“And God saw that it was good.”

Genesis 1:10

Perhaps the most important thing to bear in mind when reading the first chapters of Genesis is that it is written not about the past but about the present. It is about the perennial present, the present that is always with us. It is not a book of history or a scientific account of creation. It is not an eyewitness report of how the world and the human race began. Rather, it is a mythological portrayal of the relationship between the Creator and the creation.

The first chapters of Genesis contain not one but two creation stories. The ancient writers were not worried by the obvious differences between the two accounts. For them, both revealed the same inspired truth: that God alone is the Creator, that everything else is God’s creation, and that everything which God creates is good.

We see this most clearly in the first creation story: On each day of creation, God looks at what has been done and calls it good. On the sixth day, God looks back over everything completed and says, “Yes, it’s all very good indeed!” And on the seventh day, God rests.

Poet Wendell Berry captures God’s delight in creation: 

Time when the Maker’s radiant sight 
Made radiant every thing He saw,  
And every thing He saw was filled 
With perfect joy and life and light.

Wendell Berry, “To sit and look at light-filled leaves,” in A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems, 1979–1997 (Counterpoint: 1998), 8. 

Put in theological terms, the story is saying that everything is grace, everything is gift, everything comes from God. God is the One who makes something out of nothing and gives it to us, not way back when, but here and now. God makes us what we are, and gives us to ourselves as a free gift.

-Richard Rohr