Is the universe eternal?

No human being knew anything about the origin of the heavens and the earth. Man cannot by searching find out God, nor can man discover how the earth was created and all things came into existence. How ridiculous the statements and opinions on the creation of men called great thinkers, not to speak of the equally foolish beliefs of the nations of the past. But here is what God makes known, how He called all things into existence. He makes known that the universe is not eternal but that He created it. The whole account is of wonderful grandeur and yet of the greatest simplicity; so simple that a child can read it and understand the truth, but so profound that the greatest men have bowed before it.

In contemplating these stupendous works of God, let us seek His wisdom and gracious guidance, that we may get some true knowledge of His object in creating such a universe. It is not, as some foolish and godless people imagine, eternal. It has had a beginning: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” It would seem that the whole vast creation was brought into existence at the same time. At once, and at the word of God, everything came into being in the most perfect order and beauty: “He has made everything beautiful in its time” (Eccl. 3:11). If we find the earth at some subsequent time of its history in a state of ruin, every man that knows God knows He never made it thus, but perfect. We can truthfully say of its waste condition, “An enemy has done this.”

A difficulty has been raised, why, if God created, it was not always. The answer is as simple as complete. Eternal creation, eternal matter, is untrue and impossible, a contradiction for thought, even if we had not the word of God to enlighten us. God of all power, if He pleases, creates: there only is the truth of it. To say that the self-existing One cannot create is to deny that He is the Absolute, that He is God. But that God, omnipotent, omniscient, sovereign and good, can crease when He chooses, flows necessarily from what He is. If He could not display Himself in this way, or even more gloriously, He is not God. If the display of creation or of anything else were always, He would not be free and absolute. His sovereignty is part of Himself (Eph. 1:11). Suppose any display necessary, and you destroy in thought His divine essence and will. Necessity is at bottom an atheistic device to get rid of the true God. Creation, therefore, was perfectly free to God, but not necessary; it was when and as He pleased. And He was pleased to create. Creation exists.

The philosophies, as well as the religions, of antiquity were wholly ignorant of creation. Of God, of the "beginning," they knew nothing. Dreams of evolution were the earliest folly, and, among the Ionic school, Anaximander and Anaximenes followed Thales, each differing, all blind. Anaxagoras let in with mere matter the idea of mind, but no creator. It is useless to name others; even Plato and Aristotle, rivals too, had no real light. They, more or less openly, all held eternal matter at bottom; and though the philosophers boasted, as they still do, of their knowledge and logic, they failed to see that they could not prove it, or even that it is to mere mind unthinkable. To the believer it is the simple yet deep truth, that a beginning was given to everything that exists; if God says it, he perceives that nothing else can be true. For it is impossible to admit an effect without a cause; but reasoning can never rise at best beyond. There must be a First Cause; it can never say, There is. This God alone can and does affirm: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." God brought the whole ordered system into being. The form, nature, and aim, are not here explained: such a detail had no proper place here. That He created all is a primary and momentous truth.

But there is not a word in scripture to warrant the strange and hasty assumption that the universe was brought into being in the six days of Gen. 1:3-31, so often referred to throughout the Bible. Construe the six days as men will, it is out of the power of any on just principles of interpretation to deny that the first day begins with light, and that th e first two verses are marked off in their nature, as well as by their expression, from the work of the six days. Nothing indeed but prepossession can account for the mistake, which the record itself corrects. "In the beginning" has its own proper significance, and is in no way connected with "the days," save as the revealed start of divine creation, and in due time (however probably immense the interval) leading to that measure of time only when the constitution of things was made for Adam, for the race.

And first as to creation. We are reminded that through faith it is "we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that what is seen has not been made out of things which do appear" (11:3). Theories had been conceived by men to account for the origin of creation. But all were astray. We know nothing, and can know nothing, about the origin of creation save what Divine revelation discloses. "By the word of the Lord were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth." "He spake, and it was done." So wrote the psalmist (Ps. 33:6, 9). "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" (Gen. 1:1). So wrote the lawgiver. With these witnesses our writer of the Hebrews agrees. God spake, and brought things into existence. By the fiat of the Almighty created things appeared, but not evolved out of things which existed. Matter is not eternal. For it is of the origin of the universe the sacred writer here treats, and not of the earth emerging subsequently out of chaos, prepared for man's abode. We are to believe what God has told us. Surely this is rational. What creature witnessed the act of creating? What could we know, what could we conceive of the origin of created things, if left to the light of mere human reason, or were dependent on philosophic deduction? The devout mind believes that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Philosophic or scientific research could tell us nothing better, and nothing certain. At best with philosophy, or science, it could be but a "may be," a "perhaps." On revelation we must therefore rest as to the distant past. There is that then which we must take wholly on the Divine record. Will it be irrational to take God's word about the future? At this point we are reminded of the faith of those of old. In them it is seen how it was in exercise all along the line.

