WHEN Mr. Huxley found the record of creation as contained in Genesis blocking his way, instead of heeding the obstruction, he tells us, he broke through it, and what seemed like a formidable looking fence turned out to be merely a "heap of brushwood." All this is but to say that that barrier—"thorny barrier" are his words—which God interposed against skepticism, Mr. Huxley, in his imbibing of evolution, utterly repudiated.
To prevent just such experiences in human lives, God gave the record in Genesis. It is the first part of the Bible ever written. It contains the fundamental truth of how God works, and therefore holds within its seed truth, as it were, all other phases of divine enlightenment.
The record of creation, received by faith, gives us an understanding of the almighty power of God working in behalf of His creatures.
Directly to show this great truth, the Sabbath was instituted at the end of creation week, and the seventh day ever since has been the constant testimony of God's power both to give existence to and to uphold the world.
The Only Explanation of the Week
WERE the Sabbath kept, as God intended, by all mankind, there could be no infidelity, no skepticism, no false science, and therefore no evolution as taught to-day.
The Sabbath idea is the great truth that God in six days performed the gigantic task of creating and embellishing the world. It declares that God worked six days and rested the seventh. It admonishes us to imitate God in this by also working the same six days upon which He worked, and resting on the same seventh day on which He rested, according to the weekly schedule that has been in existence ever since.
In fact, there is no other explanation of the week. We find the week in all civilized nations; yet it is not an astronomical division of time. It seems arbitrary unless we take the explanation for its existence as found in the first and second chapters of Genesis. In this, even the skeptical have an incontrovertible witness that God did create the world in six days, and rest the seventh; for ever since, the week has been in existence—a week of seven days, crowned by the Sabbatic day of rest.
When we consider the fact that almost the entire Christian world has rejected the seventh-day Sabbath, we are enabled to understand the better why there was so little outcry against Mr. Huxley's vigorous attacks upon the Genesis record of creation. The Sabbath had been rejected for ages and generations. The Christian world had forgotten it, did not count it of any importance, felt that the Sunday sabbath might well take its place; and so they were unprepared for the attacks of skepticism and false science against the opening record of the Bible.
To-day we see where this has led. To reject the supernatural, miraculous power of God as declared in the first chapter of Genesis—the means by which the world was created—is to reject that same supernatural, miraculous power in every other place where it may appear. And so, after a generation or two of imbibing the theories of evolution, the Christian world to-day as emphatically rejects the miracles of the New Testament as they previously rejected the miracle of creation.
The Rejection of Truth
THIS professedly Christian rejection of the miraculous wherever it may appear in the Bible is the consistent maintaining of the principle of the evolutionist that the supernatural and miraculous is incredible and unworthy of the human reason.
How frankly ministers to-day are determined to preach only rationalistic religion, may be seen by the proposition of a writer in the Biblical World, University of Chicago Press, of recent date, in which he declared that "the truth of development requires that we cherish only a measured regard for the past." By "the truth of development" is meant the teaching of evolution, which we have already shown to be a false philosophy. There are such things as growth and development; but they are things apart from creation. Growth and development cannot originate, for the words mean an enlargement of that which already exists.
Applying the Blue Pencil to the Bible
IN order to honor, however, this so-called "truth of development," the blue pencil is to be liberally applied to the Bible, until we have it in a humanized edition. This Bible will be only about one twelfth of the size of our Bible to-day. It will contain only about ninety-two pages, and its Christ will not be mentioned "as having preëxisted, as having been the active agent in the creation of the world; . . . no longer think of Him as the object of worship, but only as the unique pattern and the inspirer of the acceptable worship of God." But why quote more! Its Christ will be only a human being, somewhat unique, but nothing apart from humanity itself—all natural, all easily understood, because brought down to what sinful man may judge is proper and right—a humanized religion, a humanized Bible, a humanized Christ, and as worthless as humanity alone is worthless.
To such lengths do we come when we reject the almighty power of God as brought to view in Genesis, and eventually as it is shown elsewhere throughout the Bible.
How clever, then, it was first to rid men of the Sabbath, the great bulwark against all this infidelity and skepticism! How shrewd it was to let the years go by until the Sabbath was practically forgotten and another day instituted in its place, and then begin attacks from the388
BULWARK AGAINST INFIDELITY
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scientific standpoint, by false philosophers and pseudo-scientists, upon the essential element of creation, its reference to all-mightiness! This being once rejected, the whole Bible goes, because robbed of its power.
