When it comes to this world, I’d give God an F. Make that four F’s.

This morning, at the intersection between a night’s sleep and the morning’s waking, my mind began to turn over the immensity of God’s work in creation.

“In the beginning…” Wait a minute. Genesis begins with God’s foundation of a realm where He would eventually place man. But God had no beginning. He just started the story there because it’s what He chose to show us.

Before the beginning, God had a thought. More accurately, He had the fullness of the thing that we experience as only a shadow — the thing we would call a “thought.” (For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. Isaiah 55:8)

In the fullness of his thinking and imagination, God pictured the entirety of our universe perfectly, and He did so all at once. At least that’s the way I imagine a God-Who-Can-Do-All doing it. If it wasn’t that way, it was an even better way. He only does things the best way with the best outcomes. (And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. Gen 1:31)

Here’s something I hadn’t pondered before:

Not only did God create all the things we can discover, and all the things too big to know, and all the things so small they are forever hidden…

Not only did God create all things with infinite diversity and variety…

Not only did God create things physical, things spiritual, and even the idea that we could have an idea…

He created nothing without giving it a function. (The LORD has made everything for its purpose, even the wicked for the day of trouble. Proverbs 16:4)

Every single thing now — or in the past from the beginning, or in the future to the infinity of all being — bears a particular assignment from God, a purpose to fulfill. All of creation somehow cooperates with all other parts, even in its broken state. Beyond that, each thing bears an assignment common to all, to bring God glory. (Yours, O LORD, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty, for all that is in the heavens and in the earth is yours. Yours is the kingdom, O LORD, and you are exalted as head above all. 1 Chronicles 29:11)

Just one example, rain. By His say-so, the water we can’t live without is distributed in a way so creative that only God could have imagined it. He moves it unevenly, creating extremes of environment so He can showcase an even broader variety of animate and inanimate being. Different terrains. It floats in pools. It cuts across the landscape to reveal wonders beneath the earth’s surface. In the storm, He shouts His presence. (Keep listening to the thunder of his voice and the rumbling that comes from his mouth. Job 37:2)

God’s mind saw it all in a flash.

Before the beginning, He saw function to all things.

Then He fashioned all things. In the beginning there was nothing, then there was something. His thing.

When all things rebelled, as He foreknew (He ordained it as part of their function), He made Himself to be their source of freedom.

And He did (does!) all things for the sake of celebrating the very highest good possible — His glory, His fame.

Four F’s, perfectly imagined and executed.