It is a remarkable and instructive fact that the first verse of the Hebrew sacred writings speaks of the material universe—speaks of it as a whole, and as originating in a power outside of itself. The universe, then, in the conception of this ancient writer, is not eternal. It had a beginning, but that beginning in the indefinite and by us unmeasured past. It did not originate fortuitously, or by any merely accidental conflict of self-existent material atoms, but by an act—an act of will on the part of a Being designated by that name which among all the Semitic peoples represented the ultimate, eternal, inscrutable source of power and object of awe and veneration. With the simplicity and child-like faith of an archaic age, the writer makes no attempt to combat any objections or difficulties with which this great fundamental truth may be assailed. He feels its axiomatic force as the basis of all true religion and sound philosophy, and the ultimate fact which must ever bar our further progress in the investigation of the origin of things—the production from non-existence of the material universe by the eternal self-existent God.
It did not concern him to know what might be the nature of that unconditioned self-existence; for though, like our ideas of space and time, incomprehensible, it must be assumed. It did not concern him to know how matter and force subsist, or what may be the difference between a material universe cognizable by our senses and the absolute want of all the phenomena of such a universe or of whatever may be their basis and essence. Such questions can never be answered, yet the succession of these phenomena must have had a commencement somewhere in time. How simple and how grand is his statement! How plain and yet how profound its teachings!
It is evident that the writer grasps firmly the essence of the question as to the beginning of things, and covers the whole ground which advanced scientific or philosophical speculation can yet traverse. That the universe must have had a beginning no one now needs to be told. If any philosophical speculator ever truly held that there has been an endless succession of phenomena, science has now completely negatived the idea by showing us the beginning of all things that we know in the present universe, and by establishing the strongest probabilities that even its ultimate atoms could not have been eternal. But the question remains—If there was a beginning, what existed in that beginning? To this question many partial and imperfect answers have been given, but our ancient record includes them all.
If any one should say, "In the beginning was nothing." Yes, says Genesis, there was, it is true, nothing of the present matter and arrangements of nature. Yet all was present potentially in the will of the Creator.
"In the beginning were atoms," says another. Yes, says Genesis, but they were created; and so says modern science, and must say of ultimate particles determined by weight and measure, and incapable of modification in their essential properties—"They have the properties of a manufactured article." [29]
"In the beginning were forces," says yet another. True, says Genesis; but all forces are one in origin—they represent merely the fiat of the eternal and self-existent. So says science, that force must in the ultimate resort be an "expression of Will." [30]
"In the beginning was Elohim," adds our old Semitic authority, and in him are the absolute and eternal thought and will, the Creator from whom and by whom and in whom are all things.
Thus the simple familiar words, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," answer all possible questions as to the origin of things, and include all under the conception of theism. Let us now look at these pregnant words more particularly as to their precise import and significance.
The divine personality expressed by the Hebrew Elohim may be fairly said to include all that can be claimed for the pantheistic conception of "dynamis," or universal material power. Lange gives this as included in the term Elohim, in his discussion of this term in his book on Genesis. It has been aptly said that if, physically speaking, the fall of a sparrow produces a gravitative effect that extends throughout the universe, there can be no reason why it should be unknown to God. God is thus everywhere, and always. Yet he is everywhere and always present as a personality knowing and willing. From his thought and will in the beginning proceeded the universe. By him it was created.
What, then, is creation in the sense of the Hebrew writer. The act is expressed by the verb bara, a word of comparatively rare occurrence in the Scriptures, and employed to denote absolute creation, though its primary sense is to cut or carve, and it is indeed a near relative of our own English word "pare." If, says Professor Stuart, of Andover, this word "does not mean to create in the highest sense, then the Hebrews had no word by which they could designate this idea." Yet, like our English "create," the word is used in secondary and figurative senses, which in no degree detract from its force when strictly and literally used. Since, however, these secondary senses may often appear to obscure the primitive meaning, we must examine them in detail.