God saw how good what God had created was. The one common theme that runs through the Genesis creation account is the goodness of God’s creation. With each passing day, God looked at what God had created, and God delighted at it because it was all good. There was nothing that resulted from God’s creative act that was not good. The question that we must ask ourselves whenever we read the creation account is this: how should we understand the goodness of creation? What does it mean to say that creation is good?
The goodness of creation should not be understood to merely mean that what God created was ‘pleasing to the eye’ (our everyday understanding of beautiful). While it is definitely true that what God created is pleasant to look at (otherwise we wouldn’t be spending time and resources to traverse the world for sightseeing), it is too narrow an understanding. Rather, that creation is good follows from the act of creating itself, that is, the act of bringing forth. Creation means that God brought forth from nothing (ex nihilo). God brought forth into existence that which was not in existence. God did not destroy something in order to make another thing. Everything came from God. What God created was good because it transformed the formless void. Before creation, there was nothing. After creation, there was something. It was a beautiful transformation.
Secondly, because of the nature of the act itself, creation was an expression of the creator (or as some theologians would call it, an extension of the Creator). Consequently, the goodness of creation takes after the goodness of the creator. Creation is good because God is good (cf. Mark 10:18 ‘No one is good but God alone’). Creation is good because God created the heavens and the earth with no strings attached. God did not create in order to derive any pleasure or benefits from creation. God created because God wanted to share God’s goodness with the other.