NATURAL REVELATION
Is God readily discernable? And if God is invisible, can we really fault man for not being able to see God and follow him? Paul responds to these questions with an interesting verse in Romans 1:20;
For 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 people are without excuse.
Paul says several things in this verse;
-God created this world.
-Though God is invisible, his qualities- namely his power and nature are clearly seen from what has been created.
-If man ends up not knowing God, it is because he suppresses the knowledge of God and so is without excuse on judgment day.
Almost 200 years and many astounding scientific discoveries later, the hypothesis of evolution by natural selection as a means of explaining the origins of this world remains not proven. In fact many discoveries make a stronger case against evolution as opposed to support it. For instance, genetic mutations, considered the mechanism by which species evolve, is practically never known to bestow beneficial effects, which are necessary for evolution into higher forms. It requires a lot of faith to believe in evolution, perhaps more than that required to believe that God created this world.
It is true of any creation that it will bear the marks of its creator. A painting bears the unique characteristics of the painter. The most valuable paintings in the world today are those created by Leonardo da Vinci. Uniquely different from his peers, he was as much a scientist and anatomist as he was a painter. His paintings therefore reflect perfect proportions of a human body and provide us with a unique display of the human anatomy, which is just one of the unique aspects of his work.When man makes at attempt to examine the world around him closely, it is inevitable that he will be led to a knowledge of the God who created it. For instance, it is difficult to see the order of this complex universe and not come away thinking that there is an intelligent Being who created this, as opposed to it having randomly evolved by accident.
But man has a free will, which is what makes him so unique. Without the free will, our lives would be robotic and not a fraction as rich as it is today. But having a free will also means that man can reject the knowledge of God. And more often than not, man rejects God than accept him because acknowledging God also means bowing down to Him and submitting to Him, for which man has no natural inclination. And so when he suppresses the knowledge of God, he gets to a state of being where God is absent from his thinking and reason. He ends up living poor and dying poor, because by his own choice, life is robbed of it fullness and death comes with only an expectation of everlasting misery, because during his life on earth, he rejected the only One who does not die.
