Wednesday AM Bible Study; July 23, 2025 – Genesis 1:31-2:3

Theme: God declared the completion of the six days of His creative work ‘very good’ … and declared the blessedness of His rest on the seventh.

(All Scripture is taken from The New King James Version, unless otherwise indicated).

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¹Over the past few weeks, we’ve been studying the story of God’s creation of the heavens and the earth, and of how He formed it into an inhabitable realm for the creatures He made. It’s a story that’s fundamental to everything … including our salvation.

As we’ve unfolded this story, as it’s given to us in Genesis 1:1-30, it’s important that we don’t receive it as a mere mythology or fable that people developed long ago to explain what they couldn’t know through science. Instead, it’s presented to us as a literal, authoritative declaration of the beginnings of all true history—fully in keeping with true scientific inquiry. And even though it’s a story that can be confirmed by empirical examination and study of what has been made, it also shouldn’t be thought of as merely a theory that human beings developed by a scientific examination of the existing data of this world. It couldn’t have been known strictly by scientific observation since it tells the story of what happened before any human witnesses could have seen it. Instead, as the writer of Hebrews puts it, “By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible” (Hebrews 11:3). The story of the six days of Creation is so crucial and foundational that it puts every human being who hears it at the crossroads of decision. As the apostle Peter wrote of scoffers in the last days, “For this they willingly forget: that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of water and in the water, by which the world that then existed perished, being flooded with water” (2 Peter 3:5-6). Truly, if someone will accept and believe what the Bible tells us in the first chapter, then they won’t really have any difficulty believing everything else that the Bible proposes. And now, at the end of that story, we’re given these vital words in Genesis 1:31-2:3. They contain God’s own verdict of approval of the whole creation that He had made:

Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good. So the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

Thus the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them, were finished. And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made (Genesis 1:31-2:3).

Just like an artist who stops to take pleasure and delight in a finished piece, God, the Creator of all, stopped to take pleasure and delight in His creation. And in these four verses, we’re given insight into the authoritative evaluation that He made of it all … that it was “very good”.

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Think for a moment of what it meant that God “rested” from His work at its completion. It couldn’t mean that He needed to rest because He had become weary. As the Bible plainly tells us in Isaiah 40:28;

The everlasting God, the Lord, The Creator of the ends of the earth, Neither faints nor is weary … (Isaiah 40:28).

In Exodus 20:11—at the giving of the fourth commandment—we’re told that God “rested” on the seventh day; and the word that is used in that case (yanach) means to rest in the sense of taking repose. But the word that is used in Genesis 2:2-3 is a completely different word. It’s the word shabath; which means to ‘cease’ or ‘desist’ from a thing—as if taking rest because the work is done. As Dr. Allen Ross explains the ‘rest’ we find in Genesis 2:2-3 in this way: “It [shabath] is not a word that refers to remedying exhaustion after a tiring week of work. Rather, it describes the enjoyment of accomplishment, the celebration of completion.”² In Genesis 1:31-2:3, we’re told the story of how God, the Creator, ceased His creative work to take delight in what He had made. And in this story, we find three things suggested to us in which He specifically took delight: (1) the goodness of His work, (2) the completeness of it, and (3) the blessedness of His rest from it. So then; let’s first consider … 1. THE INITIAL GOODNESS OF THE CREATION. In verse 31—after He had made mankind—we’re told, “Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good. So the evening and the morning were the sixth day.” It’s as if, before God completely ceased from his work at the end of that sixth day, He stopped to survey what He had done and to give His joyful evaluation of it all—that it was “very good”. The evaluation “good” had already been given at individual stages of His creative work. He gave this evaluation two times on the third day; once after causing dry land to appear in 1:10, and once again after allowing vegetation to grow upon it in 1:12. He gave it again on the fourth day after having set the luminaries in the heavens in 1:18, once again on the fifth day after creating the sea creatures in 1:21, and once more on the sixth day after creating the land animals in 1:25. But it’s important to notice that it was only after He created mankind as the crowning act of His creative work that He looked upon it all and said that it was “very good”—or as it can be translated, “exceedingly good” or “abundantly good”. When God surveyed His completed work, what He saw—now with the inclusion of mankind in it—gave Him great satisfaction and joy. And because it’s God Himself who gave this evaluation, we can be sure that His evaluation of “very good” is objectively true. Who would know better than God Himself? Who could question His evaluation or call it into doubt? “Will the thing formed say to him who formed it, ‘Why have you made me like this?’” (Romans 9:20). Now; if taken as the Bible presents it to us, this evaluation of the ‘exceeding goodness’ of God’s creation would be very important for at least two reasons. First, it would necessarily require that we have a different view of the nature of the created realm than would be presented by any other viewpoint that begins with assuming a corrupt creation that was improved later. If God’s evaluation of the creation at its beginning was that it was very good, then there could not have been a process of imperfection, death, and progress toward improvement that, for example, naturalistic evolution would require. It would be difficult to conceive of God looking upon a world filled with the kind of death and disease—the jungle brutality of tooth and claw—that we see today; and then saying that it was “very good”. The picture we are given instead is of a created universe that, in its initial state at the completion of six days, was very good; but that later became characterized by imperfection and death after the fall of Adam. Another thing that God’s evaluation of ‘very good’ does for us is that it helps us to appreciate, by way of contrast, the tragic significance of the impact of the fall—and of our desperate need for salvation. As the apostle Paul wrote in Romans 5;

