The Book of Genesis is in many respects the most important book in the Bible. It is of the first importance because it answers, not exhaustively, but sufficiently, the fundamental questions of the human mind. It contains the authoritative information given to the race concerning these questions of everlasting interest: the Being of God; the origin of the universe; the creation of man; the origin the soul; the fact of revelation; the introduction of sin; the promise of salvation; the primitive division of the human race; the purpose of the elected people; the preliminary part in the program of Christianity. In one word, in this inspired volume of beginnings, we have the satisfactory explanation of all the sin and misery and contradiction now in this the reason of the scheme of redemption.
Or, to put it in another way: The Book of Genesis is the seed in which the plant of God's Word is enfolded. It is the starting point of God's gradually-unfolded plan of the ages. Genesis is the plinth of the pillar of the Divine revelation. It is the root of the tree of the inspired Scriptures. It is the source of the stream of the holy writings of the Bible. If the base of the pillar is removed, the pillar falls. If the root of the tree is cut out, the tree will wither and die. If the fountain head of the stream is cut off, the stream will dry up. The Bible as a whole is like a chain hanging upon two staples. The Book of Genesis is the one staple; the Book of Revelation is the other. Take either staple, the chain falls in confusion. If the first chapters of Genesis are unreliable, the revelation of the beginning of the universe, the origin of the race, and the reason of its redemption are gone. If the last chapters of Revelation are displaced the consummation of all things is unknown. If you take away Genesis, you have lost the explanation of the first heaven, the first earth, the first Adam, and the fall. If you take away Revelation you have lost the completed truth of the new heaven, and the new earth, man redeemed, and the second Adam in Paradise regained.
Further: in the first chapters of the Book of Genesis, you have the strong and sufficient foundation of the sub-sequent developments of the kingdom of God; the root-germ of all Anthropology, Soteriology, Christology, Satanology, to say nothing of the ancient and modern problems of the mystery and culpability of sin, the Divine ordinance of the Lord's Day, the unity of the race, and God's establishment of matrimony and the family life.
We assume from the start the historicity of Genesis and its Mosaic authorship. It was evidently accepted by Christ the Infallible, our Lord and God, as historical, as one single composition, and as the work of Moses. It was accepted by Paul the inspired. It was accepted universally by the divinely inspired leaders of God's chosen people. (See Green's "Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch.") It has validated itself to the universal Church throughout the ages by its realism and consistency, and by what has been finely termed its subjective truthfulness. We postulate especially the historicity of the first chapters. These are not only valuable, they are vital. They are the essence of Genesis. The Book of Genesis is neither the work of a theorist or a tribal annalist. It is still less the product of some anonymous compiler or compilers in some unknowable era, of a series of myths, historic in form but unhistoric in fact. Its opening is an apocalypse, a direct revelation from the God of all truth. Whether it was given in a vision or otherwise, it would be impossible to say. But it is possible, if not probable, that the same Lord God, who revealed to His servant as he was in the Spirit on the Lord's Day the apocalypse of the humanly unknown and unknowable events of man's history which will transpire when this heaven and this earth have passed away, would also have revealed to His servant, being in the Spirit, the apocalypse of the humanly unknowable and unknown events which transpired before this earth's history began. It has been asserted that the beginning and the end of things are both absolutely hidden from science. Science has to do with phenomena. It is where science must confess its impotence that revelation steps in, and, with the authority of God, reveals those things that are above it. The beginning of Genesis, therefore, is a divinely inspired narrative of the events deemed necessary by God to establish the foundations for the Divine Law in the sphere of human life, and to set forth the relation between the omnipotent Creator and the man who fell, and the race that was to be redeemed by the incarnation of His Son.
The German rationalistic idea, which has passed over into thousands of more or less orthodox Christian minds, is that these earliest chapters embody ancient traditions of the Semitic-oriental Mind. Others go farther, and not only deny them to be the product of the reverent and religious mind of the Hebrew, but assert they were simply oriental legends, not born from above and of God, but born in the East, and probably in pagan Babylonia.
We would therefore postulate the following propositions:
- The Book of Genesis has no doctrinal value if it is not authoritative.
- The Book of Genesis is not authoritative if it is not true. For if it is not history, it is not reliable; and if it is not revelation, it is not authoritative.
