[4]. References to past Year Books will occasionally be made throughout our course, and it should be the desire of every Seventy to have a complete set of these Year Books. Numbers One and Two bound together, in strong cloth, can now be had by application to the General Secretary of the Seventies, price 75c, post paid.
LESSON II.
(Scripture Reading Exercise.)
II.—CREATION—THE WORKS OF GOD.
ANALYSIS. | REFERENCES. |
I. The extent and greatness of Creation. | Psalms xix: 1-6.[1] Rom. 1:18. "Evidences of Theism," pp. 167-175.[2] Dummelow's "Commentary on the Bible." p. xcix-cv.[3] (1) See Seventy's Second Year Book, Lesson VI, Note 2, for sources of Information.[4] Also Notes 1, 2, 3, this lesson. (2) Notes 4, 5. (3) Note 6. |
II. The Evidence of Design in Creation. | |
III. Incompleteness of the Evidences from Creation and Design. |
SPECIAL TEXT: "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it...Marvelous are Thy works, and that my soul knoweth right well." Ps. cxxxix.
NOTES.
1. The Testimony of the Creation to the Existence of God: When once the idea of the existence of God is suggested to the mind of man by the testimony of the fathers, and represented as he is by that tradition, as the Creator of the heavens and the earth, and also as the great governing and guiding power throughout the universe—very much is discovered in the marvelous works of nature to strengthen and confirm, almost to a certainty, the truth of that tradition.
Man is conscious of his own existence, and that existence is a stupendous miracle of itself; he is conscious, too, of other facts. He looks out into space in the stillness of night, and sees the deep vault of heaven inlaid with suns, the centers, doubtless of planetary systems, all moving in exact order and harmony, in such regularity that he cannot doubt that Intelligence brought them into being, and now sustains and directs the forces that preserve them. Thus the heavens declare the existence of God as well as His glory. This thought is in harmony with the tradition of his fathers, and he recognizes the identity between the Intelligence that he knows must control the universe, and the God of whom his fathers testify.
Nor is this all: but in the mysterious changes which take place on our own planet, in the gentle Spring, luxuriant Summer, fruitful Autumn and nature-resting Winter, with its storms and frosts—the "mysterious round" which brings us our seed time and harvest, and clothes the earth with vegetation and flowers, perpetuating that wonderful power we call life,—the strangest fact in all the works of nature—in these mighty changes so essential and beneficent, man recognizes the wisdom and power of God of whom his fathers bear record.