Weekly Deep Dive - Good Is Not the Finish Line

For so long I read Genesis 1 like it was a completed project report. God builds the world, inspects His work, stamps it “very good,” and files it away. Chapter closed. On to the snake.

I even had “very good” underlined in my Bible with a little star next to it, like God had gotten an A and we could all just move along.

Then I started studying the book in its own language, and the first chapter of the Bible subtly rearranged all my theological furniture. Because there's a word missing from Genesis 1. And once I noticed its absence, I realized I'd been asking the chapter to say something it never actually says.

Seven Goods and Not One Holy

Read Genesis 1 slowly and count. Six times God declares something good. The light. The land and seas. Vegetation. The lights in the sky. The sea creatures and birds. The land animals. And then the seventh declaration gathers everything together:

“So God saw everything that He made, and behold it was very good. So there was evening and there was morning—the sixth day.” (Genesis 1:31, TLV)

In a chapter built on sevens, that climactic seventh is the Hebrew Bible’s way of saying complete, whole, exactly as intended.¹

Now go looking for the word holy in that chapter.

It isn’t there.

Nothing within creation has been called holy…. yet. God Himself is holy, of course. He always has been. But the light isn’t given that word and neither is humanity. Even the man and woman made in God’s own image are called very good (tov meod), along with everything else on day six.

There are two words in Genesis 1 that leans forward, though. God blesses. He blesses the creatures of the sea and sky. He blesses humanity. And then in Genesis 2:3 He blesses the seventh day, and the seventh day alone receives something more. It is the only thing in the creation account that is both blessed and sanctified.²

Which makes what happens on day seven all the more striking.

The First Holy Thing

“Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, for on it He ceased from all His work that God created for the purpose of preparing.” (Genesis 2:3, TLV)

Three actions in one verse. God ceased. God blessed. God sanctified. And the first created reality Scripture explicitly says God sanctified is a day. The day is holy because God tied it to His own rest.

Shabbat is the first created reality invited to bear a quality that belongs to God Himself. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel built his beautiful little book The Sabbath around this observation: before there is a holy mountain, a holy temple, or a holy people, there is holy time.³

And look at how the TLV finishes that verse. God ceased from all His work that He created “for the purpose of preparing.” The Hebrew there is la’asot, from the verb meaning to do or to make.

The grammar honestly allows more than one reading, and translators have handled it different ways, some rendering it simply “which God created and made.”⁴ But some Jewish commentators have seen in the phrase an invitation, as though the world was made with human work already woven into its purpose.⁵

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks often described humanity as God’s covenant partner in developing, healing, and bringing the created world toward its intended purpose.⁶

And honestly, Genesis itself points that direction before we ever reach the interpretation. Look at the commission humanity receives in Genesis 1:28, before any serpent, before any fall. Be fruitful. Multiply. Fill the land. Conquer it. Rule over the creatures.

Then Genesis 2:15 places the man in the garden “in order to cultivate and watch over it”. Both passages assume an ongoing human vocation within a creation God has already declared very good. Humanity’s work was never a repair job on God’s craftsmanship. Cultivation, development, and faithful rule were part of the design from the beginning.

God handed His image-bearers a world that was very good and gave them work through which its possibilities would unfold.

If I’m reading the shape of these two chapters right, good was the starting material. Holy was the direction.

This is where my study has led me, and I’m happy to own that conclusion. The text itself spends six days calling creation good, reserves holy for the seventh day, and then commissions humanity to continue the work of cultivating and ordering the world.

The Story We Inherited

Most of us inherited a four-chapter version of the Bible. Creation. Fall. Redemption. New Creation. God made it good, we broke it, Yeshua fixed it, heaven someday. And every piece of that outline is true. I’m definitely grateful for chapter three.

But that outline has a subtle side effect. It turns the entire Old Testament into a waiting room. If the story is essentially about sin and its solution, then everything between Genesis 3 and Matthew 1 becomes filler, and “good” becomes a synonym for “finished.” Eden becomes the standard we fell from, and salvation becomes a return trip.

