The manner in which the Holy Scriptures open is worthy of their Divine Author. "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," and that is all that is here recorded concerning the original creation. Nothing is said which enables us to fix the date of their creation; nothing is revealed concerning their appearance or inhabitants; nothing is told us about the modus operandi of their Divine Architect. We do not know whether whether the primitive heaven and earth were created a few thousands, or many millions of years ago. We are not informed as to whether they were called into existence in a moment of time, or whether the process of their formation covered an interval of long ages. The bare fact is stated: "In the beginning God created," and nothing is added to gratify the curious. The open sentence of Holy Writ is not to be philosophized about, but is presented as a statement of truth to be received with unquestioning faith.
"In the beginning God created." No argument is entered into to prove the existence of God: instead, His existence is affirmed as a fact to be believed. And yet, sufficient is expressed in this one brief sentence to expose every fallacy which man has invented concerning the Deity. This opening sentence of the Bible repudiates atheism, for it postulates the existence of God. It refutes materialism, for it distinguishes between God and His material creation. it abolishes pantheism, for it predicates that which necessitates a personal God. "In the beginning God created," tells us that He was Himself before the beginning, and hence, Eternal. "In the beginning God created," and that informs us He is a personal being, for an abstraction, an impersonal "first cause", could not create. "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and that argues He is infinite and omnipotent, for no finite being possesses the power to create, and none but an Omnipotent Being could create the heaven and the earth.
"In the beginning God." This is the foundation truth of all real theology. God is the great Originator and Initiator. It is the ignoring of this which is the basic error in all human schemes. False systems of theology and philosophy begin with man, and seek to work up to God. But this is a turning of things upside down. We must, in all our thinking, begin with God, and work down to man. Again, this is true of the Divine inspiration of the Scriptures. The Bible is couched in human language, it is addressed to human ears, it was written by human hands, but, in the beginning God - "holy men of God spake, moved by the Holy Spirit" (2 Peter 1:21). This is also true of salvation. In Eden, Adam sinned, and brought in death; but his maker was not taken by surprise: in the beginning God had provided for just such an emergency, for, "the Lamb" was "foreordained before the foundation of the world" (1 Peter 1:20). This is also true of the new creation. The soul that is saved, repents, believes, and serves the Lord; but, in the beginning, God chose us in Christ (Ephesians 1:4), and now, "we love Him, because He first loved us."
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," and we cannot but believe that these creations were worthy of Himself, that they reflected the perfections of their Maker, that they were exceedingly fair in their pristine beauty. Certainly, the earth, on the morning of its creation, must have been vastly different from its chaotic state as described in Genesis 1:2. "And the earth was with form and void" must refer to a condition of the earth much later than what is before us in the preceding verse. It is now over a hundred years ago since Dr. Chalmers called attention to the fact that the word "was" in Genesis 1:2 should be translated "became", and that between the first two verses of Genesis 1 some terrible catastrophe must have intervened. That this catastrophe my have been connected with the apostasy of satan, seems more than likely; that some catastrophe did occur is certain from Isaiah 45:18, which expressly declares that the earth was not created in the condition in which Genesis 1:2 views it.
~A. W. Pink~
(continued with # 2)
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