new minister, Mr. Allan Blanch, described God as ‘good.’ It was a hit on my mind to describe God as ‘good.’ What do we mean when we say God is ‘good’?
Phillip: It’s not my subjective reaction to God. I always think of it in terms of the rich young ruler in Mark chapter 10, where he comes and says, “Good teacher, what must I do to be saved?” Jesus says to him, “Why do you call me good? There is no one good but God alone”. But then he goes on to give his answer to the question. He interrupts this way of addressing him as good. Of course, Jesus is good, for Jesus is God. But goodness is more than just my appreciation of God. It is intrinsically of God. When God creates the world, he calls it good. He is the good who, therefore, has the right to call things good.
Peter: It’s not simply utilitarian in God. It always seemed to me to be a word that describes virtue and goodness. If you were to meet a good person, you are talking about a person who does the right thing out of the goodness of their heart. There’s more to it than simply righteousness; there is also a sense of love.
Phillip: God looks at the created order, the things he has made, and says that they are good. They meet the approval of the perfect one, the good God. They fulfil his purpose because he is creating purposefully for habitation. Proverbs 8 is a reflection on creation out of the reflection on wisdom. That the world was created by God in his wisdom. The challenge of Proverbs 8 is to seek wisdom, but then you find that because wisdom was preexistent before God created the world, there was wisdom, and God created by this preexistent wisdom. That is why the world was created in righteousness and justice. Righteousness and justice are not distinct from creation. It was part of God’s created world. But the world itself was good. Therefore, if you seek wisdom, you will live in accordance with the way the world has been created, and it will benefit you. So, you get both the sense of objective good and utilitarian good.
Peter: Then what is the declaration of the goodness of creation by God? “Good, very good.” Isn’t that a sort of sense of joy? What does it tell us about creation today?
Phillip: We must understand Genesis 1, but Genesis 1 is not the end of the story, is it? Because you’ve got Genesis 3, the sin of mankind, and God’s judgment on us, driving us out from the garden. The world has now, in Romans 8, been subjected to futility and to the dominance of death. The world as created is not exactly the same as the world we live in, but it’s not totally different either. It is still the same world that God has created. The world is subjected to some degree of dysfunctionality, which was not there in the intention of God in His creation. In the re-creation, that dysfunctionality will be done away with. We are in a world now that is good, must be seen to be good, but is not working as it should because of our sin and God’s judgment on this world.
Peter: I think of someone coming to a great painting and just daubing it with mud and making it distorted and horrible. It doesn’t mean the painting is not a great painting but that human beings have distorted it. But it could be cleaned off.
Phillip: It can also be seen through the mud. You can still see what was there. But we can’t reach the point of saying the world is not good, that there’s something corrupt about it. In 1 Timothy 4:1-2, Paul writes,
Now, the Spirit expressly says that in later times, some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and the teaching of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared.
By the work of the demons in these humans, these humans with seared consciences are now going to speak. And what is it that they speak? 1 Timothy 4:3-4
They forbid marriage, require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth, for everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer.
So everything in this world is still the good of God’s creation. I’ve always objected to the abuse of alcohol here in Australia. We have a culture that is dominated by alcohol abuse. We have governments that are completely owned by breweries and winemakers who will not make decisions to protect our society. We face the horror of domestic violence, but we’re not allowed to talk about the relationship of alcohol and domestic violence. We have the horrors of our poor indigenous peoples being terribly abused, but we’re not allowed to talk about the use of alcohol as a part of the abuser. The temptation is to say that alcohol is evil. But it’s not. There is nothing wrong with alcohol. Alcohol is a good thing, created by God. God made wine to make glad the heart of man.
Peter: Over the years, there have been two broad responses: to embrace and worship the world, or to reject the world and to go into asceticism, the denial of the world. You get away from the world as far as you can, and you spend your life fasting, and you spend your life rejecting the pleasures of this world. Both approaches have affected such things as food, sex and beliefs about the afterlife. What is the Bible’s response to this, and why do you find it so powerful?
Phillip: In 1 Timothy 4, you wonder what has seared their consciences? I have had conversations with people caught up in the Hare Krishna cult. Their consciences were seared by growing up as hedonists who abused drugs. In their reaction to their materialistic hedonism, they had moved to the asceticism of hating all pleasures and avoiding all pleasures. They worked hard at making food that was not pleasant because they didn’t want to ever go back into the pleasure-seeking alternatives. The problem was never the substances, and both responses are equally bad. This is the teaching of demons because it’s now saying that God, the good God, who created a good world, has created a rotten world for whatever purpose. It’s a terrible misrepresentation of God and his goodness.
Peter: I suppose that comes out, particularly with people’s attitudes towards sex.
Phillip: They acknowledged the possibility of having sex to produce children, but they actually were trying to teach that sex was not to be enjoyed, even within marriage. It was an asceticism that ultimately pushed to forbidding marriage and forbidding sex.
God has created this world for our enjoyment, and so there’s nothing wrong with enjoyment under a good God who’s created a great world. In the Garden of Eden, the trees were beautiful. God didn’t have to make beautiful trees, but he did. And one of the lovely things in life is trees. They are beautiful in their diversity, in their variety, and in their grandeur.
