“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” —Gen. 1:1
“Where coast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding.”—Job 38:4.
I. The Story of Creation (Gen. 1).
ALL readers must admire the simple majesty of this remarkable chapter. Three times the word “create” is used in it (verses 1, 21, 27), and each time it marks an epoch or era in the sublime process of the Almighty’s work. Some timid Christians have been not a little disturbed by alleged scientific discoveries which appeared to antagonize if not demolish this Mosaic account of creation. They were needlessly alarmed. As time goes on and thoughtful men come to know more about the truth of this marvelous universe in which we dwell, they approach closer and closer to Moses’ record. Never, perhaps, in the history of scientific investigation did Genesis 1 stand so solidly and triumphantly as now! “In the year 1806 the French Institute enumerated not less than eighty geological theories which were hostile to the Scriptures: but not one of those theories is held today” (Prof. Lyell).
If the Bible is God’s book, we may settle it definitely in our minds that it will come forth out of the smoke of battle with a luster all the brighter for the conflict. This account of creation reveals the unity, power, and personality of God. It denies polytheism—one God creates. It denies the eternity of matter— “in the beginning” God made it. It denies pantheism—God is before all things, and apart from them. It denies fatalism— God here as everywhere acts in the freedom of His Eternal Being.
2. The Story of the Fall (Chap. 3).
“The story of the fall, like that of creation, has wandered over the world. Heathen nations have transplanted and mixed it up with their geography, their history, their mythology, although it has never so completely changed form and color and spirit that you cannot recognize it” (Delitzsch).
One of the strange proofs of the truthfulness of this account, if proof were needed, is found in the universal presence of serpent worship in the olden times. It was practiced in China, India, Palestine, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Africa—in short, all over the world. No other religious form was more common, save sun-worship, with which this was usually associated.
Our own continent bears testimony to its presence in some of the ancient remains. In southern Ohio there exists a huge snake made out of earth and stones, a thousand feet long or more, and which was once an object of homage on the part of the aborigines. The savage of Louisiana carried a serpent and sun, the symbols of his religion, and tattooed them on his skin. In Mexico the serpent is found in the rude pictures of that strange people, the Aztecs, entwined with their most sacred symbols. The main elements of serpent worship were a tree, a woman, and a serpent. George Smith, in his “Chaldean Account of Genesis,” presents his readers with a facsimile of a drawing found in the excavations about Babylon which has two figures sitting on either side of a tree, holding out their hands toward the fruit, while back of one of them is stretched a serpent. Singular that rational beings should pay their highest honors to a repulsive snake!
It was one aim of the old Serpent, the Devil, in the temptation of our first parents, to put himself in the place of God as an object of worship. How well he succeeded the universality of this form of idolatry attests, and this is certainly a striking verification of the truth of the account of creation and the fall of man as given in the Book of Genesis.