Creation Of The Heavens And The Earth by J. Louis Gthrie, PH.D.

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CREATION OF THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH
J. LOUIS GUTHRIE

CHAPTER III
WHERE THESE IDEAS OF CREATION ORIGINATED

The Babylonian Epics of creation are poems written about 2290 B. C. These were written before Moses, or even Abraham were born. Near 2500 B.C. the flood came and if the chronology of the two men prominent in this field is right, that of Ussher and Hale's, then we are sure that Adam was created about 4004 or 4056 or 5000 years before Christ. Also Science has recently demonstrated that creation of mankind could not have been over 10,000 years before the present time and nearer 6,000 than 10,000 years before the present. Also the Bible itself puts the date of Adam before Christ not more than 5,000 years, and more nearly right from 4,000 to 4060 years before Jesus, then we are sure that the flood could not have been more than 3,000 years before Jesus, and more nearly 25[00] years. Now the Bible positively puts the time from Adam to the Flood as being 1656 years. This record is true for the exact dated fifth chapter of Genesis counts up that exact figure, so we now are positive that the flood was not much more than 2500 years before the present Christian era.

The Babylonian Epics of the Creation does not start with the beginning of the creation, but only with the rebuilding of the Creation after the battle of the Gods. This poem of 7,000 lines recounts the stories of the battle of the Gods and then, after peace and the destruction of the evil Gods, and peace was brought about, the present creation came out of the bodies of these gods and goddesses of evil, which had been destroyed by Bel Marduk, the chief of the Hamitic Gods. Now the kingdom of Babylon, as the Bible records was founded by Nimrod, a grandson of Ham, the son of Noah. This poem, which was the Babylonian and Chaldean Bible, and was believed by these Chaldeans with as much credence as we put into our Bible, was the real Bible of those Ancient Hamitic peoples. However, Ham soon lost the power because he could not furnish the men with initiative and intelligence enough to man the empire. But this Poem did originate the Hamitic Philosophy, the sum of which is this. "An original Chaotic void, out of which the Gods of the Hamites made the heavens and the earth, and a selective force of these Gods, who had no particular care for how the creation came into order, brought out the highest power of the creation, which they called sex, and then made gods to fit their sex ideas." Baal and Astarte then became the highest element in their sex worship. This looks too much like modern theistic evolution to suit me, and it does not fit the higher thinking of many Christians of this day. However, many Christians begin their ideas of creation with an original chaos, the very thing these Hamites believed. They do not think that God could have originally created a beautiful heaven and earth, and then by rebellion in God's angelic host, this heavens and earth were wrecked and then God rebuilt it as we shall show from both the ORIGINAL HEBREW AND GREEK OF THE BIBLE.

The Japhetic peoples, who were best shown us in the Greeks and Romans, and they were the best educated of these Japethites, became the originators of the philosophy of the Chemical action of creation. Thales a Greek philosopher of 700 years before Christ stated this idea pretty clearly in the few principles of the philosophy he has left us. Anaximander, a pupil of Thales wrote out several principles of modern evolution. He first produced the Nebular Hypothesis of modernists, by saying that a flame originally surrounded the Earth and that broke into rings and afterward formed the Sun, moon, and stars. A quotation of his is as follows, "Living creatures arose from the moist element (water) as it evaporated by the Sun. Man was like another animal, namely a fish in the beginning." Anximander lived 610 B. C. to 546 B. C. This Japhetic philosophy originated this early, and plenty of quotations of these ancient Greeks and Romans are extant to show that modern Chemical and Athesitic Evolution came from them.

