Goodness and Order

When God said the original creation was "good," the second thing he meant was that it was orderly. The Old Testament is filled with a type of literature that is called "Wisdom." Wisdom was rooted in human experience, teaching life skills by which people could operate successfully under God's supervision.

It is especially in Wisdom literature that you find a considerable amount of rejoicing over the orderliness of creation, but this concept of order is found in other places as well, even Genesis 1, the first creation chapter. There you discover a rigid structure of repeated patterns of creation built around the days of a week. The effect is to make it very clear that creation itself was built by a process of putting order into it. Later the prophet Isaiah would put it this way:

For the LORD is God, and he created the heavens and earth and put everything in place. He made the world to be lived in, not to be a place of empty chaos.
"I am the LORD," he says, "and there is no other. (Isaiah 45:18)

If this is a world to be lived in, it can't be a world of chaos. If God is to be Lord (thus in control), everything in this world needs to be in its place, and thus a reflection of God's rule.

In the heart of the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament is the recognition that there is a meaning to all experience, a meaning founded in the premise that the world, made by God, is orderly, structured with an overarching harmony. To ask a Wisdom writer what it means for creation to be "good" would immediately draw out the answer, "It has order."