In the Beginning, (part 2)

"And God said, Let us make men in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over fish of the sea, and over bird of the heavens, and over cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. And God created Man' in his image, in God's image created he him; male and female created he them" (v. 26, 27).

Not only is man introduced with marked separateness from the previous creation of animals, even from those of the earth made on the same day, each "after its kind," and all seen as "good," but for the first time God enters into counsel with Himself for this great and absolutely new work. It is no longer "Let there be," or "Let the earth (or "the waters") bring forth, " though man's body is in its due place expressly said to have been formed of the dust of the ground. Here the language rises into appropriate grandeur and solemnity, "Let us make men." Not a word about kinds of men, for there was but one; whatever people may have subsequently dreamt in their pride or in the selfish advantage they desired to take of their degraded fellows. Not a little was suffered afterwards in view of their hard-heartedness; but from the beginning it had not been so.

6. The race, Man, which as it has the article in Hebrew, is thus distinguished from the anarthrous noun, has a name derived from the ground out of which man was taken. The context confirms the plural sense also.

We shall hear yet more when we come to a fresh revelation, not of man's creation as its head simply, but of the moral relations in which he is shown to have been set; but here there is ample evidence of the dignity conferred on the race. "Let us make men in our image, after our likeness." Nothing is more opposed to the Bible than the anthropomorphism of Greek and Roman mythology, which degraded their deities to fallen males and females with like passions and lusts, and gave the sanction of religion to the basest immorality. ad what philosophers of Greece or Rome ever ventured to claim so noble a prototype? Here Moses was inspired to give it as the holy declaration of the Creator. How far from the brute at length evolving man, a theory suggested by Satan to brutalise the race! It is the simple yet wondrous truth: not God brought down to the human level, but men alone created after a divine pattern.

On the other hand we must not confound the state of Adam unfallen with the new man which "after God hath been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth." This is descriptive of the new creation, not of the first Adam state where all was mere innocence, but the knowledge of good and evil along with the power by grace which abhors evil and cleaves to good that is implied in righteousness and holiness of the truth. This is not nature, but supernatural in believers, who become partakers of a divine nature (2 Peter 1:4).

Nevertheless, though Adam's state was far from that of which Christ is the risen head, he evidently was made to have a portion though a creature, above all the creation that surrounded him, "in God's image, after His likeness. " How utterly false in presence of the Bible are the speculations of evolution, an hypothesis logically at issue with those fixed laws of nature, which the same philosophers cry up to the exclusion of God! For how reconcile invariable law with change of species? The truth is that real science depends upon the uniformity of results, and consists in discovering and classifying them. This does not hinder variation through circumstances, failing which the original type returns.

Again, as natural science is essentially based on the reality and continuance of species, so it can give no account of origins. If honest, it admits there must be a cause, and an adequate one; but here, as science, it is and must be wholly ignorant. God's word alone reveals the truth; and of all reveries, none viler than the ignorance, which refuses to learn and dares to defy divine revelation, by conceiving man a developed ape, fish, seaweed, or aught else. The truth is that primordial causes are beyond science; which, instead of honestly owning its ignorance, pretends to deny the creation which scripture clearly reveals. God alone could create; and He declares that He has done so, and in what order. Science would gladly learn if not skeptical; for its province lies in investigating effects, and cannot reach up to primordial causes, which it is of all moment to know if revealed. But we can only know them from God's testimony, which is simple it we were.

How worthy of God and cheering to man, turning from these freaks of spurious science, to weigh once more His words! "Let us make men in our image after our likeness; and let them have dominion over fish of the sea and over bird of the heavens [the work of the fifth day] and over cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth [sixth day's work]. And God created Man in his image, in God's image created he him; male and female created he them." How emphatically, it will be noticed, Moses says that God created the race. It was enough to say so once of the vast universe in verse 1, when it was brought originally into being. Again, it was said to mark the introduction of animated nature, or at least of the aquatic Mammals, into the Adamic world in verse 21. But here of Man it is repeated again and again to written word; and this we are most unlikely to have or court unless we have unwavering faith in it, as we certainly ought if we believe it inspired of God. This the apostle predicates, not merely of scripture generally as a known body of holy writings, but of everything coming under that designation, some of which had yet to be written. What can be conceived more precious and withal comprehensive, than nâoa ypan, "every scripture," in 2 Tim. 3:16? He declares it to be, not only useful for the various purposes of divine blessing to man, but before all God-inspired. All admit the human instruments; but if scripture be God-inspired in every part, it is certain that God is not a man that He should lie. And He has magnified His word above all His name.