Many of these philosophies were crowded into the Christian and Hebraic thinking when Hebrews and Christians began to study the philosophies of the Hamitic peoples and the Japhetic peoples. Naturally the Hebrews of the common run of people and the educated uninspired men of their leaders began their study of the philosophies of the Hamitic and Japethic peoples around them. The Sadducees of the time of Jesus were examples of Hebrews that had been studying the Greek and Roman Philosophy and thereby denying the resurrection of the body. To show how these philosophers thought, let us quote from Xenophanes, "For we all arise from earth and water." "All things are earth and water that come into being and grow." Xenophanes lived from 571 B. C. to 479 B. C. Now we can observe what these philosophers of the Greeks did to the Hebrew thinkers, when they begin to study this kind of Japhetic philosophy.

Now to show the Latin thought, which was really a borrowing of the Greek Ideas of philosophy, influenced the Hebrews. I suppose one of the most outstanding examples of this was Flavius Josephus, much quoted today as authority on Biblical subjects. I know just at this point where Josephus repudiates THE INSPIRED WORDS OF GOD ALMIGHTY IN FAVOR OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE JAPHETHITES AND THE HAMITES in at least fifty different places in his writings. I became discouraged reading this for there are at least several hundred of that kind. Josephus was adopted by a Roman noble and educated in Rome. A quotation here from Ovid, who wrote the "Metamorphoses," a summary of the myths of Rome and Greece which gave rise to the Evolutionary teaching of the ancient Japhethites.

These two kinds of philosophy came into Christianity through the Roman Catholic Church system and became a part of the legend of every man in the Western world today. Because we are Americans is no reason why these legendary things which have been handed down to us are not part of our own thinking. The quotation from Ovid above is as follows, "Ever since man a small weak wormlike creature crawled out of the mud and slime of the shore of the rivers and the sea." Now can any one wonder that the modern teaching of evolution got into the very fiber of men like Josephus and the men of his time and before in the Sadducees. A quotation here from Josephus which shows the influence of the evolution teaching of these ancient times is found in the four volume set on page 7 of book 1 volume 1. "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, but when the earth did not come into sight, but was covered with a thick darkness, and a wind moved upon its surface, God commanded that there should be light." Here Josephus calls the Spirit of God a "wind!" On page 5, same volume, "But because almost our constitution all depends on the wisdom of Moses, our legislator, I cannot avoid saying something of him beforehand, though I will do it briefly, I mean, because otherwise, those that read my books may wonder how it came to pass, that my discourse which promises an account of laws and facts of history, contains so much philosophy."

Now Japhetic philosophy and Hamitic philosophy is so mixed up in the thinking of both Jews and middle age Christians, that we have no wonder that such things are not a part of the thinking of the traditional philosophies which are handed down to the very smallest of the people of our own nation even! Most things excepting what the WORD OF THE ALMIGHTY GOD says are so legendary and so filled with tradition that the various parts of the thoughts are not very reliable. Men have heard that a thing is a certain way and they never take the trouble to investigate it, but begin to fight for the superstition of the least provocation, and they kill and destroy and heap calumny on the first man that seeks the truth. Such has always been the way of religious fanatics and prejudiced persons.

Now to sum this up, the philosophy of the Japhethites of the Aryan or Sanskrit tribes of early civilization had [a] belief much influenced by the Hamitic because of the enslaving of the Hamites by Japhethites, was of the ultimate type which we find today among Materialistic Evolutionists or Athestic Evolutionists. They believe after the centuries, that creation was entirely chemical, either by chemical explosion or by chance. This theory today has taken hold on the imaginations of the educated and is at its highest in the colleges and universities of this time. It has so much strength and power in our educational institutions that any person advancing any other idea is immediately ridiculed off the stage and called all sorts of discrediting names and thought to be very ignorant of anything like scientific truth, but no scientific facts deal with primary origins in any way. In fact the two philosophies which have been borrowed from the Hamites and the Japhethites have been so powerful in the thinking of church men and religious men of the day and also throughout the ages, they thought it ridiculous to give God the power to do anything, excepting by what they call natural laws. They also forgot that by the entrance of sin, natural laws have been perverted so much that they have acted many times in reverse from what they would have done had there been no angelic sin nor sin of mankind.

