What is historical creationism?

In a previous article we saw that the six days of Genesis 1 were not days of creation, but days of reconstruction, and in the case of life, whether human or animal, of special acts of creation. Genesis 1:1 covers the general act of creation.

We turn first of all to the opening chapter of Scripture — the first of Genesis. There we read (Gen. 1:2), "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." The first place then, in Scripture, where we learn of the existence of God's Spirit is in connection with creation, and not merely creation, as that which came out of the hands of God at the beginning, but that which this second verse presents to us, viz., the earth in a state of chaos, that God was about to put His hand to, in order to fit it for man's dwelling-place. I suppose that every person here knows that the first verse of Genesis, where we read, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," carries you back to limitless ages, previous to the moment of which the second verse speaks, and that the interval between verses 1 and 2 admits of that, which geologists demand, namely, almost immeasurable periods of time in which the various strata of the earth's surface were deposited. We find in the second verse that "the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep," and thereafter it is we read, "the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters," and consequently, and immediately, we find God acting, during six days, in infinite goodness, at the end of which, we learn that the earth, as it now is, was prepared, and turned out of the moulding hand of God, fit for the habitation of man. I believe these six days were days of twenty-four hours, as the language, "the evening and the morning were the first day," naturally suggests, and the seventh day proves. In the next chapter, man is put upon the earth to dwell therein, to keep it, and rule over it.

First with regard to creation. Lost in reasonings, and not knowing God, the human mind sought out endless solutions of existence. Those who have read the cosmogonies of the ancients know how many different systems, each more absurd than the other, have been invented for that which the introduction of God, by faith, renders perfectly simple. Modern science, with a less active and more practical mind, stops at second causes; and it is but little occupied with God. Geology has taken the place of the cosmogony of the Hindoos, Egyptians, Orientals and philosophers. To the believer the thought is clear and simple; his mind is assured and intelligent by faith. God, by His word, called all things into existence. The universe is not a producing cause; it is itself a creature acting by a law imposed upon it. It is One having authority who has spoken; His word has divine efficacy. He speaks, and the thing is. We feel that this is worthy of God; for, when once God is brought in, all is simple. Shut Him out, and man is lost in the efforts of his own imagination, which can neither create nor arrive at the knowledge of a Creator, because it only works with the power of a creature. Before, therefore, the details of the present form of creation are entered upon, the word simply says, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Whatever may have taken place between that and chaos forms no part of revelation. It is distinct from the special action of the deluge, which is made known to us. The beginning of Genesis does not give a history of the details of creation itself, nor the history of the universe. It gives the fact that in the beginning God created; and afterwards, the things that regard man on the earth. The angels even are not there. Of the stars it is only said, "He made the stars also"; when, we are not told. By faith then we believe that the worlds were created by the word of God.

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.

The antiquity of the earth may be as great as the shifting schemes of the most enthusiastic geologist ever conceived: there is absolutely neither here nor in any other part of scripture the least intimation that opposes vast ages before man was created, or that affirms man to be nearly contemporary with the original creation. It is ignorance of scripture to say that Moses assigns an epoch to the earth's first formation, such as fathers or commentators (not without worthier remarks) have imagined and made current in Christendom. The philosophers who have spent their time in the study of geology and kindred sciences will act wisely in reading with unwonted care the beginning of Gen. 1. They will thence learn that they have been precipitate in the conclusion that the inspired writing is at all committed to the blunders of its interpreters, theological or scientific. However vast the periods they claim, even for the strata nearest the surface, scripture is the sole record which, while revealing God as the Creator of all things, leaves room for all that has been wrought before the Adamic earth. "The everlasting God, Jehovah, the Creator of the ends of the earth, faints not, neither is weary: there is no searching of his understanding" (Isa. 40:28). While geology waits for its Newton, subjection to scripture meanwhile would be untold gain to its devotees as to all other men.

That a long gap, of as many thousands of years as were necessary for the formation of the earth's crust, may be placed between verses 1 and 2 of Gen. 1. That Gen. 1:1 refers to the original creation of the heaven and earth out of nothing; that the different beds were formed with the varying objects that are found therein as fossils, occupying a very long period. Then in Gen. 1:2 another condition is found: the earth by some means had become without form and void.* It was then ordered in view of the creation of man; and the various things were arranged and formed in the six days as detailed in Gen. 1, as they are now found in and on the earth.

Thus the work of these days wholly leaves out, because chronologically it follows, the vast operations both of slow construction and of destruction which give special interest to the geologist. Original creation and subsequent dislocation (which swept away in due time whole species and genera of organised beings, followed by fresh and different ones, and this repeatedly) it asserts distinctly; and both, before the days which prepared all for his life and probation under divine government who was created ere the week closed. The document itself furnishes the warrant to the believer for taking the first verse indefinitely before the six days, and also for affirming the state, possibly final state, of confusion into which the earth passed before it became the world as it now is.