Many streams of Jewish thought have read the story along a different axis. The movement runs from creation to consummation. From good to holy. The world God made was genuinely good, functioning exactly as He designed, and it was still headed somewhere. Redemption in this reading is gloriously real, and it serves something even bigger: God’s determination to finish what He started.

Watch holiness travel through your Bible and you’ll see it.

It surfaces first in a wilderness, where Moses turns aside to see a burning bush and is told to remove his sandals, because the ground where he stands is holy.⁷ Then at Sinai, God sanctifies a people:

“Now then, if you listen closely to My voice, and keep My covenant, then you will be My own treasure from among all people, for all the earth is Mine. So as for you, you will be to Me a kingdom of kohanim and a holy nation.” (Exodus 19:5-6, TLV)

Then He commands a sanctuary, a holy dwelling where His presence rests in the middle of the camp.⁸ Then holiness becomes a calling pressed into daily conduct:

“Speak to all the congregation of Bnei-Yisrael and tell them: You shall be kedoshim, for I, Adonai your God, am holy.” (Leviticus 19:2, TLV)

Israel is invited to become, in her conduct, what Shabbat already is in time. Set apart. In other words, holiness moves from sacred time into praxis, the daily habits and practices by which God's people embody His character.

And through the prophets, the vision keeps widening, until Zechariah sees a day when even the bells on the horses and the cooking pots in Jerusalem are engraved with holiness.⁹ Ordinary things, saturated.

The Path Holiness Takes

Lay it out end to end and the trajectory is breathtaking.

Holy time. Holy ground. A holy people. A holy dwelling. Holy living. A holy city. And in the prophets’ widest visions, a whole creation filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.¹⁰

Within creation, holiness is first named over a single day, and it spends the rest of Scripture spreading. What began as one sanctified slice of time keeps reaching for more territory, more people, more of ordinary life, until nothing is left outside it.

The biblical movement runs from a good creation, wounded by sin, toward a redeemed creation filled with God’s presence. Good all the way to holy!!

From a Garden to a City

Here’s where Revelation stands up and clears its throat.

“I also saw the holy city—the New Jerusalem—coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. I also heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling of God is among men, and He shall tabernacle among them.’” (Revelation 21:2-3, TLV)

The story doesn’t end where it began. It opens in a garden and ends in a city. And the redeemed city of Revelation is creation brought to its fulfillment, the garden cultivated, built upon, filled, exactly as the commission of Genesis 1:28 envisioned, with God dwelling in the middle of it.

The One seated on the throne says, “Behold, I am making all things new!” (Revelation 21:5). Making. Even at the end, He’s still the God of day six, hands in the clay!

And she comes down holy. What only a day could claim in Genesis 2 now describes an entire world.

The cross stands at the center of that story. Jesus’ death and resurrection serve God’s larger purpose of a restored creation with His dwelling in the middle of it, and they guarantee that nothing, no sin, no curse, no grave, gets to interrupt what He has been building since “Let there be light.” He didn’t come to run the film backward to Eden. He came to carry it forward to the wedding!!

Verse Mapping Aid: Tov

The Hebrew word tov (טוֹב, pronounced tohv) is the drumbeat of Genesis 1. We usually translate it “good,” and the word ranges wide in Hebrew. It can describe what is beautiful, pleasant, beneficial, morally right, excellent. In Genesis 1, tov consistently describes creation as exactly what its Maker intended. When God calls the light tov, He’s the craftsman looking at the work and confirming it does exactly what He designed it to do.

What tov doesn’t mean is finished-with-nothing-left-to-become. Genesis introduces a different category on the seventh day. In Genesis 2:3 God “sanctified” the day; the Hebrew verb there is vayekadesh, and it comes from the same root as kadosh, the adjective meaning holy, set apart, belonging distinctly to God. Creation week gives us a world repeatedly declared tov and one created reality explicitly sanctified, the seventh day.

