18).
The reason why we found this verse was because I wanted to show Sharley and
Chris and Ernest that there the same word is used about the earth as in the
verse in Genesis of which we had just been speaking. The words "in vain"
are the same which were there translated "without form" by the people who
turned the Hebrew, in which most of the Old Testament was first written,
into English, that we might be able to read it. So you see how very
important words are, and learn that when God tells us in one part of His
Book that He created the earth not "without form," and in another part
that it was (or became) "without form," the state of the earth as it is
described in the second verse of the first chapter of Genesis was different
from its condition when God created it in the beginning. Between these two
verses, so close together in your Bible, ages upon ages may have run their
course; a distance of time may have passed so great that we cannot measure
it by any thoughts of ours.
What happened between the time, which God calls "the beginning," the time
of the earth's creation, and that time when what He created had become
"waste and desolate," we do not know. What this earth was like, when God
first created it, we do not know. How the plants and animals, which now lie
buried deep beneath the ground upon which we tread, and shut up within the
rocks, lived and died, we do not know. How confusion and desolation came,
we do not know.
Pages:
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43