But these things are almost wholly lost by sin, and we are at this day like a carcass as it were of the first created man Adam; and we retain but a shadow of the dominion which he possessed. Shall we not say then that he has lost all things, who out of an immortal is become a mortal, and out of a righteous man, a sinner? Out of one accepted of God and grateful to God, cast off and condemned of God? For now man is a sinner and mortal. If therefore these things do not, under divine teaching, stir us up to the hope and expectation of a better day and a better life to come, there is nothing that can stir us up to such hope and expectation. Let these comments suffice for an explanation of this first chapter of the book of Genesis. In the following chapter Moses teaches us the nature of the work of this sixth day; how man was created. CHAPTER II. PART I. GOD'S REST, SANCTIFICATION OF THE SABBATH AND CREATION OF ADAM. I. V. 1. _And the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them._ Our Latin rendering of the text before us is "and all the adornment of them." In the original Hebrew the expression is ZEBAAM, the "host" or "army" of them. The prophets have retained this same form of speaking and of calling the stars and the planets, "the host or army of heaven," as Jer. 19:13, where the Jews are represented as having adored "all the host of heaven." And God says by the prophet Zephaniah, "I will cut off them that worship the host of heaven upon the housetops." In the same manner also Stephen testifies concerning the children of Israel in the wilderness that God "gave them up to worship the host of heaven," Acts 7:42. The prophets borrowed these forms of speech from Moses, who in this passage calls the stars and other luminaries of heaven by a military term, calling them the host or the warning army of heaven. After a similar mode of expression he calls men beasts and trees the host or army of the earth. Perhaps this is in anticipation of the solemn realities that were to come. For God afterwards calls himself also the God of hosts or of armies; that is, not of angels and of spirits only, but of the whole creation also, which was for him and serves him. For ever since Satan was cast off by God for sin he has been filled with such desperate hatred of God and of men that he would, if he could, in one moment empty the sea of all its fishes and the air of all its birds, strip the earth of all its fruits and utterly destroy all things. But God has created all these creatures that they may be a standing army as it were; that they might fight for us and our subsistence against the devil and against men also, and thus serve us and be to us an unceasing benefit. V. 2. _And on the seventh day God finished his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made._