The language of the sacred record must therefore be regarded as anthropopathic—the Divine idea being symbolized under the figure of human acts and affections; and from the analogy between the human and the Divine we may conceive not what God is in Himself, nor yet the manner of the Divine action, but the relation of God to the world. We must, however, guard against substituting the human symbol for the Divine reality, and making the human analogy a measure for the infinite Being. "The Sacred Hymn is no more a literal detail of the actual process of creation than the description of the New Jerusalem in Revelation is a literal picture of the heavenly state."[194] God is forever above all finite relations. Finite acts and relations may be employed as representative symbols of the Divine, but they can never be adequate representations. Divine creating and moving, commanding and naming, seeing and approving, working and resting, must not be narrowed down to the standard of our finite personality, and conceived under human limitations. The conception of the Deity as standing outside of matter, and moving and fashioning it after the manner of a human artificer, as commanding and naming in human language, as being conditioned in his action by the time-measures which He himself appointed, as expending energy and then resting after the manner of a human laborer, is the rudest anthropomorphism. God is eternal; neither his being nor his action are conditioned by finite measures of time. God is absolute immensity, essential omnipresence. He is "in all and through all" as truly as He is "above and before all." He is a Living Power immanent in all matter, as well as transcending all matter, moving it, organizing it, vitalizing it continually—a Living Power working from within, rather than a mechanical force acting from without.
If the primitive composition standing at the commencement of Genesis be "the Symbolical Hymn of Creation," we are not permitted to regard it as chronological—that is, we are not justified in expecting that it shall conform to time-measures which had no existence prior to the creative act, but which were consequent upon and determined by the creative act. This is obvious both from the nature of things and the character of the composition.
The 106th Psalm is an epic poem—that is, it is a narrative in poetic measure, a history in metrical form. Who will be so unreasonable as to demand that this Psalm shall furnish any chronological data, or conform to any time-measures whatever? Psalms are composed to be sung and excite emotion, not to be merely read and criticised. The poet groups his materials for the best moral effect, and arranges his numbers to secure rhythm and harmony. It is simply absurd to demand that there shall be any chronology—nay, it spoils the grand effect to think of chronology in reading the "Symbolical Hymn of Creation." In fact, we are forbidden to think of time at all by the first word of the exordium, which states the subject of the poem. The Hebrew bereshith, the Greek ἐν ἀρχῆ = in Beginning (not in the Beginning, for the article is not used), has no relation to succession in time. It denotes pretemporality, and is rendered by Meyer, Keil, and others—"before time or in eternity." It is the same thought which is presented in John i. 1: "In the beginning was the Word;" and Tholuck and Dean Alford both read the text, "Before the world was, or before time was." Indeed, the whole poem represents an ideal conception, and not a time-march of phenomena. So assured are we on this point that we confidently affirm that no one who endeavors to think of the creation in its relation to God can ever fall into the anthropomorphic error of saying that "God's ways are like unto our ways," "God's speaking is like unto our speaking," "God's working and resting are like unto our working and resting," and "God's days are like unto our days of twenty-four hours." As Dr. Whedon remarks, "Our traditional unscientific scientific constructions of this chapter are Japhetic interpretations of a Semitic text."
The men who persist in regarding "the day of God" as a natural day of twenty-four hours are involved in numberless inconsistencies when they attempt to carry their rigid preconception throughout the whole Bible. Human or finite measures of time, when applied to any thing God does, can only be accommodated representations to meet our feeble comprehension, and we are constantly guarded, in the Bible itself, against a literal and anthropomorphic conception. "Hast thou eyes of flesh, or seest thou as man seeth? Are thy days as man's days?" (Job x. 4, 5.) To say that God's days of working are like our days is just as absurd and as degrading a conception as to say that God's eyes are "eyes of flesh," like ours. Our time-measures can not condition the Divine action. "One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day" (2 Peter iii. 8); which means that time is as nothing with God, that time does not condition the Divine life or the Divine action, but that it is the Divine action which makes and conditions all time. The beginning of the world is the beginning of time, and time is the duration of the world measured into equal parts by the equable motion of bodies in space.[195] The attempt to measure the creating work of God by days of twenty-four hours is just as absurd as the attempt to measure immensity by a three-foot rule, or to estimate omnipotence by horse-power.
Let any one test the twenty-four-hour measure on such texts as the following: "Your father Abraham desired to see my day." "The day of the Son of Man." "I must work the works of him that sent me while it is day." "If thou hadst known in this thy day." "He shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day." "The day of salvation." "The day of judgment." "The terrible day of the Lord." It would be a wholesome and profitable exercise to take up the Concordance and refer to all the texts in which the word "day" stands in any relation to the determinations or doings of God, and it will be found that it is always an indefinite period of longer or shorter duration, and may be twenty-four hundred years, or twenty-four thousand years, just as well as twenty-four hours.
