"IN the beginning," we read in the opening chapter of Genesis, "God created the heaven and the earth." But God and His universe, including man, heaven, and earth, are without beginning of days or end of years. God knows no beginning; and if there is no beginning, how can there be creation? Why does the translator say that God created the heaven and the earth?
It is admitted that the Scriptures have a literal meaning, but it is only through spiritual perception and interpretation, as revealed by Christian Science, that the truth therein contained can be understood. The true status of man and the universe is seen in spiritual development, and not in the material. We cannot cling to the material sense of the words "beginning" and "created." Spiritually interpreted the word "beginning" means the source, the only cause. The word "create" means to cause to exist, to cause to be, or to be revealed. Then God is the only cause and is the only source of the universe; and God did and does cause the universe—heaven, earth, and man —to exist and to be revealed; they are Mind's expressions.
If God's universe always has been in existence as the constant and eternal expression of Himself, without beginning and without ending, the account of so-called creation, as contained in the first chapter of Genesis, is simply the dawning of God's ideas upon human consciousness, and shows the steps up which the human mind passes as it awakens to the things of Spirit. The Scriptural account of this unfoldment consists of six divisions or revelations to the human mind, or the stages wherein the human consciousness puts off mortality and accepts immortality.