… just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned … much more the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one Man, Jesus Christ, abounded to many (Romans 5:12, 15).

Dr. Billy Graham was once asked, “Why didn’t God choose to create a perfect world—instead of this world that is so filled with death and suffering?” Dr. Graham very wisely answered that God did create a perfect world—one that, in fact, was ‘very good’—but that it was our sin that has filled it with the death and suffering we see today. But God didn’t look upon the damages of sin indifferently. He has done something about the devastating effects of the fall by sending His Son to be our Savior. Now, even though this world suffers the effects of Adam’s sin, God has brought hope through Christ;

For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God (Romans 8:20-21).

Second, in God’s evaluation of His creative work, consider … 2. THE COMPLETENESS OF THE WORK AT THE BEGINNING. At the end of Genesis 1:31, we read, “So the evening and the morning were the sixth day.” It’s very interesting to note that, in the original Hebrew language of the text, each of the first five days of creation had been marked off in what we might call an ‘indefinite manner’; that is, without a definite article. Each of those days was concluded by the words, “a day, first”, “a day, second”, and so on. This is, in fact, very much like how it’s translated in the New American Standard version. But in verse 31, the definite article is introduced for the first time (that is, “a day, the sixth”)—as if to mark off the sixth day in such a way as to make it stand out as a significant day in the process of creation. This was meant to signify the completion of the work. Verse 2:1 then goes on to say, “Thus the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them, were finished.” Though the work of God’s creation was declared to have been accomplished and completed, observable natural processes continued to occur—and still do. But the creation of all the material that exists in the natural order of the universe—and all that would be necessary for the ongoing natural process of life and perpetuation of that natural order—was completed on the sixth day. The natural processes of this universe do not involve the creation of anything new, but only of new things being done with what has already been made. We’re told something very wonderful about this in the Book of Hebrews. God is quoted as saying that some who rebelled against Him would not enter His rest; and the writer adds that this is true “although the works were finished from the foundation of the world” (Hebrews 4:3). This leads to a question: If this ‘completion’ even included the eternal destinies of some who would ‘not enter his rest’, then how much of God’s redemptive work should we consider to have been truly “completed” by that sixth day? As it turns out, a stunning amount of His saving work is presented as having been accomplished on that day! We’re told in the Scriptures:

… that some things that Jesus uttered had been “kept secret from the foundation of the world” (Matthew 13:35).

… that the Lord will invite people to enter the “kingdom prepared” for them “from the foundation of the world” (Matthew 25:34).

… that the Father chose the redeemed in Christ “before the foundation of the world” (Ephesians 1:4).

… that the work of Christ was “foreordained before the foundation of the world” (1 Peter 1:20).

… that Jesus is “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8).

… that unbelieving people of this world are said to be “not written in the Book of Life from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 17:8).