The earth's first notable event was surely its birth. We do not refer to the wonderful six days' work, which was more than anything a recovery from a state of ruin, but of God's creative act at the beginning, whenever that may have been. In imagining matter to be eternal, the ancients only proclaimed themselves fools, while professing to be wise. God alone is eternal. It is true that man, now that he has been created, has no end, but GOD has neither beginning nor end. The book of God opens with the divine account of the origin of all things. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." How, when, and why is not stated; the one object of the verse is to tell us WHO created. It is of the first importance for man to understand that not only himself, but his little world and all that is therein, and also that vast system of which his world forms a part, was brought into being by the act of God. This puts both God and man in their true place. Job doubtless felt very small when his Maker challenged him thus: "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?" (Job 38:4). Unbelief brushes all this aside with scorn, preferring the theories of its own darkness, but "by 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).

But the words do affirm a "beginning" of the universe, and by God's word, as in both O. and N.T. (see Ps. 33:6-9, and Heb. 11:3). This was everything to accomplish His design, and His design was to create the heavens and the earth, where there had been nothing. Whatever Atheists or Pantheists feign, science at length confesses there was a "beginning;" so that "created" stands here in its proper and fullest sense, as the context requires.

H. I have no kind of opinion or moral objection to the system of the days being lengthened periods, but it seems to me somewhat forced; McCausland's (a barrister of Dublin) is the cleverest book on the subject. And I have heard another thought expressed by a christian friend, that the day is an actual day, the state produced by it being of unqualified duration; but I was not persuaded by it. The structure of the chapter itself and the connection of the parts lead me to take it, after the first verse, as a statement of the formation of our present world, or χόσμος. Once we have seen the laborious efforts at cosmogony which occupied the heathen world, and that not one ever arrived at the simple fact of a creation, the force of Hebrews 11:3 becomes obvious; one sentence of revelation from God settled what all the profound elaborations of man never could arrive at; and, what is not very much to the honour of man's intellect, once the fact is stated, there is the consciousness that it could not be otherwise. Yet, instead of the best and most probable account (as the Essay calls it) that could be given, it is in absolute opposition to the uniform and universal view of the matter in every known record. Ex nihilo nil fit was the admitted maxim. Nothing can come of nothing, whereas the divine maxim is, Ex nihilo omnia hunt. Emanation, or, when the Grecian mind would not bear these oriental systems, the eternity of matter, taken for granted, was the only idea men had of the origin of the world.

134 Hence of two things, one: either the course of nature began, and then I have a cause, that is, an efficient cause, outside and before that course; or it went on eternally without any cause at all. Not merely matter existed (we do not know matter unformed and whose state is uncaused, and no part of the kosmos), but the whole perfectly ordered system (with the force that governs it in its movements, regular as no man could devise it - scarce discover, and multiform as no man can think) is perfectly uncaused and invented itself before it existed; for invented somehow it is. Matter, we are told, is inert; but it moves with a speed thought cannot realise, yet nothing has made it do so! It is here we may say Credat Judaeus Apella. Mill says he is not obliged to treat this question. But all his theory is false without it, because regular phenomena going on by established laws are not beginning. Day begins, no doubt, that is, I see the sun at a given time; but nothing is really beginning: the rotation of the earth is, as a law of nature, perpetual. If he says it is no law of nature, as it may naturally terminate, so begin, what gave the impulse? He cannot avoid efficient causes, for there are no other real ones. The attempt to reduce phenomenal causes to efficient ones was the intuitive sense that there must be such; the discovery of regular laws gradually did not falsify this, but merely the place they sought them in.

All is new. All is according to God in His nature. All is fixed. No economic changes now. We are introduced into God’s everlasting rest, into God‘s unchanging state, one of absolute perfection. We have not here the Lamb and the fulfilment of counsel and prophecy, nor the mediatorial kingdom and the reign of righteousness, but the kingdom given up, and God all in all (1 Cor. 15:24-28). Time distinctions, geographical boundaries, and limitations as at present entirely disappear in the grand eternal state, which, whether in Heaven or earth, displays the energy of God Himself. The “new Heaven” and “new earth,” the respective spheres of all the saved, shall be brought into blessed harmony with what God is. This is the state referred to by Isaiah 66:22, and Peter's second Epistle (2 Peter 3:13), a state in which righteousness shall dwell, not reign as in millennial times. Neither enemy nor evil shall invade either of the spheres where the redeemed will for ever dwell. Every one and everything will re-echo the glad refrain, God is light and God is love.

— “For the first Heaven and the first earth had passed away.” The undoubted reference is to the statement in the previous chapter. “From whose face the earth and the Heaven fled away” (v. 11). This dissolution, not annihilation, is effected by fire (2 Peter 3:10). Scripture is silent as to any future act of creating material in a literal sense, and is equally silent on what some foolishly contend for, namely, annihilation or total extinction of being. Scripture knows nothing of such a baseless theory. Not an atom of matter, not a blade of grass, and surely not a sentient being in the wide universe is doomed to extinction. Our planet will be put in the crucible, altered, changed, and made new, to abide for ever. There being no sin, there can be no corruption. The new earth is eternal. The terms “first Heaven” and “first earth” are in contrast to the “new Heaven” and “new earth.”