Not everything created on day six was created good

Oh, those first six days, however long (or, according to Augustine, infinitely short) they were.

Everything that God did was good. Right?

Wrong. Blasphemy?

While somewhat accustomed to the charge, in this  case I  think not, for it is God himself who tells us that on that all-important sixth day there was something in his creation that was not good:

Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him. (Gen 2:18) 

Divine creation had produced a man. That man was lonely. And that situation, according to God, was not good.

Now of course God did not have an epiphany that, drat, something crucial had been left out of his plan. No, this was an ordained teaching moment. It appears God wanted Adam to recognize his need for a companion. In an efficient, multi-tasking move, accomplishing two tasks for the price of one, God gets Adam to the realization that he is dreadfully alone by having him thoughtfully name the animals. That task, as might well  be imagined, seemed to drive the point home.

After a deep sleep (not a short cat nap, a deep sleep) Eve is created, and we have soulful man’s first soulful love song, as recorded in Gen. 2:23: 

“This at last is bone of my bones 

and flesh of my flesh; 

she shall be called Woman,

because she was taken out of Man.”

This is the ESV version, which captures the  "at last" sense that Adam had been thinking about this problem  for a while.

A tiny, micro-subset of things I do not know:

1. I don’t know how Augustine reconciled his instantaneous creation with the fact that there are concrete human events (naming the animals and a deep sleep) that could not have been instantaneous, between the creation of Adam and the creation of Eve.

2. I don’t know how YECs reconcile the fact that Adam appears to have been created well into the sixth day, and yet in very short order he thoughtfully names all the animals, goes into a deep sleep (and it’s not even Sabbath!) wakes up and expresses, rather impatiently in my opinion since he has only existed for a few hours, that at last he has a companion.

3. As much as I had to admit it, I do not  have a truly gymnastics-free satisfying way to answer critics who say that the Genesis One and Genesis Two creation accounts are inconsistent. I still think there is a problem there, not a big problem but a problem, one that screams for a solution.

Meh. Who cares?

Oh that’s right, if I don’t accept this (YEC) view, I am, according to many, on a slippery slope toward denying the gospel, and along the way I’m likely to drive people out of the church if not out of the faith. I keep forgetting that.