Posts Tagged ‘beholding’
“The heavens declare the glory of God…”
Psalm 19:1
We have been talking about how we can change. The Bible says that we become like God when we “see” God. Of course, no one can really see God in this life and live (Exodus 33:20). Nevertheless, when we see God’s glory, it changes us.
Can we see God’s glory in His creation? Indeed we can. Scripture says,
For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For His invisible attributes, namely His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made.
Romans 1:19-20
This is what is called “general revelation.” God reveals Himself to all people at all times in what He has made. We can learn certain things about God by looking at the works of His hands.
Karl Barth wrote a book entitled, No! The exclamation point was actually part of the title. I’m not kidding. His point? That God didn’t reveal Himself in nature. Barth is wrong here. Scripture clearly states that God shows Himself in His handiwork. Because He does, it is our task to study it as well as we can so we can learn about God. After all, we were created to know and glorify God!
So what can we learn? Romans 1 says we clearly discern God’s eternal power and divine nature. So clearly, in fact, that those who deny this have no excuse for doing so (Romans 1:19-20). Psalm 19 tells us that the skies show that God is glorious. Whenever we look at nature, we should see something of God there. If we do not, something is wrong with us. Perhaps we are not paying attention. We might not care like we should. We could even miss these lessons about God because we suppress the truth in unrighteousness.
Take some time this week to look at the stars after night falls. Do you know how close the nearest star is? Just over four light years away! 1 That means that it takes light four years to get from there to here. Let me help you realize the immensity of that distance. Light can travel all the way around the earth’s equator roughly eight times per second! 3600 seconds in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 365 days in a year, 4 years. Get the picture? It’s rougly 24,937,736,300,000 miles away. 2 And that star is our nearest neighbor. Our galaxy alone is 100,000 light years across. That’s 587,863,000,000,000,000 miles. Scientists estimate that there are 125,000,000,000 galaxies in the universe (and that was back in 1999). 3 If you do the math, the universe is HUGE!
God made all of this. What a testimony of His awesome power! Psalm 8 tells us that all of this is the work of His fingers. Finger work does not indicate hard labor! Creating the universe took absolutely no effort on God’s part. It didn’t wear Him out. God simply spoke, and the whole universe came to be.
We’ll look more at God’s glory in His creation at a microscopic level soon!
