The Heavens Declare the Glory of God
“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.”
Psalms 19:1-4
Being a person with a science background, I understand when people say things like, “I can’t see God, I can’t hear God, therefore God doesn’t exist.” Our senses guide our reality. If I can’t see it, hear it, touch it, taste it, feel it than it isn’t real. At 8 years old, our youngest daughter was pushing back on this one day until she we pointed her to the popular wind illustration, “how do you know the wind exists? You can’t see it, it is invisible, but you feel and see the effects of the wind. Can’t the same be true of God?” That happened to click with her and she still hasn’t forgotten it. People make observations all the time about our world and believe things they have never seen. Have you ever seen a germ, or virus? Yet you believe the doctors who tell you that is why you got sick. Do you believe that George Washington existed (or any historical figure or event), why? Because you believe the historical account and record of eye witness people. How can we believe that Jesus actually existed and was who he said he was (God’s Son, and the Messiah), that he died and rose from the dead? Because of the eye witness testimony of people who were there and experienced it.
The Bible is clear that God always leaves a witness, a testimony of his existence and presence. One of those witnesses is creation itself. In Romans 1:20 the Apostle Paul writes, ““For ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see his invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse for not knowing God.” Evolution has taken its shots against the understanding of God as Creator, that all of what we see came about through small adaptations and genetic mutations following a Big Bang. There are serious flaws in the macro and micro working out of this theory (such as how did organic material, the building blocks of life, come out of inorganic material, and why does our research show that genetic mutations always lead to sterility not favorable mutations that carry down from generation to generation, or that the theory contradicts the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, nor are there any transitional fossils in the current record). But even if evolution is accepted it cannot explain how this all came about in the first place. It cannot explain how perfect and precise everything needs to be in order for life to exist on this planet (the tilt of the earth, the distance from the sun, the size and motion of the moon around the earth). If any one of these was off by the tiniest fraction, life wouldn’t exist.
Paul’s point is that creation cries out to us that we are not here by accident, and therefore no one is without excuse. No one will be able to say, “I never knew God existed,” because God’s testimony is all around us if we are willing to see it, but people who don’t want to see will not (Isaiah 6:9; Mark 4:12; Matthew 13:14). And so people choose to live their lives without God, practicing all sorts of immoral behavior (because, in their mind, there are no absolute moral standards, only the standards they determine), and while God doesn’t approve of it, and knows it is not what is best for us, or what he designed us for, he gives us over to the desires of our flesh. He’s like, “if that’s what you really want, then go ahead,” knowing it will just lead to our own destruction, and hopefully the eventual realization that it doesn’t lead to the happiness and fulfillment God desires for us. Or we can realize that there is a Creator, and that Creator has standards and we are violating his standards. We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23) and “Yet God, in his grace, freely makes us right in his sight. He did this through Christ Jesus when he freed us from the penalty for our sins (Romans 3:24 NLT).” Jesus, as the Son of God, paid the price for our sins through his death on the cross so we can be in right relationship with God and no longer under his judgment, but have abundant life (John 10:10) and eternal life (John 3:16).