If The idea in the word cannot be defined with precision, but the following points are to be noted : (a) the moat important fact is that it is used exclusively of Divine activity — a restriction to which perhaps no parallel can be found in other languages. (b) The idea of novelty or extraordinariness of result is frequently implied, and it is noteworthy that this is the case in the only two passages of certainly early date where the word occurs, (c) It is probable also that it contains the idea of effortless production (such as befits the Almighty) by word or volition (Ps. xxxiii. 9). (d) The facts just stated, and the further circumstance that the word is used always with accusative of product and never of material, constitute a long advance towards the full theological doctrine of creation out of nothing, and make the word " create " a suitable vehicle for it.^
1 This is not a philosophical account of the Creation. There is no such thing in the Bible. Wisdom, among the Israelites, developed herself in quite a different direction from the philosophy of the Greeks. She did not give herself up to speculations upon the origin and nature of things. This one word, resplendent with light, lying at the foundation of all the Jewish conceptions, set
• J. Skinner, Genesis, 15.
GENESIS I. I 7
their minds at rest upon these matters : " In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." Hence the greater minds among the Jews directed their thoughts to the problems of practical life. The result of these labours is given us in five books, which form, as it were, the code of the Hebrew wisdom. The subjects treated in them relate, not to the study of Being, but to the purely practical question of right living; they even exhaust it. These books are—Job, in which is revealed the art of suffering well ; the Psalms, which give us a model of true prayer ; Proverbs, in which is taught the art of acting rightly in all circumstances ; Ecclesiastes, which treats of the right manner of enjoying the good things granted to man here below ; and finally, in the Song of Songs, the wisdom of the Israelites rises to the contemplation of the supreme art — that of true and pure love}
iii. Other Explanations.
What are the alternative explanations of the origin of the world ? Three may be named —
I. Materialism. — Materialism tells us that the Universe is eternal and self -existent. The Universe exists, because it exists. God, of course, it leaves out of the question altogether. It holds Him to have no real existence. He is pronounced to be a creature of the human imagination, the product of the human heart at a particular stage of its development. In its most elaborated modern form. Materialism proposes to substitute two self-existent factors for the God of Heaven, two blind, all- powerful agencies — Matter and Force. It pronounces the Universe to be the result of innumerable combinations of self- existent force with self-existent matter; and it maintains that while the quantity of this eternally existing force is invariable, force can transform itself into light, into heat, into electricity, into magnetism ; it is, by turns, weight, affinity, cohesion, mechanism. It is inherent in matter ; it is light and heat in the suns and in the fixed stars ; it is mechanical impulse in planets which move around a central globe; it is cohesion or magnetism in the ponderable material of the heavenly bodies. Its action is regulated by uncreated, self-existent laws.
IF I do not ask whether we can listen to a system which gives the lie, both to the heart and to the conscience, to some of the deepest and profoundest aspirations of which man is conscious.
> F. Godet.
8 THE CREATION AND THE CREATOR
But I bid you look out for one moment upon the Universe and ask yourselves if the materialistic account of its existence is even rational. That quick-witted and thoughtful people of antiquity, the Greeks, gave it a name which has lasted until modern times ; they called it the Cosmos. They meant by that word that upon the face of the Universe there is stamped beyond everything else the imprint of an harmonious beauty. It meets the eye, it falls upon the ear of man, this harmony of nature; it is no fancy impression which we gain from that splendid spectacle of universal order. But why should this harmony exist? Why do we behold this regularity, this concerted and orderly movement of universal existence? If blind force and blind matter are the only ultimate factors of existence, why should chaos ever have terminated in a reign of such harmonious and perfect order? Materialism replies that force moulds matter in obedience to laws. But law implies a legislator, and the question is, Who has created the laws ? Why do these laws exist and no other ? Has any one presided over that perpetual intercommunion of force with matter, and guided it by law to a result of such singular beauty ? Atheism smiles at us Christians when we ask this question, and replies, " A chance." Out of millions upon millions of chances that it might have been otherwise, one chance has carried the day; it has issued in the reign of order; it has eventuated in the world.^