Since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—His eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. (Romans 1:20 NIV)

The first-century Christian convert, Paul claims that we can “clearly” see God’s eternal power and divine nature (that which compels us to worship) in what He has created. So what is it we can actually witness in His general revelation?

That question compelled me over the years to attend more carefully to the natural world and also to learn from others about what they have discovered while reading pages from the “book” of God’s works in the wilderness. For the days leading up to the celebration of the human birth of our Savior/Creator I would like to offer a sampling of what I believe we can witness most dramatically when we enter the unspoiled areas of what John Calvin called “the theater of God’s glory”:

Seemingly endless time and space. Arguments in the church about whether the earth is young or old often blind us to the fact that, according to Paul, the material world will provide evidence of God’s power being “eternal.” Time has no beginning or ending apparent to our human senses or understanding—a fact I realized as a teenager that would sometimes cause my mind to whirl in the dark hours of the night. Because the earth-bound human mind cannot conceive of eternality, we want to either deny it or somehow bring it into our human scope. But we can’t.

Space too has no span measurable by our human instruments. Using our most powerful microscopes, we find no limit to smallness. In the largest telescopes, bigness gets forever bigger. Yes, timelessness and infinity are awesome realities for time-bound finite creatures to ponder. Nonetheless, they are actualities we can “clearly see” in order to keep us on bent knees before our Creator.

Mystifying light, energy, and matter. Even in this day when scientific studies tell us so much about the cosmos, the true nature of light, energy, and matter still defies human definition and understanding. Because we know so much about what these natural features do and how they do it, we usually forget that we operate with them much like a person who skillfully drives a car, but knows next to nothing about what’s under the hood. We need to recover the sense of awe that primitive civilizations had regarding these core elements of nature—not that we might worship them but that we might better worship their Creator and Sustainer.

[In the next post we'll look at the conservation of energy, astronomical extravagance and magnitude, and wonderful life]

This post appeared originally on SustainLane