The Lord by wisdom founded the earth;
By understanding He established the heavens;
By His knowledge the depths were broken up,
And clouds drop down the dew.
Proverbs 3:19-20 (NKJV).
It can be easy to forget that the Bible wasn't written by a single person in a singular effort, but that it is instead a collection of writings from various authors over a rather long period of time. The reason that I bring this up is that this little passage appears to be a non-sequitur of sorts, and while a bit jarring, squeezed right in between two longer writings on the value of wisdom itself, that's probably just the order that it was recorded.
We can still glean practical information from even a short passage like this.
The most obvious takeaway to me is that the design and operation of this world is not an accident. It was not the product of mere chance, and while the naturalistic probability of any certain event may be calculated, when you start to compute the odds of everything being just the way that it is, given all that it could be, and even on a naturalistic standpoint our existence becomes miraculous.
There is order in the world despite the regular appearance of chaos, and there is a reason that God arranged things in the order what we discover them to be in. Of great importance I think is noting that this was written long after The Fall. It is common to presume that the "curse of sin" extended from humanity to all of creation, but that ignores what scripture actually states.
This world, this reality, was never designed to last forever. God wasn't caught off guard by Adam and Eve's sin, nor does scripture indicate that the consequence for sin required God to create that which did not already exist, but that God would no longer protect humanity from that which God had already created, that humanity would have to struggle instead of being able to enjoy the benefits of being in direct relationship with God.
That pattern would be repeated by Israel, where God would remove protection from them when they disobeyed to motivate them to correct their behavior and return to God.
It is rather difficult to explain in what ways Adam and Eve would have been "perfect" and yet account for their behavior. The more perfect God's creation must be, the less intelligent, wise, or understanding Adam and Eve need to have been to explain why they gave it all up after such a simple deceit, and without any real coercion at all. This paradox is just one of the reasons that the assertion creation was "perfect" in any sense, instead of just "very good", is something I don't support.
When you parse the language back in Genesis, the original word "towb" most closely translates to "beautiful", and when you look across all the times it's used in the Old Testament, the connotation of perfect, of lacking flaws, does make sense when you understand that it is talking about beauty and not a moral or physical perfection.
Creation would also respond to God's interactions exactly as God intended, not just because God was acting, but because the systems were designed to work in a specific fashion and God's use of those systems as intended only speaks to the quality of the design.
That the natural world could exist and operate without constant intervention is not a denigration of God, in that it is always harder to create a system which can operate independently and without constant maintenance. Look at the difficulty in raising a child to become a "healthy" or "well-adjusted" adult.
This also does not exclude God from continuing to interact, to shape, to guide, but it would mean that God wouldn't be necessary to explain every interaction at every level of creation. God may be the root explanation for all the causes that produce an effect. Salt and chlorine can combine because of their electron patterns to make salt, and they can do so because God designed it that way, not because God wanted to combine them in that moment.
Reflect on this passage in that it is giving God credit for both the design and for how that design works, and to use that as part of the necessary humbling of oneself in order to pursue further knowledge.
When we are tempted to believe that we know more than God, we have a nearly infinite number of examples of things that we do not yet really understand, and yet God not only understood, but beautifully designed all of it.
I don't have to denigrate myself to understand how God's intellect so greatly exceeds anything I am capable of, and why understanding that is a necessary prerequisite for genuine humility.
Put differently, it is not that I know so little, as much as God knows so much more than I could ever imagine.
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