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Expositions of Holy Scripture by Alexander Maclaren
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God saw every thing that He had made, and, behold, it
was very good. And the evening and the morning were the
sixth day.

'Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all
the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended His
work which He had made; and He rested on the seventh day
from all His work which He had made. And God blessed the
seventh day, and sanctified it; because that in it He
had rested from all His work which God created and made.'
--GENESIS i. 26-ii. 3.

We are not to look to Genesis for a scientific cosmogony, and are
not to be disturbed by physicists' criticisms on it as such. Its
purpose is quite another, and far more important; namely, to imprint
deep and ineffaceable the conviction that the one God created all
things. Nor must it be forgotten that this vision of creation was
given to people ignorant of natural science, and prone to fall back
into surrounding idolatry. The comparison of the creation narratives
in Genesis with the cuneiform tablets, with which they evidently are
most closely connected, has for its most important result the
demonstration of the infinite elevation above their monstrosities
and puerilities, of this solemn, steadfast attribution of the
creative act to the one God. Here we can only draw out in brief the
main points which the narrative brings into prominence.

1. The revelation which it gives is the truth, obscured to all other
men when it was given, that one God 'in the beginning created the
heaven and the earth.' That solemn utterance is the keynote of the
whole. The rest but expands it. It was a challenge and a denial for
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