Doctrinal Value o f First Chapters of Genesis 75 either staple, the chain falls in confusion. If the first chap- ters of Genesis are unreliable, the revelation of the beginning of the universe, the origin of the race, and the reason of its redemption are gone. If the last chapters of Revelation are displaced the consummation of all things is unknown. If you take away Genesis, you have lost the explanation of the first heaven, the first earth, the first Adam, and the fall. If you take away Revelation you have lost the completed truth of the new heaven, and the new earth, man redeemed, and the second Adam in Paradise regained. Further: in the first chapters of the Book of Genesis, you have the strong and sufficient foundation of the sub- sequent developments of the kingdom of God; the root-germ of all Anthropology, Soteriology, Christology, Satanology, to say nothing of the ancient and modern problems of the mys- tery and culpability of sin, the Divine ordinance of the Lord’s Day, the unity of the race, and God’s establishment of matrimony and the family life. We assume from the start the historicity of Genesis and its Mosaic authorship. I t was evidently accepted by Christ the Infallible, our Lord and God, as historical, as one single composition, and as the work of Moses. It was accepted by Paul the inspired. It was accepted universally by the divinely inspired leaders of God’s chosen people. ( See Green’s “Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch.”) It has validated itself to the universal Church throughout the ages by its realism and consistency, and by what has been finely termed its subjective truthfulness. We postulate especially the historicity of the first chapters. These are not only Valuable, they are vital. They are the essence of Genesis. The Book of Genesis is neither thè work of a theorist or a tribal annalist. I t is still less the product of some anonymous compiler or compilers in some unknowable era, of a series of myths, historic in form but unhistoric in fact. Its opening is an apocalypse, a direct revelation from the God of all truth. Whether it was given
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