Most mornings when I pray I find myself thanking God for revealing himself in creation, Scripture, and Christ. I think how futile existence is without God’s revealing himself to us. Without that revelation, the human race is like a blind man in a dark box groping around without any way out. Every which way he runs looking for an exit he only finds a hard, cold wall, so he looks and runs harder. The history of philosophy is a perfect picture of the endless futility inside the box, speculation built upon conjecture based on assumptions based on nothing but human reason or human senses. Such thinking will only take humanity as far as human reason and senses can go, which is far, but not outside the box. The brilliance of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle is a testament to just how far human thinking can take us, but soon descended into philosophies not nearly as brilliant, like Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Cynicism. Many other great thinkers came after, but without revelation it was all just a big intellectual food fight.
The first step out of the box is creation. The Apostle Paul tells us how:
God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so they are without excuse.
They meaning the human race, all people, every single one. God is invisible, but he makes himself seen, visible, in what he has created. Seems simple enough, right? But the entirety of Western culture is hostile to the very idea that somehow we might give God credit for “nature.” Nature, we are indoctrinated to believe, is “natural,” without a creator, without design or purpose; it just is. But everybody knows, every single person (without excuse!) knows that’s a crock. The beauty, majesty, the improbable incomprehensible preposterous complexity of it all is obviously not a product of chance, and everyone knows it. A cosmic coincidence cannot explain it, no matter how much the atheist materialist might protest. The atheist protesteth too much, methinks. Everything coming from nothing for no reason at all is a tough sell.
Having set the table, I want you consider a daily thought experiment that will enrich your life immeasurably. Ask yourself a question: “When I think about or see these things what comes into my mind” (and the list is endless):
- A thunderstorm, or a rainbow
- DNA, a cell, or blood
- A sunrise, sunset, or a full moon
- A newborn baby
- The human brain, or immune system
- A snail, a deer, or an Armadillo
- An oak tree, a palm tree, a maple, pine, or a river birch
- A blade of grass, or a flower
- Your hand, or your face in a mirror
- A perfectly blue sky and billowy clouds
- An ant hill, a spider, or a pesky fly
- Another human being
- A lake, a crashing wave, or a rushing stream
- A major league center fielder chasing down a fly ball, or Tiger in his heyday
- A Bach cantata, or the Beatles Abbey Road
You get the picture, or should I say pictures. What do you see? What should you see? God, God, God, God, God, God, and again you get the picture. God’s invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature! You see God! You see the power of Almighty God, the Creator of everything out of nothing, ex nihilo. As counter intuitive as it might seem, you see the invisible in the visible. You see what the secular culture insists you cannot see, what is does not want you to see, what it claims cannot be seen. And it is actually completely intuitive. When you see a car, you intuitively know it could not exist without the human beings who designed, engineered, and made it, although you don’t consciously think of them every time you see a car, or anything else manmade. In effect, when you see the thing, you see the person who created the thing. The created, “natural” world is no different. We all know intuitively that no “natural” thing could exist without a creator, and we see in the thing something of that being’s nature.
Paul gives us two characteristics of God’s being that we see in creation, his eternal power and divinity, but there is plenty more about God we can pick up from creation. As for those two, though, think of the power of the being who could, as I called it above, think up the improbably incomprehensible preposterous complexity of it all, and then make it all out of nothing, and make it work! And keep it working! We saw what the power of one atom can do at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the universe is filled with atoms. And God has forever power. Only God, a divine being, a being wholly other, could pull this off. We can also see in creation (let’s always call it that instead of “nature”) many other attributes of God, like his creativity, wisdom, knowledge, care, sense of humor, pride, personality, etc.
When you start to see this way, all the time, you are led to doxology and worship. If creation doesn’t often leave us dumbfounded, we’re not looking closely enough. If we do, we’ll share it with everyone we know, teach it to our children, and praise God for it. (Since I referred to God’s three-fold revelation, I’ve decided to do posts on the other two, so Scripture is next.)
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