Now I am sure you quite understand that this word "created," which you find in the very first verse of your Bible, is a word which you must not forget to notice whenever it is used, because it is a wonderful word, which can be used only in speaking of God, the Creator, and of the Son of God, by whom and for whom all the things that we can see, and all that we cannot see, were created; and in whose power they stand together. Now I want you to read again very carefully the verses which we have read, and to notice that we have only one verse to tell us what God did at the beginning; this one verse explains that it was then that He created the heaven and the earth. This is all that God has told us, and it is just what we need to know; for how could we ever have found out by what means this earth of ours came into being, at the very first, if God had not been pleased to tell us that He created it? But what a happy thing it is just to listen to the account which God Himself gives us, telling how the heaven and the earth came into being! One who simply receives God's word into his heart will understand more than the cleverest man who ever lived, who tries by his own mind to search into the beginning of things, and to account for all that we now see around us by any other way. We read, "By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God." Faith does not wait till it sees, but believes what God says, because He says it. We may say that we cannot understand what creation is, but we can find rest for our restless thoughts by saying "Yes" to all that God has told us--and the very first line of His Book explains all that we need to know about, how the heaven and the earth came into being, when it tells us that God created them in the beginning. We read next, "And the earth was without form and void." We are not told in the verse which follows anything more about the "heaven"; that means the vast universe of which our earth is but a tiny part; but of the earth we read two things which are very surprising, when we think of what it is like now: "Without form and void"--what does that mean? After I had explained to the elder children that these words, which are used to describe the earth, mean that it was waste and desolate and without order, we looked for a verse in the New Testament which tells us that "God is not the author of confusion" (1 Cor. xiv. 33); and then we spoke about how we can be quite sure that the earth, which is part of God's creation, was not in disorder, not a waste and desolate place in the beginning; and we found in the Old Testament this other verse: "For thus saith the Lord that created the heavens; God Himself that formed the earth and made it; He hath established it, He created it not in vain, He formed it to be inhabited; I am the Lord; and there is none else" (Isaiah xlv. 18).