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