Jottings

by J. Miller | Category: Jottings | Sept 1964

There are fundamental lessons to be learned of the ways of God in the early chapters of Genesis, particularly in the first three chapters. There are few portions of God's word that have been so much attacked as these chapters have been by men who presume to he wiser that the Creator Himself, and there are many such in the world's universities and schools of learning. The Lord when speaking to the Jews in Jerusalem, as recorded in John 5, made some tremendous claims, which, if they were not supported by evidence of the most weighty kind, would, in their very nature, he blasphemy. But think of the evidence He gives as supporting His claims that He is the Son of the Father, therefore equal with God, that the Father's works are His works, that He raises the dead and gives them life, that He gives eternal life to every one that believes in Him, that all judgement of all of the human race has been given to Him, and that He will raise all the dead. Never were such claims made by any man on earth before or since. The highest claims that men, who have been leaders of their fellows, have been able to attain unto is that they were either prophets or teachers. (We do not here speak of some weakminded and strong-willed few who have without proof claimed to he Christ or even God - these are to he pitied for their arrogant stupidity).

Christ stands alone with supporting claims of His Deity. He cites John the Baptist as a chief witness (verse 33). He cites the greater witness of His works which the Father had given Him to do (verse 36). He cites the witness of His Father, who besides hearing witness concerning the Son in the Scriptures, bore public testimony that He, whom John had just baptized, in whom He was well pleased, was His heloved Son (37). Again, on the Mount of Transfiguration He bore similar testimony. Then He told them that the very Scriptures that they searched bore witness of Him (verse 39) and at the end of the chapter he refers to Moses on whom they had set their hope, and He said, "If ye believed Moses, ye would believe Me; for he wrote of Me" (46). Then He added, "But if ye helieve not his writings, how shall ye believe My words?" (47).

This last statement of the Lord is like all He said, one of tremendous force, when we think of the heading in our Bibles to the book of Genesis, "The first book of Moses, commonly called Genesis" Moses thus wrote Genesis, and for ourselves we most certainly believe that he did. Genesis is also the first book in the Jewish Bible, which contains the same books as our Old Testament. The Jewish people have all the centuries since Moses' day preserved these Holy Scriptures as a sacred trust without adding thereto or taking therefrom.

These Scriptures were inspired (God-breathed) and did not come into existence by the will of men, but men spoke from God being moved by the Holy Spirit; such is the testimony of Paul and Peter (2 Timothy 3.16, 17; 2 Peter 1.20, 21).

In the light of such testimony and such facts, how are men, who deny that Moses wrote the first three chapters of Genesis, with all that follow, going to escape living and dying in unbelief in the Lord and in His words? They must come under that word of condemnation of John the Baptist, "He that obeyeth not ("believeth not," R.V.M, the word apeithon means to refuse to he persuaded) the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him" (John 3.36). There are many like words concerning the doom of the unbeliever in the New Testament.

Genesis begins with - "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" (1.1). Is this truth or fable? or did matter evolve from no matter, and life evolve from no life? Was it as the Bible says that the heaven and earth were created by God, or did they come into existence without will, mind and power? Granted that there was will and mind, then personality is behind creation, for there is neither mind nor will in matter. That matter takes certain fixed forms and goes in a certain course is without doubt, but who gave matter its form and set the course it should follow? Here is design, and design implies mind. The mind, the will and the power were God's. We believe the Bible and reject human speculation as to the origin of things.

The Lord set His Jewish hearers a question to answer when He said, "If ye believe not his (Moses') writings, how shall ye believe My words?" (John 5.47). It is impossible to deny Moses' account of the creation of the heaven and the earth and the creation of man without denying the whole of the Scriptures. But there are some, perhaps many, who have the temerity to deny that Moses wrote the first three chapters of Genesis and thus deny that these chapters contain a true account of the origin of things and also of the fall of man. No mortal could have written the early chapters of Genesis. They are a divinely given account through Moses of the work of God. The Lord Jesus set His seal upon the Old Testament Scriptures when praying to God, when He said, "Thy word is truth" (John 17.17). Again He said to the Jews, "The scripture cannot he broken" (John 10.35). The word "broken" is the English rendering of luo, in infinitive, passive, which means to loosen, unbind or nullify. Scripture cannot he loosened into parts, one part true and the other false, as the "Higher Critics" have sought to do. It is sad to reflect upon the fact that Luther, a great German, to whom we owe so much, was followed years after his time by professors of theology in German universities who spread higher criticism, so called, in Germany, but it was imported wholesale into this country by professors of the same turn of mind, and this poisonous opiate has tinctured the teachings of almost every religious school in the land and dulled the religious susceptibilities of well-nigh countless students who have been brought under the noxious teachings of such men. As this has spread to the general public no wonder that the word of God has lost its hold upon the consciences of the masses; and ministers of religion, we do not say of the Gospel, lecture to empty pews, and now, as if to correct the folly of the past and present there are Protestant ministers (though they have little protestant about them and little to protest about) who are turning their eyes to Rome as though that were a remedy in their dilemma.

We believe in the beginning of the Bible, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" (Genesis 1.1), as we believe in the Lord's last message at the end, "I come quickly" (Revelation 22.20), and all that comes in between. The Lord will come to put an end to human folly in this world His hands once made (John 1.3). The earth is the Lord's for He made it. Man is a passenger through to whatever destiny he chooses for himself. The place he chooses will he determined by his attitude to the Lord his Maker.

"In the beginning God created." Scholars tell us that the Hebrew word bara for create means "to cut, to carve out, to form by cutting." In Genesis 2.3 we read, "God blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it: because that in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made." Dr. Tregelles gives a literal rendering of the words "created and made", as "created to make," and this is confirmed by the marginal reading of the A.V.- "Heb. created to make." To make (Heb. asah) means to manufacture, fabricate, and conveys the meaning of using existing material. Thus whilst God created the heaven and the earth in the beginning, God made the earth in six days, as He Himself said from Mount Sinai to His people encamped at its base, "For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day" (Exodus 20.11). Thus God set the seal of truth by His words upon what is recorded in Genesis chapters 1 and 2. We must either accept or reject His testimony to His own work. Happy are those who accept the testimony of the Lord and sad shall they he who reject it. The simple believer can see at once the difference between the creation and making of the heaven and the earth and the simpler the believer is, the better to take in the mighty facts involved in such words in Genesis and Exodus.

God has not revealed, so far as the writer knows, what happened and for what reason the earth which was created not a waste (Isaiah 45.18) came to he waste and void (Genesis 1.2). Vast millenniums may lie between Genesis verses I and 2 of chapter 1, but the "secret things belong unto the LORD our God" (Deuteronomy 29.29).

J. Miller | Sept 1964
Jottings