The Hebrew יום (yom), first occurring in Gen. i. 5, is the name of an indefinite period, a cycle of time radically grounded on the primitive conception of division or separation. Light is the first separation. It is "divided from the darkness." "And God called the light day, and the darkness He called night." This is God's own naming, and we must take it as our guide in the interpretation of the subsequent "days." Obviously, it is not the duration, but the phenomenon, the appearing itself which is for the first time called day. Then the term is used for a period, or the whole first cycle of events, with its two great antithetical parts—"And there was an evening, and there was a morning, one day." We look into the sacred narrative to see what corresponds to this naming. What was the night? Certainly the darkness on the face of the waters. What was the day? Certainly the light consequent on the brooding of the Spirit and the commanding word. How long was the day? How long was the night or the darkness? The account tells us nothing about it. There is something on the face of it which seems to forbid such questions. Where are we to get twelve hours for this first night? Where is the point of commencement when darkness began to be on the face of the deep? All is vast, sublime, immeasurable. The time is as formless as the material. It has, indeed, a chronology of some kind, but on a scale vastly different from that afterward appointed (ver. 14) to regulate the history of a completed and habitable world. Whoever thinks seriously on the impossibility of accommodating this first day to the measure of twenty-four hours needs no other argument. The first day is, in this respect, the model of all the rest.[196]
It is equally impossible to reduce the "seventh day" to a chronological standard of twenty-four hours. "And God rested on the seventh day from all his works which He had made." Are we to presume that God "rested" as we rest, because He was weary, and that He needed to rest just twenty-four hours? Is not God "resting" still in the sense in which the word "rest" is here used, viz., to cease doing a particular work? Is not all time since the Creation God's grand Sabbath, in which he is not doing works of Origination, but works of Love and Mercy to our race?
It is obvious that the first and the seventh days can not be days of twenty-four hours; and, furthermore, a clear apprehension of the nature of the first day must open to us the true conception of all the rest. The days are new appearances, new manifestations, new developments in the Creative Week—the great day of God (Gen. ii. 4). According to the analogy of the first day, the evening is the time of a peculiar or partially chaotic condition, like the glacial epoch which closed the Cenozoic and opened the Phrenozoic day. The morning is a new evolution of a new order of things, which carries the world-formation to a higher stage. With each creative morning there comes a higher, fairer, richer state of the earth, until it reaches the Sabbath of the world, the day on which God rested or ceased from his world-creating work, that He might educate and recreate and redeem and glorify the human race.
In these antithetical movements of each creative day we are not necessitated to assume a sudden catastrophe, or any return to the chaos of the first day, any more than we now conceive of night as a sudden return to darkness, or of day as the sudden return of light. There is a steady progression, an orderly movement in the history of each creative day, just as there is in the history of a single solar day. The light does not break suddenly upon the world—the sun rises gradually upon the earth. And so the creative day was a slow development, a gradual evolution out of a prior order of things, by the direct efficiency of God.
It has been insinuated that this is an interpretation which has been forced upon us by the progress of modern science. Theology, it is said, has been perpetually driven from her positions by science, and is now compelled to take refuge in subterfuge and equivocation. The insinuation is as false as it is foul. This mode of interpretation was propounded ages before the science of Geology was known, and was taught by Jewish doctors and Christian fathers for fifteen hundred years. St. Augustine, the father of Systematic Theology, who was born A.D. 354, asks the question, "What mean these days—these strange sunless days? Does the enumeration of days and nights avail for a distinction between the nature that is not yet formed, and those which are made, so that they shall be called morning propter speciem [i. e., in reference to appearing, receiving form or species], and evening propter privationem [i. e., in reference to non-appearance, formlessness, and want of sensible quality]?" ("De Genesi ad Literam," lib. ii. ch. 14.) Hence he does not hesitate to call them naturæ, natures, births or growths; also moræ, delays, or solemn pauses in the Divine work. They are dies ineffabiles; their true nature can not be told. Hence they are called days as the best symbol by which the idea could be expressed. They are God-divided days and nights in distinction from sun-divided. Common solar days are mere vicissitudines coeli, mere changes in the positions of the heavenly bodies, and not spatia morarum, or evolutions in nature belonging to a higher chronology, and marking their epochs by a law of inward change instead of incidental outward measurement. As to how long or how short they were he gives no opinion, but contents himself with maintaining that day is not a name of duration, the evenings and the mornings are to be regarded not so much as measuring the passing of time (temporis præteritionem) as marking the boundaries of a periodic work or evolution. This is not the metaphorical, but the real and proper sense of the word day, in fact the original sense, inasmuch as it contains the idea of rounded periodicity or self-completed time, without any of the mere accidents that belong to the outwardly measured solar or planetary epochs, be they longer or shorter.[197]