As Christ said in explanation of how the tares came among the wheat, so we say again,—"An enemy hath done this."
A Fundamental Truth
BUT the Sabbath still exists, and God's truth still stands. "Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear." Heb. 11:3. "By the word of the Lord were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth. . . . For He spake, and it was done; He commanded, and it stood fast." Ps. 33:6, 9. It is this power of God to speak a world into existence that is memorialized and commemorated and evidenced by the Sabbath institution. So long as men regard the Sabbath of God, just so long will they believe the great truth which it upholds, and the spiritual lesson is plain and significant.
Because when God said, "Let there be light," light came, so now He bids light to shine into our minds; and when we yield to the divine will, light floods the darkened chambers of the intellect. Thus the God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness shines in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, from the mirror of Christ's own face. (2 Cor. 4:6.)
Because the world was made by Christ (Col. 1:16, 17), He is the divine creative Word (John 1:1-3). His word is the word of creative power. (Heb. 1:3.) Hence He could speak to the stormy waves and the raging wind, with the result that there came a great calm. He could speak to the dead, and call them once more back to life. By that same investment of divine majesty, He can give life to those who are spiritually dead in trespasses and sins. This is the fundamental truth of the gospel. Only creative power can create us new creatures in Christ Jesus. (Eph. 2:10.)
And so we see how empty of power is this new Bible, which is to be the exponent of the new so-called "Christian" religion.
What men need to-day is a great, divine power, to take possession of the life, to subdue the evil passions and the sinful lusts, and control the mind, even to bringing every thought into obedience to Christ. Human reason and theories of development and plans of growth can never do it.
Commemorating a Mighty Principle
THEN do you not see that the principle of creation is the principle of all God's working, and that His power comes in response to His word? that where God does not speak, there is no power, and that everywhere and every time He does speak, there is power, and that power is God's unlimited creative energy?
To reject the word of God, then, is to reject the power that comes through that Word, and is to be left impotent, utterly weak against the malignant evil that is in the world, that is in our hearts, that possesses us as truly as the demons possessed the demoniac. There is no deliverance from the dead body of sin, save through the mighty power of God's word, which, personified, is Christ Himself.
The Sabbath was given to commemorate this mighty principle. It is to cause men to know and remember that God made the world in six days by His word; and if it evidences this principle of divine working in the one place, it must evidence it in every place where the divine working is manifested. The Sabbath, then, is as truly a memorial of God's creative work in the human soul in saving a man from sin, as it was of the work that God did on creation's morning.
Since the Sabbath is a memorial of the creative work (so we read in the second chapter of Genesis, and also in the fourth commandment itself, as recorded in the twentieth chapter of Exodus), it stands as a monument to the fact that God gave life to man formed of the dust of the ground; but it just as truly evidences the other kindred fact,—that through Christ, many once dead in trespasses and sins, alienated from the life of God through evil works, are now made nigh by His blood, and made alive according to the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus.
As the Sabbath memorialized that creative work of God when He commanded the light and thus caused it to shine out of darkness, it must now also memorialize the workings of God when He causes the light of the gospel to shine in our minds. The work is the same in both cases, merely being manifested in two different realms.
As the Sabbath was given at the end of creation, when all things were completely and perfectly accomplished, it stood as the crown of creation, as the memorial of a finished work. Being thus a memorial of a finished work, and being still in existence, standing yet as a memorial of the same thing,—God's finished, creative work,—it is a pledge that the creation shall be again all that it then was.
It Opened the Floodgates
As the Sabbath points back to God's finished work, when the Lord saw all that He had made, and pronounced it very good, so does it point forward to that time when, according to His promise, there shall be a new heaven and a new earth, and all things shall be made anew, when God's work shall be truly finished. The Sabbath, then, teaching the great principle of God's working, stands as a mighty pledge that God's work cannot be permanently marred; that His purposes cannot be thwarted, and that there shall yet stand an upright man in the midst of a creative work that God Himself sees to pronounce very good.
These merely suggested meanings of the Sabbath—for space forbids its elaborate treatment—indicate, in a little degree, how much the Christian world has lost in its losing of God's holy Sabbath day; and it brings us back to the statement made at the first,—that the Sabbath would have prevented this great flood of infidelity and skepticism which to-day is robbing us of both God's word and God's power. Naturally there arises, therefore, the question, How came the Christian world to lose the Sabbath? By what means has that day become obsolete as a Christian observance, that thus infidelity and skepticism might sweep away from us the very charter of our redemption? The question is pertinent, and its answer imperative.
