God created the world out of nothing created, but He did create out of His own eternal good nature. This is why all that He created, He called good. He is good and nothing can come from His good nature that is not also good.
Proverbs 3:19-20 reads that “By wisdom, the Lord laid the earth’s foundation, by understanding he set the heavens in place; by his knowledge, the deeps were divided, and the clouds let drop the dew.”
Everything from the smallest particle to the most complex beings was created from His good nature. However, only humans were given the special identity of being fashioned after His own image. He put His mark of identity on us from the beginning.
Christians often live with the perspective that the physical world has nothing good in it and that all that we ought to desire should be spiritual eternal things. We have forgotten the story of our creation and our original assignment as having dominion over the earth to cultivate it.
We start the story with the fall of man instead of at the pinnacle of creation.
Despite the world being subjected to the consequence of the fall of man, it is no more irredeemable than we are.
Romans 8:19-21 explains that “The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.”
Thus, creation is waiting for us, the sons of God, to liberate it from its bondage to decay and bring it into the same glorious freedom we have as redeemed children of God! Our doctrine for so long has curtailed this plan by purporting that the physical world will all pass away to be replaced with ethereal heaven and new earth. Just as we do not pass away when we shed our bondage to a fallen sin nature, neither does the earth pass away as the decay and corruption melts away to be replaced with the incorruptible glorious nature. Man gains a new nature when the old passes away but is still the man. Likewise, the earth becomes the new earth when it is freed from its bondage to a fallen nature.
While the spiritual realm is superior to the physical one, the physical one is not worthless. It was created as good with the assignment of revealing the glory of God thereby living in the same freedom the children of God enjoy. The physical and spiritual worlds were designed to operate in tandem rather than in tension. C.S. Lewis provides the apt analogy that the supernatural and the natural are to be more like a centaur than a horse and rider.
Thus, while creation did indeed have a definitive beginning from nothing created, there was Someone uncreated bringing it all into being with a good purpose with which we can align with Him to bring to fruition.
