“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” If God had been bound to create at any moment before that in which He was pleased to call into being the heavens and the earth, His character must have been denied; He would not thus be the Absolute after all. For absolute means that He is not tied to conditions. That He was pleased, therefore, to exert His own divine energy at the particular time when He chose, flows from the very fact that He is God. Even a man has a will. Is God to be deprived of His will? What sort of a God would that be?
“In the beginning,” then, “God created the heaven and the earth.” Observe the careful abstinence here from measures of time that belong to man. It is now well known, that not the heavens only but the earth had an existence and suited condition when man was not upon it, when it might be utterly impossible, according to the facts that we know about its circumstances, for man to be there, or for any animated nature to subsist, followed by vast but gradual changes, as well as sudden convulsions destructive of such living things as did afterward exist. For such crises and changes there were, if there be anything ascertained in the “uncertain science,” as one called it who was himself one of the chief contributors to the riches of physical knowledge. And an uncertain science it truly is. Humboldt, we may be sure, did not mean to slight any real fruit of man’s mind. If there be, then, anything certain in the uncertain science of geology, it is this, that there were immense tracts of duration when man did not exist upon the earth. God’s Word leaves ample space for them. “In the beginning” fixes the commencement of the universe indeed, but admits of eras of indefinite extent, and this before the confusion described in the following verse, still more of course before the six days, whose course begins with Genesis 1:33And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. (Genesis 1:3).
To what use He applied them – what were the particular constitution, phase, and denizens of the earth during one space or another, God has not seen fit to lay before us in His Word. This is no defect in Scripture: that it lies open to such a charge flows from one of its excellences. The Word of God was never meant to be a book of human science. Nevertheless, when science ceases to be uncertain, when it is no longer a heap of hypotheses, one displacing and destroying another, in the measure in which it becomes really entitled to the rank of science, and attains any degree of consistency as a branch of knowledge, it never fails to pay homage to the Word of God. I do not speak of every individual who cultivates it. Far from that. But it seems to me true of science itself. And unquestionably men who have largely advanced its domains in all directions have not been the least loud in their acknowledgment of God’s Word, when it speaks of that which they are generally considered to know best. There is none in this room who would dispute the place of a Newton or a Cuvier. They were not backward in owning the value of scriptural truths. Remember, I do not bring in the names of these great men as if it could be any triumph for the cause of God. It was their gain to bow to His Word, which really cast luster on them, not they on it.
So always it is. There is no man but what derives all his blessing, if he be wise, through God’s Word from God Himself. Sir Isaac Newton, for instance, did not degrade the science of which he was one of the most illustrious ornaments by denying God or dishonoring His Word. Not that the prince of natural philosophers understood the Word of God well – I do not think he did. It was not given to him to sound the depths of Scripture to any remarkable extent. He can scarcely be deemed correct as to his views of creation; for his idea was that God in the first place created crude masses of matter. Very likely such is the notion among many to this day; if so, it is a serious error, which derives no countenance from the Word of God. What Scripture says is that “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Do these latter terms mean masses of matter? Heaven is not masses of matter, nor earth either. When Scripture says God created the heaven and the earth, it means what it says. God did not create a mass of undigested materials. We may presume Sir Isaac got this from Ovid, certainly not from the Bible. Most school-boys have imbibed the same idea; for even the greatest of men may sometimes be affected by that which influences the child at school. Few of us sift our sources of thought enough to discern how much we are tinctured, especially by heathen poets and philosophers. There is no man necessarily above such an influence. It would be only flattering ourselves to fancy that any man here could pretend to such an immunity. I should be sorry, indeed, to give the slightest ground to suppose it to be a question of man against man. My present task is to vindicate God’s Word, no matter who the person is that ventures to oppose it. Let his reputation be what it may, God is above him, and His Word is infinitely wiser than that which any man has written without inspiration. Scripture never knows what it is to correct itself; it corrects all others and their words, let them be the greatest philosophers or who they may.
God’s Word then asserts, that in the beginning He created the heaven and the earth. I admit that it was not the heavens in the sense in which we afterward read of them, in the course of the second day (Gen. 1:6-86And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. 7And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. 8And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. (Genesis 1:6‑8)). It was not the earth in the state in which, when the waters were finally gathered into seas, man was to live on the dry land. Nor is there any reference to man or even to any other animal in this primary mention of the earth (Gen. 1:11In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. (Genesis 1:1)). All is left strikingly open. If science has made discoveries here, let her humbly seek to prove them. Let her remember the cosmogonies of olden time and not be too hasty. Above all, let her not be in a hurry to contradict the Bible. She will be wiser if she curbs her spirit and seeks a docile mind; otherwise she will find out her humiliating mistake before long. When things get settled down into their places, and the various discoveries acquire shape, and are generalized into laws that carry conviction everywhere, like the principle of gravitation; when geology arrives (if it ever should) at such a place as its far more exact sister, astronomy, I do not doubt that her obeisance to the Bible will be more complete than it is now. Not that I expect such progress; yet it is not for anyone to predict what may be in reserve. But this is certain, that Scripture asserts the grand truth that God gave being to the heaven and the earth, without connecting this with time as measured by man, still less of course by history.
Consequently the common idea of putting the creation of the world some six thousand years ago is a mere blunder. The Bible is in no way responsible for it. Where does Scripture say so, or anything approaching to it? It is only the annotator at the beginning of the Authorized Version who joins B. C. 4004 with Genesis 1:11In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. (Genesis 1:1). I do not doubt that the margin was thus supplied by men, excellent, learned, and with pious intentions. But it is only man, not God, who dates creation from Tisri, or September 1st. And this is the blessedness of the Bible, that we have in itself that which corrects the best of men who labored on it with the best means and desires. Is this a loss? To my mind an immense boon, especially to those who boast of no wisdom except that which the Bible gives them. The Bible – and this is its boast and ours – is the book for all, be they the simplest or most ignorant. The Bible – and where is there the appearance of such another book – can correct the best wisdom that man has ever laid up, not merely outside, but from the Bible itself. The Bible, then, nowhere puts creation in connection with Adam, – expressly not; nor is it in connection with animated being, with beasts, or birds, or fishes, or reptiles, nor even with the grass and fruits of the earth. It simply affirms what man never knew as a certainty without the Bible, that “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”
(To be continued.)