TARA GIBBS | CONTRIBUTOR

When my kids were in high school, a parenting book encouraged me to ask, “What is our family motto?” Potential responses flitted through my mind, “Glorify God and enjoy Him… Love God, love others… Encourage one another…”

However, when I posed the question, two of my kids laughed and gave me the same horrifying response, “Win.”

Hmm.

I knew we were not a resume-builder, push-our-kids-to-do-it-all kind of family, and after getting the horrified reaction they wanted, my kids followed up with better answers like, “Glorify God and enjoy Him forever.”  The opportunity to get a rise out of mom had been too tempting to resist.

But their responses got me thinking, “Yes, I teach our kids to glorify and enjoy God, but what other messages do I communicate in unspoken ways throughout the week?” From “work hard and do well,” to “avoid the dangerous world,” to “our family prioritizes elite sports,” to “take good care of your physical body,” fill in thousands of potential “unspoken mottos” here: _______.

Many of these “unspoken mottos” are not bad in themselves but simply mis-prioritized. And until heaven, perfect balance will not be achieved, but that is exactly why it’s good to regularly ask ourselves, “What unspoken family mottos are we communicating?”

One place to find many truths for living in this world is the creation account of Genesis 1-2. This is where we see the world as it should be.

Sometimes I think we treat the first two chapters of Genesis like the foreword of a book: “I can just skim over that introductory part to get to the real story—sin, fall, and salvation.” A friend said to me once: “Practically, I think I often thought of Christianity as starting with the fall in Genesis 3, ‘We are sinful, and we need Jesus to be saved.’”

But sin and the fall are not the way God starts His Story of His good world. When we read Genesis 1:1-31 we learn much about how we are to positively inhabit this world day in and out. There’s a lot here from which to strengthen our lived out family motto.

It is Good

At the end of almost every day of creation we hear the refrain, “And it was good.” You see it in verses 4, 10, 12, 18, 21, and 25. Verse 31 sums up God’s view of His creation, “And God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good.”

As we compare our stated life motto to daily lived choices, do they demonstrate a view of the physical, created world as “very good”? Sometimes as we focus on the fall of Genesis 3 and consider our personal sinfulness, our eyes can be so focused on sin, we forget to emphasize the goodness.

God made a good creation, and Jesus came to inaugurate the restoration and reconciliation of that creation (Is. 65:17; 1 Cor. 15:20; Rev. 21:1-5). As God’s image bearers, does our view of the world testify to that goodness, or does it say, “don’t touch, don’t taste, be afraid, just say no to creation…”? As we spend time looking at the goodness of creation, it gives us a beautiful picture of how God designed this good earth for His people to “glorify God and enjoy Him.”

It is Orderly and Knowable

When we read Genesis 1:1-31, we see a rhythm, order, and complementarity in the craftsmanship of our God. He could have created everything all at once, but instead, He takes His time crafting each thing in its place and order. As God creates, we see the complement of dark and light, sky and earth, land and sea. We see plants and animals to fit these habitats and instructed to reproduce in a predictable and knowable way—“each after its own kind.”  God created a beautiful, functional, and knowable world.

There is joy that comes from this predictability. We don’t have to worry about planting a pineapple and getting a watermelon. We don’t have to worry whether gravity is going to work the same way when we walk out of our houses in the morning. Studying God’s knowable creation should lead us to rest in His wisdom and praise His beauty.

It Shows the Goodness of Work and Rest

As we study creation, we also see our craftsman God pause each day to look with pleasure and approval upon His creation. In verses 4, 10, 12, 18, 21, and 31 we read, “And God saw…” before He declares His creation, “good” and finally “very good.”

Old Testament scholar Jack Collins says, “the reader is to experience something of God’s delight in ‘everything that he has made.’”[1] Read that quote slowly and thoughtfully. Are we experiencing something of God’s delight in His creation?

As you and I consider our lived-life-mottos, may we follow God’s example in stopping from our busy-ness to revel in the goodness of His creation. Not only that, may we follow God’s model by pausing from our own labors to see the goodness of the work we do as His stewards of creation (Gen. 1:28, 2:15).

Not only does God stop to appreciate what He has made, at the end of each workday, God pauses to rest. God did not stop to rest because He tires (Is. 40:28). Yet, at the end of each day of labor, there was “evening and there was morning.” The time between evening and mornings is the time of rest for laborers.

In the creation account God models for us the rhythms of a flourishing life: work, worship (stopping to appreciate and worship God’s goodness), and rest. As we consider how to embody a lived-life-motto in this created world, may we spend time gazing at the goodness of Genesis 1 and 2. Consider prayerfully reading through those two chapters focusing on “goodness.” If God saw value in stopping each day to gaze at the goodness of what He had made, how much more so should we?

[1] C. John Collins, Genesis 1-3, P&R Publishing, 2006, 76.

Photo by Joshua Woroniecki on Unsplash