We open the Bible. Its first words are necessarily either a revelation or an imposture, either God’s Word or man’s guess claiming His authority. A middle ground here is impossible. The first, and in extent the greatest of all miracles is revealed,
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
There is no specific date given. It is expressly indefinite. Many have confounded verse 3 with verse 1, with feelings some hostile, others friendly, to revelation. Both were inexcusably wrong, because both carelessly overlooked the Scripture before their eyes. For these words of God, even were there no others confirmatory, affirm in verse 1 the original creation of the universe, then in verse 2 its chaotic condition. The earth was not created empty and waste when first called into being (Isa. 45:1818For thus saith the Lord that created the heavens; God himself that formed the earth and made it; he hath established it, he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited: I am the Lord; and there is none else. (Isaiah 45:18)). It may have become so often, if able geologists are to be heeded. It certainly was so immediately before the days of man’s world began, which commenced, not with creating light, but with its activity renewed after ruin and darkness.
“And God said, Light be, and light was.”
Thus verse 2 does not describe God’s creation like verse 1, but a state of utter contrast with it, when total disorder ensued for the earth. Neither the one fact nor the other called for more than passing notice, as being physical, and in no direct way the sphere of God’s moral dealings with man. Yet was it of moment to have facts to deep interest briefly disclosed, which were entirely beyond the ken of man, lost in contending dreams of eternal matter in the West, and of emanations in the East, illusion and falsehood both of them into which evolution, the fashion of our day, no less surely entices unwary souls.
Whatever of detail Genesis 1 may furnish is solely about the formation of the world as it was prepared for the human race; eventually for Christ the Man of God’s counsels. It was no speculation of some “Hebrew Descartes” or Newton, but God’s account of His own work by His servant and prophet Moses. It is worthy of God, deigning in love to communicate what man could not discover and yet ought to know.
Science is powerless to speak of the beginning of things. So the inductive philosophers own, ashamed as they may well be of all the cosmogonists, Egyptian, Phoenician, Greek, Oriental, or any others. There stands God’s revelation, simple, majestic, and complete for His purpose, without even a rival throughout all ages, against which the pride of man can allege nothing but his own errors of haste and misapprehension. How could such a chapter have been written but by divine revelation? Search, ye men of science, ransack all your stores; scrutinize the reports and transactions of the most renowned societies. Did not your wisest own himself but as a child picking up a pebble here and there on the ocean shore? Did not he own reverently this inspired record of creation?
Hence we may observe there is no formal claim in the opening of the Bible. The great of this world may enter with a flourish of trumpets, naturally if not necessarily.
Not so the divine record. Who could speak of creation but God? or tell it adequately in its relational light but Himself, taking His relative name to His people? Who but He in both ways could fully let us know the cause, history, and consequences of the deluge? Who else, what led to the rise of nations and languages? or to the call of Abram and the fathers who followed of His chosen and separate people? Yet even here throughout we have “Elohim said” and wrought; and so with His name as “Jehovah,” wherever suited and requisite. He is an enemy who denies its absolute truth and divine authority.