The first week, in which God performed the work of creation in six days and rested on the seventh day, was just like every other week. . . . The weekly cycle of seven literal days, six for labor and the seventh for rest, which has been preserved and brought down through Bible history, originated in the great facts of the first seven days. . . .
But the infidel supposition, that the events of the first week required seven vast, indefinite periods for their accomplishment, strikes directly at the foundation of the Sabbath of the fourth commandment. It makes indefinite and obscure that which God has made very plain. It is the worst kind of infidelity; for with many who profess to believe the record of creation, it is infidelity in disguise. . . .
Infidel geologists claim that the world is very much older than the Bible record makes it. They reject the testimony of God’s Word because of those things which are to them evidences from the earth itself. . . .
Bones of men and animals are found . . . showing that much larger men and beasts once existed. . . . Because the bones found are so much larger than those of men and animals now living, or that have existed for many generations past, some conclude that the earth was populated long before the record of creation, by a race of beings vastly superior in size. . . . Those who reason in this manner have limited ideas of the size of men, animals, and trees before the flood, and of the great changes which then took place in the earth.
Without Bible history, geology can prove nothing. Relics found in the earth do give evidence of a state of things differing in many respects from the present. But the time of their existence can be learned only from the inspired record. . . . When men leave the Word of God, and seek to account for His creative works upon natural principles, they are upon a boundless ocean of uncertainty. . . .
The Word of God is given as a lamp unto our feet, and a light unto our path. Those who cast His Word behind them, and seek by their own blind philosophy to penetrate the mysteries of Jehovah, will stumble in darkness. . . .
God has given sufficient evidence upon which to base faith, if [one] wishes to believe. In the last days, the earth will be almost destitute of true faith. Upon the merest pretense, the Word of God will be considered unreliable, while human reasoning will be received, though it be in opposition to plain Scripture facts. Men will endeavor to explain from natural causes the work of creation. But just how God wrought in the work of creation He has never revealed to men. . . .
“The secret things belong unto the Lord our God; but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children forever.” Men professing to be ministers of God raise their voices against the investigation of prophecy, and tell the people that the prophecies, especially of Daniel and John, are obscure, and that we cannot understand them. Yet some of these very men eagerly receive the suppositions of geologists, which dispute the Mosaic record. But if God’s revealed will is so difficult to be understood, certainly men should not rest their faith upon mere suppositions in regard to that which He has not revealed. . . . In [God’s] providence men, beasts, and trees, many times larger than those now upon the earth, were buried at the time of the flood, and thus preserved to prove to man that the inhabitants of the old world perished by a flood. God designed that the discovery of these things in the earth should establish faith in inspired history. But men, with their vain reasoning, make a wrong use of these things which God designed should lead them to exalt Him. They fall into the same error as did the people before the flood—those things which God gave them as a benefit, they turned into a curse, by making a wrong use of them.
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This article was first published in Signs of the Times, March 20, 1879. Seventh-day Adventists believe that Ellen G. White (1827-1915) exercised the biblical gift of prophecy during more than 70 years of public ministry.