Now there is a two-fold danger of misapprehending Adam's state and place while unfallen. We may exalt it beyond the truth by confounding it with what grace gives in Christ; or we may lower it by making it a question of such reasoning and conscience as man acquired by the fall. In his original state Adam stood in relationship with God in thankful use of all He gave, but liable to death on disobedience. It was in no way heaven held out if he obeyed, as will appear more fully by-and-by. The danger was of losing his first estate by transgression. But God imposed no such moral government as the law; nor had Adam the knowledge of good and evil till the fall. Man was not holy but innocent, and tested solely by prohibition as the simple test of obedience on God's part. It was a blessed creature's responsibility to obey with the threat of death on transgression.

By the fall man got the knowledge of good and evil, that is, the intrinsic perception of right and wrong apart from prescription; or as Jehovah Elohim said (Gen. 3:22), "Behold, the man is become as one of us to know good and evil!" In Adam fresh from God's hand the knowledge of good and evil would have been a defect, a moral inconsistency, and therefore an impossibility. Before the fall he had conscience solely in the sense of responsibility to obey, not at all in the way of accusing or else excusing self. Only when he sinned, and thus lost his innocence, did he gain the moral power of knowing good and evil of himself, henceforth his sad, painful, but most useful monitor. Before that he was naturally enjoying divine goodness in its creative effects, under the test, not of resisting things intrinsically evil, but of a single restriction from God which made eating the forbidden fruit wrong: a state wholly different from ours. The fall changed for evil the whole ground of standing. Propitiation with life in Christ is a still deeper and higher change for good, even though in fact the old man yet abides and is altogether evil in itself. Christianity is no mere restoration of man, but eternal life in Christ and eternal redemption.

But unfallen Adam was in no way free in the sense of independence of God. He had indisputable title to act in what God subjected to him, but in nothing else. Obedience and dependence were due to God. All was good around him to enjoy:

Science in its very nature is incapable of rising to this knowledge infinitely more important as it is than all it can make known or even discover, however ample the field in nature may be. For revelation speaks of three broadly distinct conditions — creation unfallen; creation as it is in guilt, and misery, whatever the resources of sovereign grace held out to faith; creation as it will be when all things are made new. Science occupying itself solely with the intermediate is in great danger of denying in dishonest pride what it cannot know scientifically, to the destruction of all who trust it, instead of the God Who gave His Son in love to save sinners who repent and believe the gospel.

But to return, we read, "And God blessed them; and God said to them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over fish of the sea and bird of the heavens, and over every living thing that creepeth on the earth" (v. 28). Man, as Prof. Owen said, is the sole species of his genus, and the sole representative of his species.

This is the second benediction of creation. The first was when God made the creatures that peopled the waters and the air of Adam's world, the earliest to enjoy animal life in that state of things. God has pleasure in blessing His creatures that have a life even of a lowly kind to appreciate the fruits of His goodness, and especially in view of their reproduction and multiplying within their sphere. Here, a second time, He blessed mankind, male and female, of whom alone it is said, though the detailed difference is reserved for a subsequent and more fitting occasion. In verse 22 we have only "saying," but here "God said to them, Be fruitful," etc. Man was the depositary of God's revelation, as he ought to be His priest, and, as we have seen, His viceroy. This is more than the interpreter of nature, as one of our sages styled him. He had intercourse with God at once.

Language thus was in no way the slow invention of man's wit, but an immediate endowment of our first parents by God from creation. Here His word assures us of its reality from the first day of man's creation; and everything confirms in the chapters that follow. To imagine otherwise is to disbelieve the Bible and prefer one's own thoughts or the dreams of other men, as if we or they could know anything about the matter. He Who alone knows all has been pleased to tell us the truth through Moses. His word was valid for the unintelligent creation — how comforting for the human pair to hear Him say, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it! Even though man comes in as a creature with the rest, still he is introduced exceptionally as the crown of creation; and the higher creatures are pronounced good separately from man, who is blessed, male and female, in an address to them as at the head of all the rest.

Then comes the proclamation of the rule assigned them by God. Not only of divine revelation and of salvation by grace, yea of a Savior able to meet God in righteousness, no less than man in grace. But it takes the ground of making out a righteousness of its own, supplemented by God's mercy to cover all faults and deficiencies. Impossible for any soul to find satisfaction thus. For on one side he acknowledges a Creator God of power and goodness infinite — on the other he faces a world and race of sin, evil, wretchedness, and death, to say nothing of a judgment he could not but dread. The strongest and clearest mind is lost in this labyrinth; and human efforts on the religious side of superstition are as vain to clear it up and present the truth and purge the conscience as the profane seculations and self-contradictory antinomies of philosophy. Human religion only hardens men in their naturally false thoughts of God as either austere or easy-going. Philosophy (in its struggles to escape the inconsistencies inevitable to a fallen estate, which is not confessed to God with a broken heart) only darkens more deeply what is already dark, and ends too often by the mental endeavor to deny the God Whom sin and unbelief have made unknown, save in the qualms of conscience.

