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A Very Good Creation
By John R. Gavazzoni
The Genesis account of creation reveals something to be treasured, i.e., God's satisfaction with all He had done. Divine satisfaction is very demanding. For God to be satisfied, a thing must be very good. The account informs us that, indeed, was God's valuation of all that He had created. Upon crowning all that He had done with the creation of man, He saw all that He had created, and "....behold, it was very good." That goal of "very good" was arrived at in stages, as the Lord saw. At each stage of His creative accomplishments, good added to good until it reached "very good."
The Amplified version adds to "behold," "and He validated it." Several translations have, in the place of "behold," "indeed." Taking all attempts to render the Hebrew text fully and accurately, what is conveyed to the reader is that what God saw was indeed, very good, and validated according to His beholding. This brings us to the question, just what constitutes in God's eyes that which is very good? What is the nature of that in which He finds very good satisfaction? The answer is the excellence of His Being.
From Paul we learn that man has his being within the Being of God: "in Him, we live, and move, and have our being." There is a singular excellence of Being within which man, as God's crowning creative achievement, has his being, and as the head of all creation, and representative of its nature, God reckons him and all that is under him as very good. Layer upon layer, God built that which was good, until He crowned it all with the formation of man. Therefore, I say, the whole of creation exists under man, under God. That truth is inherent within the Lord's commission to Adam and Eve, "be fruitful, multiply, replenish (fill) the earth, and subdue (conquer) it."
That commission was restored in Jesus, the Last (Final) Adam, who with all rightful affirmation, could say, "all authority is given unto Me in heaven and earth...." Real authority is according to nature. Real authority proceeds out from within being. God's authority rests upon, and proceeds out of His nature, His Being, and in and by the being which we have within His Being, He extends and exercises His authority.
The Psalmist observed, "Thou crownest him (man) with glory and honor." He references man and the Son of Man in the context, shadowing the truth that in Jesus, the Son of Man, the Second Man/Last (Final) Adam, man is restored to being crowned with glory and honor. To be crowned in scripture indicates a regal display of the (true) nature of the one/One being crowned. In a word, crowning is from the inside out. In a childlike frame of mind, I once asked the Lord, just what did Jesus mean in His pattern prayer, "our Father which art in heaven," and specifically what is that heaven in which the Father dwells. I heard the answer within a split second of my question: "I dwell in the transcendence of My own glory."
You see, the emanation of God's excellence, the out-from-within-Him excellence of His Being, His glory, both clothes Him and becomes His habitation. God dwells within His glory. What else could possibly be a fit habitation of God. Paul wrote that, "the man is the image and glory of God." Jesus, the True Man, True Human, is the reality of all humanness, of all humanity. God's glory is in His family. He is "the Father of glory." He begets glory, and from the stuff of that begotten glory, He fashioned our creaturehood. Man, restored in Christ, is the habitation of God in the Spirit. We are the living stones of the living God, in and by which He has constructed His habitation.
This traces back to sonship "before the foundation of the world," translated into the eons, so that Paul is very specific about in what form the fullness of the Godhead exists in Christ....specifically, "bodily." "In Him dwelleth the fullness of the Godhead BODILY." The fullness of Deity in God's Son before all time, became the fullness of Deity bodily in Jesus. "....Know ye not that your BODY is a temple of the Holy Spirit." What is the substructure of our earthen embodiment? Of what are we truly made? We are made of glory. "The whole earth is full of His glory," proclaimed the prophet. "Full" there is not to be understood in the sense of a liquid contained in a glass vessel, with the vessel being of a different kind than the liquid.
What the prophet saw and proclaimed was that all earthenness is constituted by the glory of God. The container and the contained are of one essence, as in God's habitation being the emanation (from the inside out) of His glory. The dust of the ground from which Adam was formed, was glory dust. All materiality is formed-out, fashioned, carved-out Spirit. God, before all time, gave birth to a family. God, as Spirit, gave birth in kind. He, the "one Spirit," gave birth in kind to spirit children. All creation from procreation is "after its kind." From our own spirit-substance, born of the one Spirit, which is God, God formed our creaturehood. This is the reality upon which Paul declared that all creation is in travailing expectation awaiting the manifestation of the sons of God, for creation shall be delivered from its bondage to decay by its entrance into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. The deliverance-principle is that as the sons go, so goes all creation.
Creation's deliverance from its bondage to decay lies within its own sonship constitution. Creation will be delivered out-from-within, out from within its own glory-constitution. I've shared many times how the Lord explained to me regarding my/our true identity, both as those begotten of God in union with Christ, and created by Him: "You are the fruit of My loins, and the work of My hands."
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