The One Thing He Waited For

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply.” — Genesis 1:28

There is a moment in the creation story that is easy to walk past.

God speaks light into darkness. He separates the waters. He calls land out of the sea and fills it with trees and creatures and everything that grows and swims and flies. Again and again He looked at what He had made and said it was good. Good, in the sense that only a maker can mean it: this is exactly what I intended, and it is beautiful.

Then He made us. And the word changed. It was very good.

He delighted in everything He made. But with us, the delight went somewhere it had not gone before. I have read this chapter many times. And I have never quite gotten used to that word. Very good. Not good. Very. That the God who made galaxies paused over us differently. He did not just look at us and call it good. He came close. He formed us with the kind of attention you give to something you intend to love and be loved by.

Not spoken into existence from a distance, but formed from the ground up, the way a potter shapes clay. The LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life (Gen. 2:7). A God who breathes into His creation is not a God who is keeping His distance. He stooped. He formed us with the kind of care you give to something that matters to you more than anything else.

Not because we had earned anything. Not because we had proven ourselves. Moses put it plainly to Israel, and it has never stopped being true:

It was not because you were more in number than any other people that
the Lord set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples,
but it is because the Lord loves you. — Deuteronomy 7:7–8

Because the Lord loves you.

No other explanation is given. None was needed. This is what love does when it originates in God. It does not wait to be deserved. It simply moves. He is not merely loving. Love is what He is. When God made us, love was not one of the things He intended to give us. It was the ground we were shaped from.

An ancient Chinese legend is worth pausing over. Inside it, quietly, is a clue to why God was willing to wait.

In the Southern Dynasties period of ancient China, a painter named Zhang Sengyou was said to be the most gifted of his age. A legend tells that he once visited a temple and painted four dragons on its walls. But he left their eyes blank: four magnificent creatures, scales and sinew rendered in perfect detail, and yet eyeless, fixed, inert.

The onlookers were puzzled. Why no eyes?