The reason why we found this verse was because I wanted to show Sharley and Chris and Ernest that there the same word is used about the earth as in the verse in Genesis of which we had just been speaking. The words "in vain" are the same which were there translated "without form" by the people who turned the Hebrew, in which most of the Old Testament was first written, into English, that we might be able to read it. So you see how very important words are, and learn that when God tells us in one part of His Book that He created the earth not "without form," and in another part that it was (or became) "without form," the state of the earth as it is described in the second verse of the first chapter of Genesis was different from its condition when God created it in the beginning. Between these two verses, so close together in your Bible, ages upon ages may have run their course; a distance of time may have passed so great that we cannot measure it by any thoughts of ours. What happened between the time, which God calls "the beginning," the time of the earth's creation, and that time when what He created had become "waste and desolate," we do not know. What this earth was like, when God first created it, we do not know. How the plants and animals, which now lie buried deep beneath the ground upon which we tread, and shut up within the rocks, lived and died, we do not know. How confusion and desolation came, we do not know. And why do we not know? Because God has not told us. People have thought a great deal about it, and they say that upon the earth itself may be read, as in a book, marks of the many changes which it went through during that far, far away time; but what we have to remember is that God does not tell us anything about it in His Book; it is with the days and weeks and years of Time and the "from everlasting to everlasting" of His great Eternity, about which He does speak to us, that we have to do. God speaks to us, the inhabitants of the earth, of what it concerns us to know--and the first thing we learn about this earth upon which we live is that it was created by Him. The next thing that we learn is that the earth which He had "formed to be inhabited" was "without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep." This was the state of the earth which God had created, when He began the work of His wonderful "Days," and brought what had become a scene of desolation into order and beauty, a place prepared for men to dwell in. And now there is one more verse to find, because it speaks about those SIX DAYS in which God "made" (not "created") the heaven and the earth. "In six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is." (Exodus xx. 11.)