- The Book of Genesis is not true if it is not from God. For if it is not from God, it is not inspired; and if it is not inspired, it possesses to us no doctrinal value whatever.
- The Book of Genesis is not direct from God if it is a heterogeneous compilation of mythological folklore by unknowable writers.
- If the Book of Genesis is a legendary narrative, anonymous, indefinitely erroneous, and the persons it described the mere mythical personifications of tribal genius, it is of course not only non-authentic, because non-authenticated, but an insufficient basis for doctrine. The residuum of dubious truth, which might with varying degrees of consent be extracted therefrom, could never be 'accepted as a foundation for the superstructure of eternally trustworthy doctrine, for it is an axiom that that only is of doctrinal value which is God's Word. Mythical and legendary fiction, and still more, erroneous and misleading tradition, are incompatible not only with the character of the God of all truth, but with the truthfulness, trustworthiness, and absolute authority of the Word of God. We have not taken for our credentials cleverly invented myths. The primary documents, if there were such, were collated. and revised and re-written by Moses by inspiration of God.
A sentence in Margoliouth's "Lines of Defence" deserves an attentive consideration today. We should have some opportunity, said the Oxford professor, of gauging the skill of those on whose faith the old-fashioned belief in the authenticity of Scripture has been abandoned. (p. 293.) One would perhaps prefer to put the idea in this way. Our modern Christians should have more opportunity not only of appraising the skill, but of gauging also the spiritual qualifications of a critical school that has been characterized notoriously by an enthusiasm against the miraculous, and a precipitate adoption of any conclusion from a rationalistic source which militates against the historicity of Genesis.
Christians are conceding too much nowadays to the agnostic scientist, and the rationalistic Hebraist, and are often to blame if they allow them to go out of their specific provinces without protest. Their assumptions ought to be watched with the utmost vigilance and jealousy. (See Gladstone, "The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture," pp. 62-83.)
But to resume. The Book of Genesis is the foundation on which the superstructure of the Scriptures rests. The foundation of the foundation is the first three chapters, which form in themselves a complete monograph of revelation. And of this final substructure the first three verses of the first chapter are the foundation.
In the first verse of Genesis in words of supernatural grandeur, we have a revelation of God as the first cause, the Creator of the universe, the world and man. The glorious Being of God comes forth without explanation, and without apology. It is a revelation of the one, personal, living, God. There is in the ancient philosophic cosmogony no trace of the idea of such a Being, still less of such a Creator, for all other systems began and ended with pantheistic, materialistic, or hylozoistic conceptions. The Divine Word stands unique in declaring the absolute idea of the living God, without attempt at demonstration. The spirituality, infinity, omnipotence, sanctity of the Divine Being, all in germ lie here. Nay more. The later and more fully revealed doctrine of the unity of God in the Trinity may be said to lie here in germ also, and the last and deepest revelation to be involved in first and foremost. The fact of God in the first of Genesis is not given as a deduction of reason or a philosophic generalization. It is a revelation. It is a revelation of that primary truth which is received by the universal human mind as a truth that needs no proof, and is incapable of it, but which being received, is verified to the intelligent mind by an irresistible force not only with ontological and cosmological, but with teleological and moral arguments. Here we have in this first verse of Genesis, not only a postulate apart from Revelation, but three great truths which have constituted the glory of our religion.
(1)牋 The Unity of God; in contradiction to all the polytheisms and dualisms of ancient and modern pagan philosophy.
(2)牋 The Personality of God; in contradiction to that pantheism whether materialistic or idealistic, which recognizes God's immanence in the world, but denies His transcendence. For in all its multitudinous developments, pantheism has this peculiarity, that it denies the personality of God, and excludes from the realm of life the need of a Mediator, a Sin-Bearer, and a personal Saviour.
(3)牋 The Omnipotence of God; in contradiction, not only to those debasing conceptions of the anthropomorphic deities of the ancient world, but to all those man-made idols which the millions of heathenism today adore. God made these stars and suns, which man in his infatuation fain would worship. Thus in contradiction to all human conceptions and human evolutions, there stands forth no mere deistic abstraction, but the one, true, living and only God. He is named by the name Elohim, the name of Divine Majesty, the Adorable One, our Creator and Governor; the same God who in a few verses later is revealed as Jehovah-Elohim, Jehovah being the Covenant name, the God of revelation and grace, the Ever-Existent Lord, the God and Father of us all. (Green, "Unity of Genesis," pp. 31,32; "Fausset's Bib. Ency.," p. 258.)
