Life Author:Unknown Author Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Bible Cessons: i i i1st QUARTER. 1907. Lesson I.—Jan. 6. GOD THE CREATOR.-Gen. 1:1-25. Lesson Key-note:—"In the beginning God created the heavens and the... more » earth." This story is an allegory. It cannot be history, from the very nature of the case. Who has ever lived with the knowledge of just how the material universe began to be? Of course no one has ever been able to tell a story of beginnings. But as an allegory there are some valuable suggestions in it which we may search out. "In the beginning." as here used, does not mean at a time before which there was nothing. The Vulgate rendering, in principio, means at the basis or foundation, or in the essence of creation. And the Vulgate, Tleus crea-vit, "God has created," conveys a sense of completed expression extending up to the present. The Hebrew word Olobim here translated "God," is a plural noun and means the in-visihle powets, and not a deity at all. Thus we have the doctrine of evolution expressed in the opening words of Genesis: At the foundation, in the essence of things, the invisible Powers or forces have always been creating or unfolding the heavens and the Earth. Our Bible chronology which locates the event of creation in time about 6000 years ago, is, of course, utterly without authority or evidence. We now know, having read it in the great book of uature written onthe stones and in the Earth's framework, that the formation of the visible world was a process of evolution extending over a period of countless ages. You will notice in this allegory that every process of unfoldment is stated to be effected by the word. "God said," and it was so. God said, Let light be and light was. It is true, as verse 2 has it, "The spirit of Invisible Powers moved upon the face of the waters." This was and...« less