Pastor Nick Gatzke

Before you have any idea what’s wrong with the world, you need to know what was right with it.

That’s not as obvious as it sounds. You and I were born into a world already broken, already noisy with competing explanations for why things are the way they are. The chaos feels native to us. So when we open the Bible at Genesis chapter one, we’re not just reading a creation account—we’re being introduced to the Creator and a place we can barely comprehend.

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” — Genesis 1:1

This is where the story starts. Not with a people already in rebellion, but with a majestic God working with perfect intention—and calling everything he made “good”.

A Very Different Story

Every culture in human history has offered some account of where we came from, and the differences between them are instructive. The ancient Babylonians told of the goddess Tiamat warring against her rebelling children; the young god Marduk killed her, and from her body he fashioned the earth. The Taoist story of P’an Ku holds that humanity descended from the parasites on a dying cosmic giant. Later, secular scientific frameworks emerged—panspermia, spontaneous generation, organic evolution—each offering their explanation for our existence.

These are not idle stories. What we believe about our origins shapes how we understand our dignity, our purpose, and our place in the world. It matters enormously that when God reveals his own account of creation, it sounds nothing like these others. There is only God and his voice.

God Said

What strikes me most when I read Genesis 1 is the repeating pattern: God said and it was. Verse 3: God said, “Let there be light.” Verse 6: God said, “Let there be an expanse.” Verse 9, verse 11, verse 14, verse 20, verse 24, verse 26 and so on throughout the entire chapter. Each time creation proceeds by his spoken word. The Hebrew poetry of this chapter places emptiness and the voice of God in direct opposition, and the voice wins every time without effort or resistance.

To create something from existing materials is genuinely impressive. The most beautiful things humans have made—great architecture, fine music, a perfectly crafted car—have a baseline of raw material underneath them. But to speak something into being from nothing is an ability that belongs only to a God who is independent of everything outside himself.

Order out of Chaos

There is a structure to the creation account. In days one through three, God creates form: he divides light from darkness, sky from sea, and draws dry land up out of the waters. Then in days four through six, he fills what he has formed with lights to rule day and night, creatures to fill sea and sky, animals and then humanity to fill the earth. The structure is intentional, and it is beautiful, and it tells us something about who God is and about the world you live in right now.

Chaos is not hard to find. Nations are fracturing. Marriages are falling apart. Jobs disappear. Families struggle. In these times, it is easy to conclude that things are out of control. But what Genesis 1 makes undeniably clear is that God is a God of order, not chaos. The one who took the formless void and structured it with sovereign intention is the same God who presides over every moment of your life. He is not surprised by what unsettles you. If everything was made by him, then surely everything is controlled by him, and nothing is beyond his view.

In the wildest, most disorienting seasons of life, your safety is not found in how comfortable the circumstances feel. It is found in a relationship with the one who permits those circumstances to happen.

What Creation Reveals

Creation doesn’t just show us what God can do. It shows us who God is. Romans 1:19-20 puts it plainly: “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.”

Consider the most beautiful things you’ve encountered in creation––perhaps the mountains, the expanse of the ocean, or the face of a child. These things are not accidental. They are reflections. Creation mirrors the glory of the one who made it. As David wrote in Psalm 19, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.”

But creation also reflects something we are quick to doubt: the goodness of God. After each creative act, God pauses, looks at what he has made, and calls it “good”. This is not God congratulating his own workmanship in some abstract sense. It is God declaring the moral and relational quality of what he has made, because he himself is good. Good things flow from a good God.

We live in a moment when that claim is constantly questioned. When something goes wrong, the reflex is to conclude that God must not care, or cannot be trusted. But the whole pattern of creation pushes back. Psalm 100 anchors this truth: “For the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.” The pattern that started in Genesis 1 has never stopped.

The Crowning Achievement

On the sixth day of creation, something shifts. God says, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Humanity is placed at the pinnacle of creation—not because we are the strongest or the most adaptable, but because we alone bear the image of God himself. When God steps back to survey everything he has made, the verdict changes: “Behold, it was very good.”

Good became very good the moment people entered the picture. There is a dignity in that which nothing can fully strip away. You are not an accident, not a cosmic afterthought, not the end result of a long biological accident. You were made by God, in his image, for his purposes, and he looked at what he made and called it very good.

Everything was good. And the God who made it good is still at work making things right.

This ABW Article is based on Pastor Nick Gatzke’s teaching series: Beyond Repair, message: Everything Was Good. For more Bible teaching go to: abetterword.org