THE AUTHENTICITY OF GENESIS.
By John W. Burgon
You are invited to observe (and this is the one point which I propose to bring before you) that, although Moses wrote the first chapter of Genesis, it is certain that in the authorship of the ten commandments he had no share whatever. They were exclusively the work (as the two tables on which they were originally written were exclusively the workmanship) of God. The record on this head is altogether express and unmistakable: “The tables were written on both sides. On the one side and on the other were they written. And the tables were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, graven upon the tables.” You will have already anticipated all I would further say. In the fourth commandment God has seen fit to pledge himself to the historical truth of the first chapter of the book of Genesis. This is a fact with which every child is familiar. The seventh day is to be kept holy, “for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is.” Here, then, God solemnly sets his seal to the Mosaic narrative of creation. He recapitulates the essential feature of it, viz., that the work was a six day's work, and, moreover, a work of precisely such a nature as in Genesis is described. The reference, in fact, to this first chapter of Genesis is unmistakable and undeniable. Here, then, we are presented with the extraordinary spectacle of Almighty God providing for the authority of the first page of his own Book by solemnly adding his seal to it; not by the hand or agency of another, but with his own hand or, at least, his own “finger.” Jehovah, Almighty God, without any intervention of man whatever—the divine element, for once operating alone, so as to silence cavil and shut up unbelief effectually—the divine element, I say, without the slightest admixture of the human element, hath deliberately singled out the Mosaic history of the world's creation as the one passage supremely worthy (or else pre-eminently in need) of his own eternal and effectual sanction. No other part of the historical scriptures is adverted to in the course of the ten commandments but this. But for this God comes down from Heaven. He singles it out. He makes comments upon it. He rehearses it. He draws practical inference from it. He interweaves it with his imperishable law. And the result is solemnly deposited by God's own express command within the ark, beneath the mercy-seat, under the shadow of the wings of the cherubim; reserved in the holy of holies, alike of the tabernacle and of the temple. For “the priests at the dedication of the temple brought in the ark of the covenant of the Lord unto his place, into the oracle of the house, to the most holy place, even under the wings of the cherubims; for the cherubims spread forth their two wings over the place of the ark. There was nothing in the ark save the two tables of stone which Moses put there at Horeb.”—John W. Burgon.