No! man was made to look up, not physically alone but morally, in dependence on God the source and giver of all goodness. He sought independence by sin, and gained a conscience already bad, which made him look down, while his pride still pretended to everything. He had lost God and departed from Him, and (being wholly insufficient to abide self-sustained) set his mind on the creature below himself so as at length even to deify it. The Son of God emptied Himself by taking the form of a bondman, being made in the likeness of men, and humbled Himself, becoming obedient even unto the death of the cross; where God was glorified as to sin by propitiation for it, and the ground laid for the righteous salvation of all who believe. A man-god was Satan's bait and man's ruin. The God-man dying in obedience and for redemption is the triumph of truth and grace.

Genesis 1:29-31

The closing notice remains, the economy of the primeval creation, and the divine estimate of all.

"And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb producing seed that [is] upon the face of all the earth, and every tree in which is the fruit of a tree producing seed — to you it shall be for food; and to every animal of the earth, and to every bird of the heavens, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, in which fis] a living soul, every green herb for food. And it was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold [it was] very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day" (vv. 29-31). Man has still his made man upright, surrounded by every thing "very good" yet under trial of obedience, as we shall soon hear definitely; but he departed from God through the wiles of the enemy in the face of solemn warning. He sinned and thus introduced death for himself and his posterity, and "subjected to vanity" the creation put under him. But God, when tracing the evil to its source, has proved His goodness by holding out the assurance of a Conqueror over the enemy, even while suffering Himself, to be born of woman too. And to this word all believers from the fall clung till He came Who made it good in His death on the cross and in His resurrection.

Thus does God from the first proclaim mercy rejoicing over judgment, though sin bore its sorrowful fruits in an outcast race and a blighted world, where no creature is as God made it. It is science, not scripture, which here as elsewhere, brings in difficulties even for believers.

But Sir J. W. Dawson in his Archaia, 217-222, raises questions which are certainly not solved, though brought by himself, a very competent geologist, "into the light of our modern knowledge of nature." He pictures Eden either cleared of its previous inhabitants or not yet invaded by animals from other centers! He supposes man created then with a group adapted to his happiness (Gen. 2:19, etc., treating of them only), and these latest species of animals and plants extending themselves within the spheres of older districts, so as to replace the ferocious beasts of older epochs and other regions! He fancies that on the fall the curse that befell the earth would thus consist in the predaceous animals with thorns and briars invading his Eden. Most of my readers will have heard more than they wish of notions as irreconcilable with scripture as derogatory to it. How can the excellent Principal of M'Gill College have indulged in such speculations? Evidently, because being sure, too sure, of his geological scheme, he accommodates scripture to it: a position not very wise scientifically where so much is continually shifting and so little is absolutely ascertained — a position most antagonistic to a Christian's faith in God's word. He is not entitled geologically to assume a mixture of the conditions of the Tertiary with those of the human period in the Quaternary. His theory of day-ages exposes him to these consequences, along with the recently adopted fashion of opposition to A. D'Orbigny's careful and exhaustive proof in his "Prodrome de Stratigraphique Paleontologie, "' that not a species of plants or animals survived the Tertiary, and that a distinct break preceded man's time as often before.

And what is the alleged ground in scripture? "Man was to rule over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and the b'hemah or herbivorous animals. The carnivorous creatures are not mentioned, and possibly were not included in man's dominion"! But this is distinctly refuted by verse 30, which expressly assigns every green herb to "every beast" or animal of the earth. The same text proves

Genesis 2:1-3

These verses are really the necessary supplement and close of chap. 1, if we divide into chapters on a sound principle. It is well known that such a division, save in the Psalms etc., has no authority and is not seldom erroneous. The new title given to God, Jehovah Elohim, indicates consistently a new subject, as will be shown in its place. Hitherto it is simply Elohim, the abstract name of the Creator. Here as everywhere the name has nothing whatever to do with the question of authorship, as ignorant unbelief has suggested with misplaced confidence, but springs exclusively from internal reasons, as may be seen throughout scripture to much interest and instruction.

did even in the days of David and Solomon; so the prophets proclaim, and scripture cannot be broken.

