Article October 5, 1912 Issue

CREATION AND REVELATION

ERNEST C. MOSES.

Down through the ages of human history, the mind of mortals has held to finite conceptions of creation, and has lost in every process of reasoning based on such conclusions. The common sense of "creation" and "created" involves commencement, therefore the words imply limitation, finity—conditions which are opposed to God, infinite Spirit, to whom a thousand years are but as a day, who is "from everlasting to everlasting."

Creation, according to a common lexical definition, stands for "the act of God in bringing the world or universe into existence," and finite reasoning immediately deducts that there was a time when the universe did not exist. Mortals read the first chapter of Genesis, and material sense interprets the record of creation as applying to a solar and stellar universe, including our world and mankind, brought out of chaos, or nothing, by the divine fiat, and established in seven twenty-four-hour days on a material basis, governed by conflicting material laws. These estimates of God's accountability for a material creation have even attempted to include the destructive upheavals, storms, and abnormalities of human experience, on land and sea. It has been common to ascribe all this to God, notwithstanding the Scriptures repeatedly affirm that God's work is perfect, complete, and good.

Christian Science, however, disagrees with every concept of the true creation as being material, rejects every theory of the commencement or real existence of matter, and interprets spiritually the inspired record of creation as presented in the first chapter of Genesis. In this interpretation the Bible student obtains a reasonable idea of creation which satisfies, because it is scientific, and therefore unassailable. Christian Scientists, who are slowly working out of the wilderness of mortal beliefs toward the promised land of spiritual understanding, realize that the dreamland experiences of earthly existence testify to a material world and universe, but divine Science does not include these phenomena in the real, spiritual creation. These conceptions are misconceptions, false beliefs, to be recognized at their true value and overcome in the way taught and demonstrated by Christ Jesus. Christian Scientists are not engaged in accounting for the existence of a material universe; they leave that to those who believe in it.

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