Our interpretation of the formal language of Scripture, especially of the verbs which are employed to denote the act of creation, must therefore be informed and determined by these fundamental principles. If God is the unconditioned Cause of all existence, then the Creation must be the absolutely _free_ and self-determined act of God. As such, it can not have been conditioned by any immanent necessity in the Divine nature itself, nor by any necessary existence out of and extraneous to the Divine nature. By this conception of God, and of his relation to the world, we are debarred from supposing the coeval existence of any thing besides God (_e. g._, ἄπειρον, τὸ μὴ ὄν of Plato, the ὕλη of Aristotle, the "matter" of the modern Physicist) as the condition and medium of the Divine agency and manifestation. While, therefore, it is acknowledged that in Gen. i. 21, 27, בָּרָא (bara) denotes the _formation_ of organic bodies out of pre-existent materials, we can not be restricted to this meaning of the term when dealing with verse 1, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." We are compelled to believe that "bara" here means _origination_--origination _de novo_; first, because the primal act of creation must have been a supernatural, miraculous production of something which had not previously existed under any form--an unconditioned creation antecedent to nature; and, secondly, because we are informed that after this primal act of creation, "the earth was still _without form_ and void." No possible ingenuity of criticism can construe that opening sentence of revelation to mean, "In the beginning God gave _form_ to pre-existing matter." That first beginning is the _principium principiorum_, the beginning of all beginnings, and must be distinguished from the six new beginnings of the six days' work.[51] We must regard this sublime utterance, standing at the head of all God's communications, as affirming this foundation-idea of revelation--that God is the sole causality of the heavens and the earth in an absolute sense, the efficient cause of time, and all temporal relations; the all-mighty cause of space, and all spatial relations; the originator of the primordial substance, and all its qualities--in a word, the unconditioned Creator of all finite being, quality, and relation--"בְּרֵאשִית--ἐν ἀρχῆ--_in principio_--first of all (in the order of conception rather than the order of time) God originated, laid the foundations of, the heavens and the earth."[52]