One of the theories of modernism is that the law of evolution can be traced through the Bible in the development of the idea of God. The development of the idea of God? Is there in the Scriptures any real trace of the development of the idea of God? There is an expansive, and richer, and fuller revelation of the attributes and dealings and ways and workings of God; but not of the idea of God. The God of Gen. 1:1 is the God of Psa. 90; of Isa. 40:28; of Heb. 1:1; and Rev. 4:11.
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." Here in a sublime revelation is the doctrinal foundation of the creation of the universe, and the contradiction of the ancient and modern conceptions of the eternity of matter. God only is eternal.
One can well believe the story of a Japanese thinker who took up a strange book, and with wonderment read the first sentence: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." It struck him that there was more philosophy of a theological character, and satisfying to the mind and soul, in that one sentence than in all the sacred books of the orient.
That single sentence separates the Scriptures from the rest of human productions. The wisest philosophy of the ancients, Platonic-Aristotelian or Gnostic, never reached the point that the world was created by God in the sense of absolute creation. In no cosmogony outside of the Bible is there a record of the idea that God created the heaven and the earth, as an effort of His will, and the fiat of His eternal, self-existent Personality. Ex nihilo nihil fit. The highest point reached by their philosophical speculations was a kind of atomic theory; of cosmic atoms and germs and eggs possessed of some inexplicable forces of development, out of which the present cosmos was through long ages evolved. Matter was almost universally believed to have existed from eternity. The Bible teaches that the universe was not causa sui or a mere passive evolution of His nature, nor a mere transition from one form of being to another, from non-being to being, but that it was a direct creation of the personal, living, working God, who created all things out of nothing, but the fiat of His will, and the instrumentality of the eternal Logos. In glorious contrast to agnostic science with its lamentable creed, "I believe that behind and above and around the phenomena of matter and force remains the unsolved mystery of the universe," the Christian holds forth his triumphant solution, "I believe that in the beginning God created the heaven an the earth." (John 1; 1-3; Heb. 1:1; Col. 1:16.) The first verse of the Bible is a proof that the Book is of God.
And so with regard to the subsequent verses. Genesis is admittedly not a scientific history. It is a narrative for mankind to show that this world was made by God for the habitation of man, and was gradually being fitted for God's children. So in a series of successive creative developments from the formless chaos, containing in embryonic condition all elemental constituents, chemical and mechanical, air, earth, fire, and water, the sublime process is recorded, according to the Genesis narrative in the following order:
- The creation by direct Divine act of matter in its gaseous, aqueous, terrestrial and mineral condition successively. (Gen. 1:1-10; cf. Col. 1:16; Heb. 11:3.)
- The emergence by Divine creative power of the lowest forms of sea and land life, (Gen. 1:11-13.)
- The creation by direct Divine act of larger forms of life, aquatic and terrestrial; the great sea monsters and gigantic reptiles (the sheretjim and tanninim). (Dawson, "Origin of the World," p. 213; Gen. 1:20-21.)
- The emergence by Divine creative power of land animals of higher organization, herbivore and smaller mammals and carnivore. (Gen. 1:24-25.)
- And finally the creation by direct Divine act of man. (Gen. 1:26,27.) Not first but last. The last for which the first was made, as Browning so finely puts it. Herein is the comparability of Genesis and science, for this sublime order is just the order that some of the foremost of the nineteenth and twentieth century scientists have proclaimed. It is remarkable, too, that the word for absolutely new creation is only used in connection with the introduction of life. (Gen. 1:1,2,27.) These three points where the idea of absolute creation is introduced are the three main points at which modern champions of evolution find it impossible to make their connection.
Next we have in this sublime revelation the doctrinal foundation for the beginning of mankind.
