The Fundamentals - 1910: Vol.8

76

The Fundamentals in a vision or otherwise, it would bd impossible to say. But it is possible, if not probable, that the same Lord God, who revealed to His servant as he was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day the apocalypse of the humanly unknown and unknowable events of man’s history which will transpire when this heaven and this earth have passed away, would also have revealed to His servant, being in the Spirit, the apocalypse of the humanly unknowable and unknown events which transpired before this earth’s history began. I t has been asserted that the beginning and the end of things are both absolutely hidden from science. Science has to do with phenomena. It is where science must confess its impotence that revelation steps in, and, with the authority of God, reveals those things that are above it. The beginning of Genesis, therefore, is a divinely inspired narrative of the events deemed necessary by God to establish the foundations for the Divine Law in the sphere of human life, and to set forth the relation be- tween the omnipotent Creator and the man who fell, and the race that was to be redeemed by the incarnation of His Son. The German rationalistic idea, which has passed over into thousands of more or less orthodox Christian minds, is that these earliest chapters embody ancient traditions of the Sem- itic-oriental mind. Others go farther, and not only deny them to be the product of the reverent and religious mind of the Hebrew, but assert they were simply oriental legends, not born from above and of God, but bom in the East, and prob- ably in pagan Babylonia. We would therefore postulate the following propositions: 1. The Book of Genesis has no doctrinal value if it is not authoritative. 2. The Book of Genesis is not authoritative if it is not true. For if it is not history, it is not reliable; and if it is not revelation, it is not authoritative. 3. The Book of Genesis is not true if it is not from God. For if it is not from God, it is not inspired; and if it

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