A Personal Creator by William Warren Prescott

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Aug 19, 1909

A Personal Creator

By William Warren Prescott

The first revelation of God made to us in the Scriptures presents him as the Creator: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Our worship and service are due to him as the Creator: “O come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before Jehovah our Maker.” The acknowledged superiority of Jehovah above all the false gods is based upon the fact that he is the Creator: “Great is Jehovah, and greatly to be praised: he also is to be feared above all gods. For all the gods of the peoples are idols; but Jehovah made the heavens.” If, therefore, it can be shown that there is no personal Creator, it follows that there is no God to whom our worship and service are due.

The Sabbath is the sign of the creative power of a personal God: “It [the Sabbath] is a sign between me and the children of Israel forever: for in six days Jehovah made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested, and was refreshed.” The Sabbath is also a sign of the same creative power exercised in renewing the soul in the image of God: “Wherefore if any man is in Christ, there is a new creation.” “Moreover also I gave them my Sabbaths, to be a sign between me and them, that they might know that I am Jehovah that sanctifieth them.” Any effort to destroy the certainty of a personal Creator is therefore indirectly an effort to weaken confidence in a personal Sanctifier, and to render void any obligation to observe the seventh-day Sabbath, the sign of a personal God as the Creator of the material universe and the Renewer of the soul.

These considerations are a sufficient explanation for the persistent endeavor in this last generation, when the message of Sabbath reform is being given, to substitute an impersonal force for a personal Creator and evolution for special creation. We are glad to note that there are some who still speak in defense of the Scriptural view of creation, although they do not yet see fully the ultimate result of the claims of evolution in their relation to the message of preparation for the advent of our Lord.

One such writer is Rev. G. L. Young, from whose vigorous article in the Bible Student and Teacher for July we quote:—

The best and wisest of them [evolutionists], however, (note that it is not said those that are the most severely logical in the application of their system!) see that evolution by itself alone is not sufficient to explain the facts that actually exist. So they frequently refer one to some ever-present superintending power that does the rest. They may not, however, refer us to a personal God. Quite frequently they ultimate in an impersonal pantheistic conception of nature—like the heathen of old—or, as Dr. Wallace puts it, “some great source of energy and guidance”—whatever he means by this expression.

Now in reality, this “great source of energy and guidance” (that some, like the Athenians of old, are thus blindly groping after) is the personal God. And this God is the One who “in the beginning created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1); who “created the great sea monsters, and every living creature that moveth wherewith the waters swarmed, after its kind, and every winged bird after its kind” (verse 21); who also “made the beasts of the earth after their kind, and the cattle after their kind, and everything that creepeth upon the ground after its kind” (verse 25); and who finally capped the creative climax when he “created man after his own image.” Verse 27. Notice that all were created after their kind, and all without the intervention of Darwinian, Lamarckian, or any other kind of evolution. This stupendous fact of creation—a truth too high and noble, apparently, for some minds to grasp—this is the highest truth known to man. . . .

There is no record, scientific or otherwise, that God has ever imparted life or brought into existence the varied multitudes of living forms in any way different from that revealed in the Sacred Scriptures—by act of creation. Against this creational truth there exists no valid objection; of it there is no scientific refutation. The multitudinous conflicting theories of the ages,—mythological, philosophical, and scientific,—these but serve to accentuate its superiority, its beauty, and its truth.

Instead of being made in the image of God, the evolutionist contends that man was made in the image of the beast. The words of a recent writer will illustrate this. He says:—

“It is plain that in whatever image man was made; the monkey, the dog, the cat, the bear, the mouse, and even the bird, the turtle, and the fish are made in substantially the same image.”

This might have done for philosophical but unscientific heathen whose darkened minds were incapable of anything higher and truer (cf. Rom. 1:20–28); but for those who have come to a nobler and juster apprehension of things—that there is no creation apart from a Creator—that above all, back of all, and the personal Cause of all, there stands One who inhabits eternity (see Ps. 90:2; Isa. 57:15), and apart from whom nothing was ever brought into being (see Genesis 1; Acts 17:23; Rom. 11:36)—such nobler minds are gifted with the power to understand that the phrase “special creation” is not “meaningless,”

that the process itself is not beyond “imagination,” and that man came into being by precisely such grand process. In the words of one of the ablest men of the nineteenth century—thinker, preacher, lecturer, editor, author, and infidel-fighter, the eloquent but sarcastic H. L. Hastings—we may say:—

“Of course there is no disputing about tastes; and if a man chooses to put away his history, his heritage, and his hopes as a son and creature of Almighty God, and trace his genealogy to the monkey, the mollusk, the moner, and the mud, we must respect his rights and allow him to exercise his preferences; but when he insists that we shall also trace our genealogical line through ancestral apes and patriarchal pollywogs, we respectfully decline the honor. We prefer to look higher; and as there is still a little uncertainty among scientific men on the point, we propose to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt and still look up to a Heavenly Father, instead of down to a little dot of a mud-spawned moner, as the source of our existence.” . . .

We are bold to affirm that there is no real proof, absolutely none, from any source whatsoever, that man “has been slowly developed from lowest savagery and brutehood.” And this we do not fear to say right in the face and eyes of all the infallible asseverations of “cocksure” dogmaticians of the last half century. The parrot-habit of repeating with an air of unfaltering infallibility, that evolution is a settled thing; that it is believed by practically all thinkers; and that its rejection is a sure indication of mental incompetence,—all this has doubtless had its effect as a game of bluff, but it has added not one whit to the weak-kneed position of evolutionary traditionalism.

The real issue is between evolution and special creation. The difference between these two methods of operation is the difference between self-salvation through a long and laborious effort for moral uplift as the result of developing the divine germ within, aided by the influence of external environment, and that salvation which is the gift of a personal God and received through faith in a personal Christ. The former is the gospel of heathenism, the latter is the gospel of Christianity. There ought to be no hesitancy in making the choice between the two.

W. W. P.