Man was created, not evolved. That is, he did not come from protoplasmic mud-mass, or sea ooze bathybian, or by descent from fish or frog, or horse, or ape; but at once, direct, full made, did man come forth from God. When you read what some writers, professedly religious, say about man and his bestial origin your shoulders unconsciously droop; your head hangs down; your heart feels sick. Your self-respect has received a blow. When you read Genesis, your shoulders straighten, your chest emerges. You feel proud to be that thing that is called man. Up goes your heart, and up goes your head. The Bible stands openly against the evolutionary development of man, and his gradual ascent through indefinite aeons from the animal. Not against the idea of the development of the plans of the Creator in nature, or a variation of species by means of environment and processes of time. That is seen in Genesis, and throughout the Bible, and in this world. But the Bible does stand plainly against that garish theory that all species, vegetable and animal, have originated through evolution from lower forms through long natural processes. The materialistic form of this theory to the Christian is most offensive. It practically substitutes an all-engendering protoplasmic cell for the only and true God. But even the theistic-supernaturalistic theory is opposed to the Bible and to Science for these reasons.
1.牋 There is no such universal law of development. On the contrary, scientific evidence is now standing for deterioration. The flora and the fauna of the latest period show no trace of improvement, and even man, proud man, from the biological and physiological standpoint has gained nothing to speak of from the dawn of history. The earliest archaeological remains of Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, show no trace of slow emergence from barbarism. That species can be artificially improved is true, but that is not transmutation of species. (Dawson, "Origin of the World," pp. 227-277.)
2.牋 No new type has ever been discovered. Science is universally proclaiming the truth of Gen. 1:11, 12, 21, 24, 25 "after his kind," "after their kind"; that is, species by species. Geology with its five hundred or so species of ganoids proclaims the fact of the non-transmutation of species. If, as they say, the strata tell the story of countless aeons, it is strange that during those countless aeons the trilobite never produced anything but a trilobite, nor has the ammonite ever produced anything but an ammonite. The elaborately artificial exceptions of modern science only confirm the rule. (See Townsend, "Collapse of Evolution.")
3.牋 Nor is there any trace of transmutation of species. Man develops from a single cell, and the cell of a monkey is said to be indistinguishable from that of a man. But the fact that a man cell develops into a man and the monkey cell develops into a monkey, shows there is, an immeasurable difference between them. And the development from a cell into a man has nothing whatever to do with the evolution of one species into another. "To science, species are practically unchangeable units" ("Origin of the World," p. 227). Man is the sole species of his,genus, and the sole representative of his species. The abandonment of any original type is said to be soon followed by the complete extinction of the family.
4.牋 Nor has the missing link been found. The late Robert Etheridge of the British Museum, head of the geological department, and one of the ablest of British paleontologists, has said: "In all that great museum there is not a particle of evidence of transmutation of species. Nine-tenths of the talk of evolutionists is not founded on observation, and is wholly unsupported by facts." And Professor Virchow is said to have declared with vehemence regarding evolution: "It's all nonsense. You are as far as ever you were from establishing any connection between man and the ape." A great gulf is fixed between the theory of evolution and the sublime statement of Gen. 1:26, 27. These verses give man his true place in the universe as the consummation of creation. Made out of the dust of the ground, and created on the same day with the highest group of animals, man has physiological affinities with the animal creation. But he was made in the image of God, and therefore transcendently superior to any animal. "Man is a walker, the monkey is a climber," said the great French scientist, De Quatrefages, years ago. A man does a thousand things every day that a monkey could not do if he tried ten thousand years. Man has the designing, controlling, ordering, constructive, and governing faculties. Man has personality, understanding, will, conscience. Man is fitted for apprehending God, and for worshipping God. The Genesis account of man is the only possible bases of revelation. The revelation of fatherhood; of the beautiful, the true, the good; of purity, of peace; is unthinkable to a horse, a dog, or a monkey. The most civilized simian could have no affinity with such ideas. There is no possibility of his conceiving such conceptions, or of receiving them if revealed. It is, moreover, the only rational basis for the doctrine of regeneration in opposition to the idea of the evolution of the human character, and of the great doctrine of the incarnation. Man once made in the image of God, by the regenerating power of the Holy Ghost is born again and made in the image of God the Son.
Further, we have in this sublime revelation of Genesis the doctrinal foundation of