Peter: There has been a strain of Christianity that has said you can’t enjoy the world, the natural world. In some strains of Protestant Christianity, there’s been a sort of Sabbatarianism, which means that you can have one day a week rest, but during that day of rest you can’t do things like go for walks or enjoy yourself, play tennis, or whatever. The whole day has to be dedicated to quietness. Not really the world God has created.
Phillip: That’s a failure and a distortion. It winds up misrepresenting God in a very bad way. When Paul writes to the Colossians, he warns of human traditions and philosophies that can drag you away from the truth of Jesus. In chapter two, he speaks about people making about what you eat and what you can eat, what you can’t eat, on feast days, fast days, and the rest.
These things are the things of the world. They appear to be very religious, but they are no help in dealing with our problem, which is sin.
Peter: They are saying the world is not good. What about the food laws of the Old Testament?
Phillip: You need to see the reasons for which God gave them and the reason for which Jesus declared all foods clean in Mark 7. It had to do with holiness, teaching the difference between cleanness and uncleanness, holiness and unholiness. It was God’s great education program for Israel on the nature of holiness. But the mistake was to absolutize it as saying there are foods that are clean and unclean. Jesus makes it quite clear that all foods are clean. That’s not the issue. One of the things that Colossians 2 mentions is people passing judgements over Sabbaths.
A more serious challenge is the philosophical one that came in the 1960s about whether Christians are the cause of the ecological problems of today. There was an article by Lynn White Jr. about the historical roots of today’s ecological problems. It said we see humans as ruling the world rather than as humans being part of the world, that the world has been exploited and destroyed by humans. But that all comes back to Genesis 1, argued Lynn White. Have you ever seen this or followed that article?
Peter: I do remember it. It was always a misunderstanding of Genesis 1.
Phillip: How is it a misunderstanding of Genesis 1?
Peter: There is some truth in it because we can see the way in which human beings do exploit the world. After the Fall, our relationship with the natural world is an uneasy one. We exploit it and do things that are wrong. Animals have become extinct, and all sorts of other awful things happen. I presume he’s talking about the creation of man and the dominion that God has given over the animals and the creation order as a dominion, which is stewardly. It is meant to be a dominion that is for the benefit of those over whom you have dominion. All authority is like that. When you are given authority, it is for the benefit of those for whom you’ve been given authority. The husbandly authority, which is real, is nonetheless in the interests of the wife and family. The dominion that human beings originally were given over the world was to cultivate it, to use it certainly, but not to exploit it, not to damage it. But the trouble is that it was not long into Genesis before the awful reality of human sin became evident.
Phillip: In Genesis 1:26 we are given dominion. It is a good world, but it still requires ongoing subduing. But we are to do it like God, who is good. For us to use dominion for evil is not to use dominion like God. In 1970, Francis Schaeffer wrote in response to Lynn White’s challenge, who had pushed people into thinking Eastern mysticism would give us a better ecological balance to the world. That’s the way I think people are pushing the idea that Indigenous culture will give us a better relationship to the world and creation now. They do not accept the God-given dominion of man over creation. Our exercise of dominion means that Australia feeds seven times the size of our own population. It means life expectancy has shifted from 30 up to over 80. Yes, we’ve made a mess, but we’ve done wonderful things as well.
Peter: Some people would say that Christianity’s great flaw is that it has nothing to tell you about our proper relationship to the natural world, but that if you shift it over to some Eastern religions, they would. What would you say to that?
Phillip: Christianity is a very materialistic religion. We believe in the material world. Consider my Hari Krishna friends. Theirs was just a Westernized version of Hinduism. They denied the reality of the world. They called the world “Maya,” that is deception. It was the devil’s deception to take you away from spiritual realities. Christianity is the exact reverse. The world is the expression of God, who created it as good and placed us in the responsibility of caring for it in the way he does.
Peter: The astonishing thing about the Christian gospel was the talk of the resurrection of the body, the resurrection of the dead, the new heavens, and the new earth. In other words, at least in one sense, a materialistic future.
Phillip: It’s not just that he was given a new body. Because of the risen Lord Jesus, we too are going to be given a new body.
Peter: That again shows this very positive view of the created order. The genius of Christianity, of course, the genius of God, is that this created order is good. That raises the question of how do we live within it. Does the Bible tell us much about how we best live? How do we relate to this created order?
Phillip: Therein lies our ethics of marriage and of eating and of serving each other with the physical world. What about the treatment of animals? A sign of being one of God’s people is kindness to animals. The RSPCA, the Royal Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, was founded by Christians and came out of a series of Christian essays written mainly by clergymen against cruelty to animals. We are the people who got rid of bear baiting. We are the people who should be thinking about the questions of how greyhounds and horses are treated in terms of the racing fraternities today. But you say that people are horrified. They were horrified when we objected to bear baiting too and horrified when we objected to cockfighting because caring for animals is an important part of Christianity. God created the animals. He saw them, and he declared they were good.
Peter: In Exodus 20:10, the commandment about resting on the Sabbath includes a day of rest for the animals, as well as members of the household.
Phillip: Exodus 23:10-11 and Leviticus 25:4 speak about a Sabbath rest for the land because this is a God-created world that has rest as part of its function. The new heavens and the new earth will be very interesting.
