The result of Satan’s first experience in independent rulership is shown in verse 2 of the first chapter of Genesis. Let us read it as found in the Rotherham translation of the Old Testament, which more clearly follows the Hebrew than does the A.V. “Now the earth had become waste and wild and darkness was on the face of the roaring deep.” Notice that the emphasis is upon the earth, or earthly sphere, which was the dominion of Satan. The Celestial region, above Satan’s domination, was not included. The bright anointed cherub had demonstrated very clearly his inability to exercise independent government even in his own dominion.
Study these words “waste,” “wild,” “darkness,” “roaring deep.” Where was the earth full of beauty and light over which the “sons of God shouted for joy”? Who had marred God’s glorious handiwork and brought about this chaotic condition? Alas, “an enemy hath done this.”
Only He who creates is able to sustain that which is created, and all rulership is centered in God. Satan was a created being; therefore unable to sustain (literally hold together) his own principality and having chosen to be independent of God’s rulership, he was unable to rule beneficently-therefore his complete failure.
Just how long a period of Satan’s misrule was necessary to bring about this chaos, we do not know. Suffice it to say that in the thousands and thousands of years that lie between the creative act of God as recorded in Genesis 1:1 and His reconstructive work as recorded in the last phrase of verse 2, the geological ages are to be found. The teaching of geology agrees perfectly with the Bible if the latter is but understood. The glacial period and ice age are indicated in the account of the ruin, as stated in so few words in the verse that we have been considering.
No truly thoughtful mind could conceive of this verse as descriptive of the original earth as it came from the hand of God, and the geologist who studies the strata of the earth and its fossil remains must have a deep, unanswered question in his mind unless he knows his Bible.
We read in Isaiah 45:18 that God did not create the earth a “waste.” “He formed it to be inhabited”; therefore now that it had been made empty and desolate, He patiently undertakes the work of reconstruction. This work is described in the remaining portion of the chapter.
Notice that the word “create” is used only three times in the narrative. In verse 1, in connection with the original creation; in verse 21, when God brings into being animal life; and in verse 27, when the crowning object of creation, human life, appears. It is significant that this verb, which indicates “to bring into existence that which had no previous existence,” is used at the points in the evolution theory that are regarded by evolutionists themselves as the missing links in their chain.
It is also interesting to study the order of created life biologically. First, vegetable life, which is simple unconscious life; then animal life, which is conscious, but not self-conscious; and last of all, human life, which is self-conscious.
The modern science of comparative anatomy reveals the fact that the proportion of brain to spinal cord in fish is 2 to 1, in reptiles 2 to 1, birds 3 to 1, mammals 4 to 1, man 33 to 1, and this order from the lower to the higher, is indicated in the account of creation as recorded in the first chapter of Genesis, verses 20 to 28.
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