Refinement Not Realignment

There are repeated references in Genesis to God calling elements of Creation "good" during the Six Days.  One wonders what "good" might mean, or the meaning of God making the pronouncement.  Surely God could not fail to make something perfect, if that was his desire.  Nor, conversely, could anything that was not God be perfect, in the ultimate sense.  By the standard of divinity, then, God could just as well call something that was not God "bad" as well as "good".  Surely this is beyond us.

What then can be the meaning of the pronouncement?  I suggest that, for an adherent of Jesus' teachings in the Gospels, the matter need not be too difficult.  In John (the Gospel with the most explicit relationship to Genesis), Peter is left with an admonition to do his duty.  Peter is left with the prospect of continual service to others, until he falls out of his ability to work his own will, and falls into the clutches of others.  He will be thus offered up, as it were, to the afterlife as a product of a forge or refinery in life.

This seems always to be the case in God's Creation.  The only apparent (and narratively logical) reason for God to call elements of Creation "good" is because they are to be viewed as emerging satisfactorily from the cauldron of their birth.  This also is the case in the Gospels, as properly viewed.  We are to be the products of refinement, not of sacramental realignment--whether that realignment be in the form of repeated sacraments or of one-time rebirth.

In an important sense, the question becomes one of choosing between refinement (as in John) or realignment (as in the Gospel addendum of Luke/Acts, with its narratively indefensible tarrying in Jerusalem.)