There may indeed be some analogy between the days that concern the earth of the human race and those immense ages of ripening advance which preceded, so as to furnish a slight ground of resemblance on which not a few men of ingenuity and the best intentions have reared their various schemes for accommodating the days to the geological ages. Yet this hypothesis, even when guarded by the most cautious and competent aid of science, does not square with scripture. It is unjustifiable in every point of view to confound the disturbed state of ver. 2 with the creation of the earth described in ver. 1, which it really follows, disorder after order; is it not even absurd to identify ver. 3 with either? Each follows consecutively; and the long tracts of time, if filled up in a way that scripture does not essay, would come in after ver. 1, and before ver. 3, which wholly differing from what precedes, introduces a new condition where alone details are given to mark God's direct dealings with man.

I accept what is now pretty well known by the student of the word, that in the term which opens the book of Genesis — “In the beginning,” as well as in the next clause of the verse, God has left it open for the possibility of millions of years to have elapsed since that “beginning” was, when God created the heavens and the earth; and thus time sufficient was allowed, to form the strata of the earth, as it is now found, before the work of the six days was accomplished, in the varied ages which had passed, and through the many catastrophes which had probably taken place. For we read in the next clause of the verse, that the earth (not the heavens), was without form and waste (tohu), having probably fallen into chaos. God had not created it in this state, as Isaiah testifies (Isa. 45:18). “He created it not waste” — the same Hebrew word as used in Gen. 1.

There remains the third, and as I believe, the really sound meaning of the chapter: in that it leaves room for all that God wrought, however protracted the time that elapsed between the "beginning" and the "six days" in successive acts of God in construction and catastrophe: cognisable by men of science, and left for their discovery in due time, but entirely outside the scope of revelation. The first two verses give the principle of creation and of chaos for the earth, the one as necessary as the other for man when created, not only to learn the facts from the earth's crust but to use the results according to God's beneficent provision. Thus scripture departs not from its supreme design and character, nor encumbers itself with teaching science which is man's pride. But it is untrue that it commits itself to "false science" or unreliable history, or any other insinuation of infidels. Hence, as in a scripture not poetic in any way but the simplest prose attributed to God by as true a saint as ever lived, there is no ground to doubt that the "six days" are literal, as "the evening and the morning" seems expressly meant to convey.

Indeed there is great moral beauty in "days" having no place in the part which commences with "In the beginning" and ends with "the Spirit of God was brooding over the face of the waters." It was well that we should know that the great divine agent, who in Israel deigned to give His all-powerful energy for making the vessels of the Sanctuary, and later, came down to make Christians individually and the church collectively God's temple by His indwelling, took so suited a relation to the last work which God was preparing for man to inhabit long after. It was no mighty tempest, but His suited brooding over the waters. But when the "six days" begin which man crowns before they closed, how in keeping a measurement of time so important for the race, and in relation to God above all! Then we first hear of them. Moral dealings then begin, with the wondrous proof of God's deep interest in man, and the corresponding responsibility of man to God, to the race, and to the lower creation. Then too we first read "And God said," and the deep privilege of reading and the solemn call to believe. This too confirms that the six days had nothing to do with the many acts of creating creatures, inanimate and animated, who could not understand Him; but His speaking definitely of all that formed the environment of the race was as precious as instructive for His vicegerent here below. Still more blessed when we look on by faith to the Second man and last Adam, the antitype and contrast of him that brought in sin and death, as Rom. 5:14 lets us know, the Conqueror of Satan, the holy Sufferer for our sins, that the believer should reign with Him, and the world itself be blessed under His reign to God's glory. His word as to both Adams is not science but revelation, as indeed all the Bible is.

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.

But, in creating, God created not a confused and disorderly mass; He created the heavens and the earth in the beginning. The heavens, in fact, were never thrown into confusion — the earth was, as we see in Gen. 1:2; but this was after the beginning: how long is not said. Thousands or millions of years may have elapsed. It answered no moral end to reveal what science would investigate or conjecture. Only it is revealed, as befitting the divine character, that He is not a God — not a creator — of confusion. The confusion of the earth was subsequent, the reason or cause being unexplained as the interval or the history. The fact is distinctly revealed; and nobody would have failed to discern it, if philosophers had not misled the divines who are vain of standing well with the men of science. Geologists differ fundamentally to this day: some insisting on catastrophes, followed by renewals; others contending for continuous action of forces gradually operating. If there be a measure of truth in both, scripture leaves room for all, without straining the six days, which are wholly distinct from the immense ages that preceded man.

Days and weeks and years have to do with the human race and God's moral dealings on earth, after God had created and destroyed — it may be, many times — within those vast periods differently characterised before man was made, though not without a beneficent design for him on God's part. The principle and the fact, first of creation, then of disruption, before the immediate preparation of the world for the race, is the revealed communication of Gen. 1:1-2; the days, 1:3 - 2:3, are the commencement of time as we reckon it, not of creation, but of that later and special form when man was ushered into the earth. On the first, God said, "Light be;" and light was. It is not intimated that light was then first created. The previous ruin may have hindered its action till God uttered this fiat with a view to man's earth. On the second day, with the severing of land and sea, came the expanse as we have it (strangely rendered by the Seventy, whence "firmament" came through the Vulgate into the English version); on the third, the vegetable kingdom, herbage and tree yielding fruit; on the fourth, the luminaries in the expanse, not first created but set to give light night and day on the earth; on the fifth, animal life begun in the waters and for the air.