Now comes the first point of direct contact with the habitable earth and its surroundings. We have had (ver. 1) the creation of the heavens and the earth, apart from date or definite time; we have had also (ver. 2) a superinduced condition of confusion, but the Spirit of God brooding upon the face of the waters. Neither one nor other has to do with man's earth, though earth there had been under both those differing and successive conditions. Nor can it be doubtful to him who knows God, that even the latter had its worthy and wise aim as well as more obviously the former. But neither phase is connected immediately with man, though all was done to God's glory with man in prospect, and above all the Second man, as we can add unhesitatingly from the N. T. It is to the facts stated in these preliminary verses that geological observations and inferences would mainly refer. As the words are few and general, there is ample space for research. The believer knows beforehand that theoretic conclusions wherever sound must fall in with the sentence of inspiration. The work of the six days has little if anything to do with geology. There may be a measure of analogy between the work of the third, fifth, and sixth days, and certain of the alleged antecedent geologic periods which the Bible really passes over silently as being outside its range and object, while room is left for them all in vers. 1 and 2. But the effort to force the days, whether those three or all six, into a scriptural authority for the successive ages of geology is mere illusion. If it be a harmless use of geology, it is anything but reverence for God's word or intelligence in it. That there are discrepancies between the record and any facts certainly ascertained, neither geology proves, nor any of the sciences still more sure and mature. But he who is assured of revealed truth can afford to hear all that experts assert even when based on a partial induction of facts, as is not seldom the case. If outside scripture, there is nothing a believer has to contend for; if scripture speaks, he believes, no matter what science declares to the contrary; if science confirms it, so much the better for science. Assuredly God's word needs no imprimatur from men.
If one appealed to any branch of physical science as to the first day, he could get no clear answer. Geology has nothing to say, confessedly. What can astronomy or optics do more? Science, as such, leaves out God—science, not scientific men, many of the greatest of whom have been true-hearted believers. Science, in itself, knows nothing of the power that originated, ignores the First Cause, and shirks, ordinarily, even the final causes which might summon heed to a first cause. It occupies itself with art established order in the world and with secondary causes, especially those at work before men's eyes or probably deducible from experience. The peril for the unwary is obvious, and real, and notorious. It would be much less if science were honest enough to acknowledge its ignorance of what is beyond its sphere. But often its interpreter says “There is not", where logically and morally he is entitled only to say, “I know not". This is not merely audacity without warrant, but sin of the worst kind. The fool hath said in his heart, “there is no God.” It is exactly where science finds itself confessedly stopped by a blind wall that scripture proclaims the truth from God. As He knows, so He revealed as far as in His wisdom and goodness He saw fit. “And God said, Light be: and light was. And God saw the light that [it was] good; and God divided between the light and the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And there was evening, and there was morning, one (or, first) day” (vers. 3-5).
Now who but an inspired man would have so written? The more you depreciate Israel as an unlettered if not rude and barbarous people, the greater the wonder. Did Egypt so teach, or Babylon, did Greece or Rome? How came Moses to declare that the fact was as he writes? I do not speak of the sublime which Longinus so justly extolled, but of that which human experience never could have suggested; for living man, had he judged from universally known phenomena, had ever regarded the sun as the great source of light; so that if the writing had been his, he must naturally have spoken first of that bright orb: In other words, the work of the fourth day would more reasonably have taken the place of the first. That the philosophers taught for ages afterward. But not so the truth; and, whatever the seeming and striking difficulty, especially then, Moses was given to write the truth. As the apostle says some fifteen centuries after, God spoke light to shine out of darkness (2 Cor. 4:6). The darkness is not said to have been everywhere, but “on the face of the deep”, and now that an earth for the human race was in question, there it was that God commanded light to shine. That it was “created” now is not said; that it had existed before during the geologic ages for varying phases of the earth and for a very long while for the vegetable and animal kingdoms, there is abundant reason to conclude. But this is science, not faith, though the scriptural account is the sole cosmogony that leaves room for it.
But what is affirmed is that (after utter confusion reigned for the earth and darkness on the face of the deep, yet the Spirit of God brooding on the face of the waters) God interposed and said, Light be; and light was. As far as the Adamic earth was concerned, the light-hearers were not yet set in their functions as now: this was the fourth-day work. The word was, “Light be “; and light was: language evidently consistent with that view of light which prevails in comparatively modern times against Sir I. Newton's theory of emanation from the sun. If the phenomena of light are allowed in general to be a result of molecular action, and dependent on fundamental qualities of matter as it is now constituted, so that it was not the creation of an element admitting of independent existence, as science now owns, is it not remarkable that the words of Moses avoid all error, without forestalling scientific discovery, and express nothing but truth in the clearest terms? At the word of God appeared instant activity of light at that time inert.