One way to read the rest of Scripture is as the story of that root on the move.

My Final Thoughts

I spent a lot of years treating my spiritual life the way I treated Genesis 1. Saved? Check. Forgiven? Check. Very good, underline it, little star, done. And then I’d wonder why “done” felt so restless.

The Hebrew of Genesis 1 and 2 told me what my own heart couldn’t articulate. God wasn’t finished with the world on day six, and He isn’t finished with me either. The way I’ve come to read it, good was never the finish line. It was the good creation God intended to fill with His holiness.

That’s why Peter can reach back to Sinai and describe Messiah’s communities with Israel’s priestly language.¹¹ Through Yeshua, believers from the nations are welcomed into the holy vocation that began with Israel and still belongs to her. The calling never expired… it expanded to make room.

So if your walk with God feels less like a completed transaction and more like a construction site, take heart. You’re in the part of the story where the Builder is still building, and He has never once abandoned a project.

Dig Deeper

Genesis 1:1-2:3, Genesis 2:15, Exodus 3:1-5, Exodus 19:1-6, Exodus 25:8, Leviticus 19:1-2, Isaiah 11:9, Habakkuk 2:14, Zechariah 14:20-21, Romans 8:19-23, 1 Peter 2:9, Revelation 21:1-5

Let’s Talk in the Comments

1. Before today, how would you have defined the difference between good and holy? Has that changed?

2. Where in your own life have you been treating “good” like the finish line?

3. What do you make of the first holy thing in Scripture being a day rather than a place or a person?

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About the Author

Diane Ferreira is a Jewish believer in Yeshua, a published author, speaker, seminary student, wife, and proud mom. She is the founder of She’s So Scripture and She Opens Her Bible. She is the author of several books, including The Proverbs 31-ish Woman, which debuted as Amazon’s #1 New Release in Religious Humor, as well as Holy, Hormonal and Holding On.

She is currently pursuing her graduate degree in Jewish Studies in seminary, with her favorite topics being the early church and Biblical Hebrew. Diane writes and teaches from a unique perspective, bridging her Jewish heritage with vibrant faith in the Messiah to bring clarity, depth, and devotion to everyday believers.

When she’s not writing, studying, or teaching, you’ll find her curled up with a good book, crocheting something cozy, traveling, or playing her favorite video games.

Notes

1. The declarations of good fall at Genesis 1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, and 25, with the seventh and climactic declaration, “very good” (tov me’od), at 1:31.

2. God blesses the creatures of the sea and sky (Genesis 1:22), humanity (Genesis 1:28), and the seventh day (Genesis 2:3). Only the seventh day receives both the blessing and the sanctification.

3. Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1951). Heschel’s opening chapters develop the idea that the Bible’s first holiness is a holiness in time.

4. The Hebrew phrase is asher bara Elohim la’asot, literally “which God created to do” or “to make.” Compare the TLV’s “for the purpose of preparing” with translations that render the phrase “which God created and made.” The infinitive leaves room for both readings.

5. A classic expression of this tradition appears in Midrash Tanchuma, Tazria 5 (numbered Tazria 7 in some editions), where Rabbi Akiva presents stalks of wheat and loaves of bread to argue that God designed His creation to be brought to completion through human hands. The Tanchuma is a collection of rabbinic teachings on the Torah compiled in the centuries after the apostolic era. You can read the passage at sefaria.org/Midrash_Tanchuma,_Tazria.5.

6. See especially Jonathan Sacks, To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), where he develops human responsibility as partnership with God in the work of creation.

7. Exodus 3:5.

8. Exodus 25:8.

9. Zechariah 14:20-21.

10. Isaiah 11:9; Habakkuk 2:14.

11. 1 Peter 2:9, drawing on the language of Exodus 19:6.

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Tree of Life (TLV) – Scripture taken from the Holy Scriptures, Tree of Life Version*. Copyright © 2014,2016 by the Tree of Life Bible Society. Used by permission of the Tree of Life Bible Society.