There is no better way to prove the weakness of a cause than by trying to uphold it by equivocal arguments. Men would never be arguing that "we" means the trinity, or that it is the "royal style," etc., if they had more cogent arguments to advance. It is only when we are hard pressed that we resort to sophistry.
But let us read the second verse:
The earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
Honestly, it is impossible to get any intelligible meaning out of such a sentence. The earth was without form? Was not the form of our globe the same in the beginning as it is now? Can there be anything without a form of some kind? The revisers of the authorized version of the bible, wishing to remedy this ignorant statement, have dropped the word form, and substituted in its place the word waste: "The earth was waste and void." But "waste" and "void" mean practically the same thing. The revisers have simply refused to translate the word which means "without form." Of course, the revised version is not read in all the churches; and in the authorized version, "the earth is without form." This meaningless text has been made to support the idea that at one time there was only chaos, out of which the creator evolved cosmos. Science, however, has shown that nature was never in a state of chaos. The laws of matter are the same to-day, and will be the same to-morrow—and they have never been different. The law of gravitation, for instance, was as potent and inevitable when the earth was younger as it is now. There was just as much order, or to put it differently, nature was as orderly a billion years ago as she is to-day. Everything happened according to the inherent properties of matter and force then, as now, and as it will happen to-morrow and forever. Chaos, then, is a figment of the theological mind. To provide God with something to do, a chaos was invented, which had to be tamed into a cosmos to keep the deity occupied.
But the text proceeds to inform us that "darkness was upon the face of the deep." This can not mean that the land itself was in the light; it must mean that the entire earth, land and sea, were wrapped up in darkness. All we have, then, in the beginning, is darkness, and God's spirit moving about in the darkness. What a beginning! If God is light, as we are told elsewhere in the bible, how could there be darkness where he lived and moved about? God in the dark! or, God and the darkness! The unknown! It is this Darkness which men have called God! And is it not significant that because of this early association with darkness, the gods have always preferred it to the light. In First Kings, sixth chapter, fourth verse, we read that Solomon in building his temple "made windows of narrow lights." The house was meant to be the dwelling place of God, and care was taken to shut out the light, except what slipped in through narrow windows. Modern church buildings show the same prejudice against the light. God feels at home in the darkness! That was his first home—when he moved about in the universal night. It is also plainly stated in the bible that God prefers darkness for his abode.
The Lord said that he would dwell in the thick darkness. *
* I Kings viii, 12.
God! Darkness! They are joined together and no man has ever been able to put them asunder.
But let us read on:
And God said, Let there be light; and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good.