But science easily over-shoots itself in hasty generalization. For it contradicts the inspired record when it ventures to say that the fiat as to light on the first day must have preceded the existence of water and of earth, of liquid or solid or gaseous compounds of every kind. Granted that light is manifested in the making of such compounds. But verses 1 and 2 give the surest testimony that “earth” and “water” did exist, not indeed before light, but before that particular fiat of God which called it into action for the earth that now is, after the confusion and darkness which had just before prevailed.
It is all a mistake then, and distinctly at issue with the context to assume, that there was no “light” in the state of things intimated by ver. 1. And it is allowed that even the “earth” and “water” of ver. 2, whatever the then state of ruin and darkness could not have been without “light” previously if but to form them. Verse 3 was therefore really the signal of creation begun, but of God acting afresh and in detail, ages after the universe was created, with its systems, and within them its suns, planets, and satellites. On the plain face of the record, after the mighty work of the universe, and after a disruption that befell the earth with most marked consequences, God puts forth His word to form the Adamic earth with its due accompaniments. Hence we may notice anticipatively that on the fourth day not a hint is given of creating the physical masses of the sun, moon, and stars. It is there and then no more than setting them in their declared and existing relations to the earth. Their creation belongs in time to Gen. 1:1; but of the rest more fully in its place. That on the first day light dissipated the then prevailing darkness is true, and of deep interest as God's first word and act for the earth of man. But this says nothing about the original creation of the heavens and earth. Nor is it quite comprehensible why “the waters” of ver. 2 should be not literal waters, because utter darkness veiled the deep or abyss. These are the inconsistencies that necessarily flow from the false start which confounds “in the beginning” of verse 1 with the “first day” of verses 3-5 and those that follow; as this again involves the extraordinary error of taking verse 2 to be the original state of the earth in verse 1, when it originally came into being from God.
The hypothesis that the earth when creation began was a frigid chaos or frozen globe, strange as it seems, is hard to escape for such as deny successive states since creation according to God's will, or, which goes along with it, for such as affirm the “creation” of the sun, etc. only on the fourth day. The argument is that, if so, it must have been almost cloudless, well lighted, and well warmed—in short, an impossibility. But reasoning from things as they are to a condition so contrasted in the record itself with what God formed for man subsequently is fallacious. It is simply a question of what God tells us of the abnormal state supposed in verse 2. Not a word implies frigidity, save that darkness was on the face of the deep, which may rather have been the effect of heat acting on the earth and the waters, a transient state after previous order, and before it was made for Adam. The record in no way identifies the disorder with the earth when its creation was effected in verse 1; but it assuredly distinguishes the dark dislocation of verse 2 from the work of the fourth day when the earth and sun and stars became one in system as in their present constitution. In short, the dilemma appears to be quite baseless. The true scope of verse 2 is not at all that the original creation was a scene of darkness, even for the earth, but that when the earth, not the heavens, was thrown into confusion ever so long after, darkness was on the, face of the deep. Light is not an element calling for annihilation (which would indeed be absurd), but a state flowing from molecular activity which God could and did here arrest as far as “the deep” was concerned. It acted all the same elsewhere; as it had over the earth till then during the formation of what some geologists call the Tertiary, Secondary, and Primary beds, to say nothing of what preceded: details for men to discover and interpret as they can scientifically, but as foreign to scripture as the detailed wonders and movements of the starry heavens.
