Excerpt from The Great Texts of the Bible
This is a sublime sentence sentence with which the Bible opens. Will the sentences that follow be in keeping with the musical throb and stately massiveness of these opening words? Even when we regard the book simply as a monument of literature we find it impossible to conceive a more appropriate introduction than this: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." Yet the end is not less majestic than the beginning: " And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth are passed away."
How should we approach the study of a book which opens and closes with words of such sublimity? There is a sentence or two in the preface to John Wesley's first volume of sermons, in which the great evangelist gives us the secret of his method of Bible-study. "Here am I," he says, "far from the busy ways of men. I sit down alone; only God is here. In His presence I open, I read His Book; for this end - to find the way to heaven. Does anything appear dark or intricate? I life my heart to the Father of Lights. I then search after and consider parallel passages of Scripture, comparing spiritual things with spiritual. I meditate thereon with all the attention and earnestness of which my mind is capable. And what I thus learn, that I teach." To Wesley, then, there were two great realities - the visible Book, and its invisible but ever-present Author; and to a man of his training and susceptibilities the one would have been an enigma without the other. He saw God at the beginning of every section of Holy Scripture.
Let us attempt to explain this great but difficult text by considering -
I. The Creation.
i. The meaning of "In the beginning," and of "the heaven and the earth."
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