Ours meanwhile is a higher call and a brighter hope; for we are by the Holy Spirit united to Him Whom Jew and Gentile crucified, Whom God not only raised but set at His own right hand in the heavenlies, above all principality and power and might and dominion, and every name that is named not only in this age but also in that which is to come; we are the body of the glorified Head. Those who had the sabbath, as a sign between them and Jehovah, rejected their own Messiah, Who, slain by the hands of lawless men, lay in the grave that sabbath, "high" or great day as it emphatically was. It was the sin and the death of Israel, the ground of a still more terrible scattering than that of Assyria or of Babylon; yet in God's grace the divine and only efficacious means to faith of blotting out that sin and every other; as we prove who believe the gospel, while hardening in part has befallen Israel. But all Israel shall be saved by-and-by; and when they are, from one moon to another and from one sabbath to another all flesh shall come to worship before Jehovah. We now by the Spirit sent down from heaven draw near by faith within the holiest, and this with boldness by the blood of Jesus. Of our peculiar blessing the first day, not the seventh, is the witness. Nor can lack of Christian intelligence be more decided than confounding the Lord's day with the sabbath.

But the seventh day is also decisively again the day periods. For what can be conceived more unnatural, when we let a system of private interpretation carry us away alike from simplicity and from spiritual understanding? Till the six days introduced Adam and his world it could not be said that the heavens and the earth, still less "all their host," were finished. Previous states of the creation had their importance; but till man and his congeners, animal and vegetable, there was a great lack. Neither on earth nor even in the heavens was there a creature made in God's image or after His likeness. This was not a little in itself as bringing in moral ways of and with man, and room for God's manifestation in promise and government, till the infinite fact of Immanuel, the Word made flesh, the Son of God a man, and His work no less infinite of redemption, yet to be the basis not only of the church's blessedness, as also of all saints and of Israel to come, but of the new heavens and new earth through all eternity.

What possible evidence from scripture that "the seventh day is the modern or human era in geology" (Archaia, 235)? or as the author of "Footprints of the Creator" puts it, "God's sabbath of rest may still exist; the work of redemption may be the work of His sabbath day!" Does it need the words of any one to refute such a reverie of self-destroying fancy? The scripture before us points out His rest as cessation from work, not merely from creation, but from "creating to make." No doubt, if six immensely protracted periods of several thousand and the deluge, the kingdom of Israel and the Gentile world powers (to say nothing of the law, the gospel, and the church), is a mere fiction of some few geologists speculative beyond the rest, for which not a word of revelation has ever been truly advanced.

Reviewing these papers attentively for reproduction in a small volume, I do not feel the need of adding many words. Scripture is to the believer absolutely reliable; and, in my judgment, it refuses to bend to philosophic speculation which is not true science, but the guesswork of some scientists assuming to theorize on what is unknown to science and therefore illegitimate. In such schemes generally proper creation is denied, and evolution of matter (perhaps eternal matter) takes the place of God calling the universe into being as in Gen 1:1. Next, the state of disorder, so necessary in its results for man when brought into existence, is shown in verse 2 and connected with the statement of original creation, because both preceded man's world, and cover the enormous periods of geologic time, not only when fossil remains make their records recognizable in themselves and distinguishable one from another, but, the more vague Azoic age which preceded.

Hence the least offensive of these schemes, as Prof. Dana's, is not only without but opposed to scripture in assuming an original nebula. For this disagrees with both the first verse and the second of Gen. 1, and conceives the third to mean the earth as a globe of molten rock, like the sun in brightness and nature, enveloped in an atmosphere containing the dissociated elements of the future waters and whatever else the heat at the surface could evaporate. Such is the first era of philosophic conjecture. A second went forward until first the earth became centrally solid. Long after, a crust was formed outside; and the vapors of the atmosphere were condensed, and a watery envelope made. A third age, or continuation, followed, so as to admit of the simplest forms of vegetable life, and of time crust increasing by contraction, aided by disintegration of the rock, by exposure to the ocean; and so began the earth's supercrust — the only part of the earth's structure within the reach of direct investigation. As the first introduction of vegetable life is the fourth age the display of the systems followed in the four grand types of the animal kingdom in the fifth; and in the sixth, Mammals, and Man.

Analogy, with the chief periods of geological time, is admitted. But it is only a measure of analogy as a whole. We have seen on conclusive evidence that the inspired record will not bend to the assumption either that the first verse of Gen. 1 is a summary of the chapter, or that verse 2 contains the original order of creation, instead of being a state of confusion into which, for the wisest purposes