Hence “creation” of light, first or second, in the universe is only the slip of philosophers. Scripture is more accurate than its most modern expounder, even when striving to show the accordance of science with the Bible. In the gloom that overhung the earth thrown into desolation God caused light to act, as the characteristic act of the “first day” of the week, the brief cycle that was to close with man its new master and representative of God here below. “And God saw the light that it [was] good; and God divided the light from the darkness; and God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night.” It presents to us God pondering and speaking in gracious consideration of the race He was about to create thereon, with a mind dwelling on realities about to open out for man far more solemn than the light or the darkness, day or night, literally. Yet the light of the eyes rejoiceth the heart, says the Preacher (Prov. 15:30), and truly is sweet (Eccl. 11:7), as God pronounced it “good”. “And it was evening, and it was morning, first (or, one) day.” Only we must guard against taking the previous darkness as the evening. It would appear rather that light shone; and then its waning into night, and brightening into day, constituted the first day. That the earth would revolve on its axis, before the light-bearing of the sun afterward, and so have the phenomena of evening and morning, is easy to apprehend. The fact is certain; the “how” was no difficulty to Him Who spoke and it was done. Our place is to honor Him in believing His word, without which faith nothing is as it should be. Another first day was to behold a better light: there too, still more conspicuously, if that True Light shone when all was profounder darkness, He too had been before the darkness.
If the preceding exposition be just, the day of the first week is plainly one of twenty-four hours. No one can fairly deny that scripture, like other speech, uses “day” where required in a general or figurative sense, which may cover a period of considerable length. But this need never produce embarrassment to a careful reader: as ever, the context gives the clue. In this chapter and the next we have the word variously applied according to the exigency of the case; in none ought it to be doubtful. Here “the evening” and “the morning” should exclude just question. It can only mean, thus defined, a day of twenty-four hours. Before (not “there was a sun”), but before the sun was set to rule the day (of twelve hours) as now makes no difference as to the length meant. The same phrase is carefully used before and after. Nor would any prolonged sense have been tolerated for this carefully specified week but for the error which muddles “the beginning” with the first and following days, makes the heavens and the earth at first to be a chaos, and in so doing effaces in fact the creation of both the one and the other. For where is either really “created” on such a scheme?
This will appear still more convincingly when we come to close quarters with the six days viewed as embracing the immense ages of geology. It might not be so glaring when taken in a dreamy poetic way as a vision in the hands of the late Hugh Miller. But when the simple dignity of the true father of history is vindicated for the matchless prose of Moses, the effort to make the days, or some of them, answer to the ages of geologic formation in building up the crust of the globe proves itself so much the more glaring and violent failure. Take the first day as our first test: are we told to imagine such a notion as that the outshining of the light in dispelling the immediately antecedent darkness occupied an age? And if not for the first day, or the second, or the fourth, how harshly inconsistent to claim it for the third, fifth, and sixth? Especially as the seventh day, or sabbath, should honestly put to the rout any such application. In every case the figurative sense is here irrelevant and unsuitable. We shall see in due time from scripture that the stretching out of the sabbath into an æon is altogether unfounded.
An ingenious attempt is made in “Sermons in Stones” to show that the brooding of the Spirit in verse 2 means the creation of submarine animals (Zoophytes and Bivalve Mollusks without visual organs) before light; then of a higher class furnished with organs of sight after light on the second day; and lastly of Vertebrate Fishes on the third. All this is error opposed by the record, which admits of animated nature for man's world only after the fourth day. For this confusion we are indebted to the misinterpreting “days” here into ages. The truth is, according to the record, that the Spirit's brooding upon the face of the waters is quite general and admits of no such precision, as it was also before the first day. And if the days were simply days of the week in which Adam was created, geology can neither affirm nor contradict. Its main office is to investigate the evidence of the successive ages of the earth's crust before the human race. It is freely granted that the language employed by inspiration is that of phenomena; but this does not warrant the hypothesis of the medium of a vision. It was a divine communication to and by Moses; but how given we know not and should not speculate, lest we err. A vision in fact might have shown him the submarine animals, being beyond natural conditions; but the hypothesis is invented to foist in the creation of animals not seen or specified in the record.
Further, we must banish the notion that the black pall of an unbroken night was the original condition—a heathen, not a biblical, idea. It was not so before verse 2, which describes a subsequent and transient state. The first verse supposes an order of the universe; the second, an interruption of no small moment for man; then in verse 3 the week begins in which the earth was prepared for his abode who was made before that week ended. The geologic ages had passed before the human measures of time commenced. If the record had been duly read, the Inquisition might have avoided its unwise and suicidal judgment of Galileo; for the first day, compared with the fourth, favors the Copernican theory as decidedly as it condemns the old philosophy of Ptolemy. It exactly agrees with the revolution of the earth round its axis for evening and morning, independently of the function of the sun soon after formed. Only we must take note that the profound darkness dispelled was neither primeval nor universal, as many men of science have hastily assumed. It had nothing to do with the heavens, any more than had the disorder which befell the earth, after ever so long lapse of time.