THE BEGINNING
‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.’
I. What is meant by creation? The giving being to that which before was not. The expression, ‘the heavens and the earth,’ is the most exhaustive phrase the Hebrews could employ to name the universe, which is regarded as a twofold whole, consisting of unequal parts. Writing for men, Moses writes as a man. The moral importance of the earth, as the scene of man’s probation, is the reason for the form which the phrase assumes. The truth of the Creation governs the theology of the Old and New Testaments, and may have influenced the formation of heathen cosmogonies, such as the Etruscan and the Zendavesta. Creation is a mystery, satisfactory to the reason, but strictly beyond it. We can modify existing matter, but we cannot create one particle of it. That God summoned it into being is a truth which we believe on God’s authority, but which we can never verify.
II. Belief in the creation of the universe out of nothing is the only account of its origin which is compatible with belief in a personal and moral God.
Creation suggests Providence, and Providence leads the way to Redemption. If love or goodness were the true motive in creation, it implies God’s continuous interest in created life. By His love, which led Him to move out of Himself in creation at the first, He travels with the slow, onward movement of the world and of humanity, and His Incarnation in time, when demanded by the needs of the creatures of His hand, is in a line with that first of mysteries, His deigning to create at all. Belief in creation keeps man in his right place of humble dependence and thankful service. A moral God will not despise the work of His own hands, and Creation leads up to Redemption.
Canon Liddon.
Illustration
(1) ‘What sacredness the thought that God is the Creator should stamp on every object in nature!
I go forth amid all the glories and the beauties of the earth, which He has so marvellously framed. He is there; it is with Him I walk; in His works I see something of Himself. Thus there is a tongue in every breeze; there is a voice in the song of every bird; there is a silent eloquence in every green field and quiet wood. They speak to me about my God. In a measure they reveal and interpret Him. He made them; He made them what they are; He made them for me. Thus the sights and sounds around me should be means of grace.
And, if He is Creator, I must be careful how I use nature’s gifts and bounties. The wheat, the corn, the vine, this piece of money, this brother or sister, He formed them, and formed them for gracious and holy ends. My hand should be arrested, my mouth should be shut, my spirit should shrink back in awe, if ever I am tempted to abuse and wrong them. Let me tell myself: ‘They came from God, and they are meant to be employed for God; for His pleasure they are, and were created.’ I move through a world mystic, wonderful.’
(2) The keynote of the whole chapter is struck in its first verse: ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.’ As Professor Elmslie well says, ‘The concern of the chapter is not creation, but the character, being and glory of the Almighty Maker. If we excerpt God’s speeches and the rubrical formulas, the chapter consists of one continuous chain of verbs, instinct with life and motion, linked or in swift succession, and, with hardly an exception, the subject of every one of them is God. It is one long adoring delineation of God loving, yearning, willing, working in creation. Its interest is not in the work, but the Worker. Its subject is not creation, but the Creator. What it gives is not a world, but a God. It is not geology; it is theology.’ It matters little to this writer whether the birds or fishes come first in the scale of creation; it matters everything that his readers see, behind and above all, God. ‘And God said’—let the intermediary stages be as many as they may, we come to that at last. Let science take all the æons of time it needs for the great creative processes it is slowly unravelling before our eyes; let it go on adding link after link to the mighty chain of created being; sooner or later the question must be asked, ‘On what shall we hang the last?’ And when that question is asked, the wise men and the little child will go back together to the Bible to read over again the old words past which no science ever takes us, so simple and yet so sublime—‘ In the beginning, God.’