And God said, let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. – Genesis 1:3-5

We see in these verses the beginning of the familiar story of the six days of creation. God starts by creating light to banish the darkness and then working all the way to the creation of man.

In these first few verses, the planning and timing of God is revealed. He works from the foundation upward. He started from the chaos and darkness that was the whole earth. He did not just make a new one after the rebellion in the heavenlies, but salvaged the old one by remodeling it.

Now here is a good lesson for our very wasteful generation. Some things are really worth saving. The test of success is not the ability to start a new thing, but the ability to keep that which we already have. Whether it is our business, marriage, friends or even property, it is not enough to just replace a “product” once it gets faulty.

I once talked to a lady who was shocked when I told her that marriage is meant to be for life. She felt that, after about five years, you should have grown tired of your partner and would need an upgrade. Needless to say, she thought Christians were silly to “eat from the same pot for so many years.” We give up on things and people too easily. We assume that if there is a better one, let’s get rid of the old one. If God was willing to stick with a devastated world, shouldn’t we be at least willing to try to save it too by living more responsibly? We as a generation inherited a fruitful earth, yet in just over 50 years of industrialization, we have managed to plunder the earth, causing climatic and environmental degradation. Should we not attempt to replenish this world (Genesis 1:28) rather than mining the moon and searching for new livable planets?