rce in nature, indeed the only force in nature, for
all energy is here only because the power-filled Word is being spoken.

The Bible is the written word of God, and because it is written it is
confined and limited by the necessities of ink and paper and leather.
The Voice of God, however, is alive and free as the sovereign God is
free. "The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are
life." The life is in the speaking words. God's word in the Bible can
have power only because it corresponds to God's word in the universe. It
is the present Voice which makes the written Word all-powerful.
Otherwise it would lie locked in slumber within the covers of a book.

We take a low and primitive view of things when we conceive of God at
the creation coming into physical contact with things, shaping and
fitting and building like a carpenter. The Bible teaches otherwise: "By
the word of the Lord were the heavens made; and all the host of them by
the breath of his mouth.... For he spake, and it was done; he commanded,
and it stood fast." "Through faith we understand that the worlds were
framed by the word of God." Again we must remember that God is referring
here not to His written Word, but to His speaking Voice. His
world-filling Voice is meant, that Voice which antedates the Bible by
uncounted centuries, that Voice which has not been silent since the dawn
of creation, but is sounding still throughout the full far reaches of
the universe.

The Word of God is quick and powerful. In the beginning He spoke to
nothing, and it became _something_. Chaos heard it and became order,
darkness heard it and became light. "And God said--and it was so." These
twin phrases, as cause and effect, occur throughout the Genesis story of
the creation. The _said_ accounts for the _so_. The _so_ is the _said_
put into the continuous present.

That God is here and that He is speaking--these truths are back of all
other Bible truths; without them there could be no revelation at all.
God did not write a book and send it by messenger to be read at a
distance by unaided minds. He spoke a Book and lives in His spoken
words, constantly speaking His words and causing the power of them to
persist across the years. God breathed on clay and it became a man; He
breathes on men and they become clay. "Return ye children of men" was
the word spoken at the Fall by which God decreed the death of every man,
and no added word has He needed to speak. The s