Creation Was Never Perfect
6/03/2025
Mike Dicker is the Principal of Youthworks College
“In the beginning God made the world and everything perfect” is what I often hear people say when they recount the story of creation through salvation history. I’ve even read it in teaching curriculum and Christian books. The problem is, it’s not true. It doesn’t make sense of salvation history, and it diminishes the incarnation of Jesus and the redemption of all creation.
We are all probably well versed in the creation story of Genesis 1-2 and then the tragic fall of humanity in Genesis 3, but summarising the story to say that God’s creation was perfect and then people ruined it with sin is a misleading substitute for what the Bible actually says:
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…and God saw that it was good.” Six times God says that his creation is ‘good’, and once that it is ‘very good’ after he had made man (adam) and woman (adamah) in his image. The word God uses to describe his creation is good and very good, but not perfect.
The problem with calling God’s creation perfect is that it invites us to think of God’s creation as pristine and static, as if it was completed and, well…perfect. But that is not what God made. God makes a creation that needs to be completed and fulfilled. The technical word is that he made creation with a telos (purpose/end). God creates everything and then hands over the responsibility of fulfilling, subduing and ruling it to his kingly representatives adam and adamah (Gen 1:28).
It’s in this context that God takes his rest from all his work (Gen 2:2). The garden he planted in the East is meant to be worked by people and expanded to fill the earth. People are to be like him, to rule as he rules, to love as he loves, to care as he cares, to work as he works, to be ordered and gratified as he is. All people are made for this as we live, move and have our being, abiding in him and he in us.
By God’s own design he intends that all his creation should be fulfilled (perfected) through his image-bearing people. Human beings are central to the purpose of creation and the plan of God. In fact, we could boldly say that God’s creation is unable to be perfected without human beings! And this is what we miss if we give the impression that God’s creation was already perfectly pristine and static until we ruined it: we miss the centrality of human beings to God’s purposes.
All creation is to be fulfilled in and through his image-bearers —this helps us make sense of why people must “fill, rule and subdue.” I mean what is there to fill, subdue and dominate in a creation that is already completed? It also makes sense of the fall, of the presence of evil in the garden, of a tree that causes death if you eat its fruit, and why God persists with people even after their disobedience. It’s actually what makes sense of the whole salvation story!
When we use the shorthand of saying creation was originally perfect, children and young people are usually first to ask the most sensible follow up question: Why then did God let people ruin it? Why did he even allow the possibility of sin in his creation if it was perfect? Wouldn’t it have spared us all a great deal of trouble if he just kept it perfect?
But if we speak of creation as Genesis speaks of creation and see the purpose of God to bring all things to fulfillment and completion through his people, then we see with more clarity how these events fit into God’s plan of fulfilling all things in Jesus, the Son. In fact, Paul says that the mystery of God’s plan for the fullness of time has been revealed. Why has God made things as they are? It is “to bring all things together in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth.”
This is why the incarnation of God as a human being is absolutely essential to the perfection of all things. Human beings fail time and time again to live up to the glory God has bestowed on us as his image bearers “…and yet, we do see Jesus, who was made lower than the angels for a little while, now crowned with glory and honour” (Heb. 2:9). We do see Jesus made like “his brothers and sisters” with human flesh and blood (Heb. 2:14, 17). We do see Jesus who is “…the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation” (Col. 1:15), a human being who stands at the centre of creation, who is before all things, and in him holds all things together. We see Jesus the Son as the fulfilment of God’s entire plan from beginning to end “the first and the last” (Rev. 1:17).
Nothing God does is faulty, and so creation can be called ‘perfect’ if we mean it in the sense that it is exactly what God wanted and intended. But in the beginning, creation is not ‘perfect’ in the sense that it was complete, pristine or static. It was always meant to be perfected through human beings as his image-bearers, and that image is perfected in the man Jesus Christ – our pioneer, our brother, and our fellow heir of God the Father.
This makes sense of why the creation has been subjected to the frustration of death and decay: “the creation waits with eager longing for the sons of God to be revealed” (Rom. 8:19). God subjected creation to frustration (the fall) in the expectation that all will be liberated when the children of God are revealed with the full freedom and glory of their adoption to the Father with Jesus the Son, by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Doesn’t that make much more sense of salvation history, the incarnation of Jesus, and the redemption of all creation? This is the glorious mystery revealed in the gospel of Jesus.