… that the hope of eternal life is based on that which “God, who cannot lie, promised before time began” (Titus 1:1-2).

… that the Bible displays a “hidden wisdom which God ordained before the ages for our glory” (1 Corinthians 2:7).

It can honestly be said then that, from the standpoint of the sovereign purposes of God, absolutely all of His works were finished on the sixth day—only waiting to be brought to full actualization afterward in the unfolding of history. This is true even of ourselves. We can say, in whole-hearted praise to God, that “in Your book they all were written, the days fashioned for me, when as yet there were none of them” (Psalm 139:16); and rejoice in the knowledge that “we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10). Taken in this context, we could go even further to say that when God declared His finished work “very good”, He was not looking only at the state of creation on the sixth day, but was also looking far ahead to the full completion of His decree throughout eternity future. He looked ahead past the temptation of the enemy in the garden, past the tragic fall of man, and past the atoning sacrifice of His Son on the cross (who victoriously cried, “It is finished” in John 19:30), and on ahead to the full and complete glorification of His sons and daughters who will have been redeemed by faith in the cross of Jesus; and that He declared even the certainty of our dwelling before Him forever in love with His Son in the new heaven and the new earth to be “very good”—all to the everlasting praise of the glory His grace! What a staggeringly “complete” work of creation it was that was completed on that sixth day! And finally, in God’s evaluation of His creative work, consider … 3. THE BLESSEDNESS OF REST ON THE SEVENTH DAY. In verses 2:2-3, repeated stress is laid on the completion of God’s work on day six—but also with the addition that He blessed His rest from His work on day seven: “And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.” This declaration of God’s rest at the completion of His work becomes the pattern set before the Jewish people in the fourth commandment—to work six days and rest on the seventh (see Exodus 20:8-11), just as God Himself ceased from His work and rested. This is a call to remember and celebrate the completion of God’s work; and also to consider sacred His holy day of rest. He set the example for His creatures; mercifully ordaining for them a regular day of rest once a week from their labors. But there’s more. The Creator’s ‘rest’ also becomes a picture of salvation itself. We’re told in Hebrews 4:1-10—as it quotes from Psalm 95 with respect to the unbelieving Jewish people who sought to earn salvation by their works and didn’t enter into grace through faith in Jesus;

Therefore, since a promise remains of entering His rest, let us fear lest any of you seem to have come short of it. For indeed the gospel was preached to us as well as to them; but the word which they heard did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in those who heard it. For we who have believed do enter that rest, as He has said:

“So I swore in My wrath, ‘They shall not enter My rest,’ ”

although the works were finished from the foundation of the world. For He has spoken in a certain place of the seventh day in this way: “And God rested on the seventh day from all His works”; and again in this place: “They shall not enter My rest.” Since therefore it remains that some must enter it, and those to whom it was first preached did not enter because of disobedience, again He designates a certain day, saying in David [that is, in Psalm 95], “Today,” after such a long time, as it has been said:

“Today, if you will hear His voice, Do not harden your hearts.”

For if Joshua had given them rest, then He would not afterward have spoken of another day. There remains therefore a rest for the people of God. For he who has entered His rest has himself also ceased from his works as God did from His (Hebrews 10:1-10).

This is a rest that involves a cessation of our ‘works’ as a means of earning righteousness before God; and of ‘resting’ instead in the work that God has completed for us in Christ. It’s a ‘rest’ that we enter into by faith. The rebellious children of Israel had failed to enter the rest God offered them in their day after their deliverance from bondage in Egypt; and thus they wandered in the wilderness for forty years. But as the writer of Hebrews says,

Let us therefore be diligent to enter that rest, lest anyone fall according to the same example of disobedience (Hebrews 4:11).

When we genuinely rest for our salvation by faith in the full completion of God’s work for us through His Son—we ‘rest’ indeed. That’s how we say our own “Amen!” to God’s declaration of “very good”.

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¹Much of the material for this study was adapted from the Bethany Bible Church study, Genesis & A Biblical Worldview (2012), Lesson 7.

²Allen P. Ross, Creation and Blessing: A Guide to the Study and Exposition of Genesis (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1996), p. 114. AE