For this very reason, stated above, it is utterly impossible to know just what the phenomena will behave like in its presentation to us. We cannot know just what the great principles of Divine Laws and Divine action is under the present regime of things, for the very fact of sin. There is but one way to discover this truth, and that is in the Revelation of God to us. Then we must sweep away tradition and superstition in the minds of the average man and revert to the original languages of the Bible and if possible discover just what God did have his inspired men say. Since we have shown many times that the minds of men are made to interpret things in the time in which they live, and most men try to interpret things in the light of the age in which they live, we can never be sure of what superstition the man who is interpreting matter is filled. Let us try and ask God to free our minds for a time of all this Hamitic-Japhethism, both scientific and religious, and try to get back to the original stories of this subject as God has given it to us in these languages of the Bible.

Since time began, there has been but three original ideas of creation, given the human race. They are these. 1. The idea of a selective force working on some sort of original matter and shaping from that original matter or substance a development up to the present order of things. This is further to go on into the ages of eternity and will bring out new orders until everything will reach Deity. There is no Diety today, only the highest element in it is the thinking of mankind. He is God and he is the highest order at present. Selective Force has gone that far in development and the high present order of things. This Scientists call "Theistic Evolution." This is a mighty nice theory, yet unproved. One question these advocates of this theory failed to answer is "Where did the original Selective Force have its origin and how?." They are just as much at sea as the Atheist, as the Orthodox Christian, as the mongrel "Christian-Theistic-Evolutionist," or if one could secure a mongrel of the three, Christian, Theistic Evolutionist, Atheistic Chemist!

I think the three ideas have been clearly enough put to the reader, so he can know there is no middle grounds between them, but least it has not been made clear, let us state them once more. In simple language they are: 1. Theistic Evolution. A selective force that has evolved up to the highest minds of man with all gradations down the scale to the lowest of material things 2. Chemical and Atheistic Evolution either by chance and chemism or by one of them until the present order of things. 3. Creation, direct and instantaneously by a Divinity who is God in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Everything [else] which is a mixture of any one or two or the three of these is out of the question. Anything like a hybrid becomes a bit of ridicule. Neither of these three parties who speak for and urge one of these statements of the creation, will have anything of the others. And since Scientists are all lined with either of the first two of these, and halfbreed pseudo Christian Scientists are all in halfway grounds, it remains then, for the pure theologians to assume the third position. This is that God created the Universe and everything in it of whatever kind it is whether, angelic, whether animal and vegetable and man, or whatever it is, God created it directly and instantaneously, and his statements of it are to be regarded as the true statements concerning the creation of Heavens and Earth or really the universe and its inhabitants.

Now if we have made ourselves clear on this, we might begin with the creation of Heavens and Earth, and this is the heading of this book. There has been an age old theological notion, which declares that God made the heavens and the earth out of nothing. I have never been able to find a single scripture to state that. Many of our brethren declare that the word "Create as found in Genesis 1:1 means create out of nothing." If that is true the original sense of create as found in all the Hebrew Lexicons is untrue. I have never yet found a single one of them: that says that, in the original meaning of the word. Every one of them declare it to mean "cut, form, cut out, carve, to form, to create, to produce, to smooth, to polish, to beget, to bring forth, to feed, to flatten, to grow fat, fashion, make." I have access to at least seven or eight lexicons, which give these meanings and some of them have been translated for at least 2000 years and not one of them say that "Create means to make something out of nothing." Now if there are any that state that I have not yet seen them, for the original meanings of the word is as I have given here. Brethren, does it not seem that we have read something into the Hebrew word "BARA" that is not in it by stating that it means "to create out of nothing," when it does not. I believe that expression was injected into the word, because our theological fathers did not have anything better to give to the meaning than that when they were attacked by paganism and nearly swamped by being unable to give any meaning that would give literally what the Word of God says.