How God Speaks to Men through Creation

Raw, unedited transcript from video

There is a God we want, and there is a God who is—they are not the same.

Good morning, men! So, it’s football season, and I’ve got an old football injury that’s starting to come back already. It’s that one where I keep changing the channel—that repetitive stress injury in my thumb. All right, so that was very funny. Let’s move on from there.

We are thrilled to be starting a new series today called “How God Speaks to Men.” Before we get going, we want to give a shout-out to those men who are joining us online, either through video or audio. We want to give a special shout-out to a group called The Sports Barn in Bennington, Nebraska. They’ve been meeting for 16-plus years on Friday mornings. They have about 35 men coming live and another maybe 25 online—businessmen and also men from the Open Door Mission in downtown Omaha. They’re led by Mike Bliss, and it’s a great ministry. Pat Leopold from our group’s been there a few times.

So, I wonder if you would join me in giving these men—and also the others who are joining us—a big, rousing Man in the Mirror welcome on three: One, two, three—hurrah! Men, we are honored to have you with us today.

I want to talk to you about how God speaks through creation.

Chester, Pennsylvania: I was speaking to a men’s group at a high school cafeteria. Walking to the cafeteria down a hallway, I saw a poster on the wall. It showed deep space with the caption: “Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not. Both ideas are overwhelming.”

How does God speak through creation?

Well, the first thing I want us to look at today is concluding that God can’t not exist. We’re not doing apologetics in a big way here—we are a Bible study; we presuppose the existence of God. However, I worded this as a double negative to kind of make it interesting—I don’t know if it is or not—but anyway, concluding that God can’t not exist.

So, let’s begin with the question: What is creation?

Genesis 1:1 says, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” And so, creation—the heavens and the earth—and God did this in six yoms, six days. The Hebrew word for “day” is “yom” (Y-O-M). Everybody say “yom”—yom.

The word yom in Hebrew is interpreted different ways. It can be a 24-hour day; it can be a period of time; it even, once in the Bible, is used for eternity. So, Genesis 1—I don’t personally believe it was written for a scientific understanding of creation; I think it was written for a theological understanding of creation. You can believe whatever you want—you can believe in a 24-hour literal day or you can believe in a period of time.

But here’s the point: There were things that were created by God in each yom:

1. First yom: Light and night.
2. Second yom: Sky.
3. Third yom: Land, seas, and vegetation.
4. Fourth yom: Sun, moon, stars—celestial beings.
5. Fifth yom: Fish of the sea and birds of the air.
6. Sixth yom: Livestock, wild animals, and human beings.

So, whenever you see the word “creation,” like in the New Testament—the whole creation groans—that includes all of these things, and that includes you. You are also part of creation. So that’s just definitional.

The first question is: Why is there something instead of nothing? This will turn your brain into a pretzel or a cold gate of spaghetti, but why is there something instead of nothing?

Lucretius is attributed with saying sometime around the third century, “Ex nihilo nihil fit”—out of nothing, nothing comes. The idea that there can be something coming from nothing is a mind-blowing thought.

And then there are now people like Stephen Hawking and others taking it further, saying that creation started with a point of singularity—a little tiny dot—and then there was this Big Bang. And maybe that’s the way it happened. But the question is, if there was a Big Bang, who made it go bang, or what made it go bang?

From the beginning, even the Greek philosopher Aristotle talked about the need for an uncaused cause or an unmoved mover. This has always been part of the calculus of thinking about creation.

I believe that we can very easily create the necessity for God, and we can do that simply with one illustration. I can give you many—I’ve got a bunch of things like this in my book “Is Christianity for You?” There’s a chapter in there about the idea of God—is the idea of God logical?

Just one example—and I know all the arguments: cosmological, teleological, epistemological, moral—I know all the apologetic arguments. But here’s the thing: If you walked into your kitchen and you saw a cake on the counter, you might be surprised that there’s a cake rather than no cake, but you would never think it got there by itself. Where there is a cake, there is necessarily a baker. And that’s the way it is with creation.

I think that’s enough for today. The big idea is this: I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist. It takes—honestly, if you think about it—it takes more faith to believe there is not a God than it takes faith to believe that there is a God. In fact, in the people who debate these things, it’s a very clever mind trick to talk about atheism as its own belief system. In other words, you have to have belief that God does not exist—you have to have faith that God does not exist—because you can’t go behind every asteroid in the whole cosmos. Until you have thoroughly investigated the entire cosmos and have been able to go behind every asteroid and every planet and every sun and discern and observe with your own scientific self that there is no God there, then you can’t say that there’s no God, you see? So, I don’t have enough—I don’t have that much faith based on what I see.

So, what is God saying through creation, and how is He saying it?

First, how is He saying it? How does God speak through creation?

Psalm 19 says:

“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.”

I remember the place and the moment that it first occurred to me—the necessity of a Divine Being. I was in college; I was on a date; I was next to a little lake in an apartment complex where she lived, and we were laying on a blanket staring up at the sky. And the heavens are pouring forth speech, declaring the glory of God.

I had grown up in a non-Christian home that didn’t know Christ—I’ve talked about that before—so I wasn’t unfamiliar with the idea, the word “God.” For me, God didn’t necessarily have to be a machine or an idea or an impersonal force. But when I was looking up at the sky, I was just struck with the idea of the necessity of God. It’s not possible for God not to exist because of how God is speaking to us in creation.

And the text goes on:

“They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them.”

How many of you have heard of Albert Mehrabian’s concept of communication? He’s a scholar from the 1970s that stated that 7% of communication is words, 38% is tone of voice, and 55% is body language. You’ve heard this—I know you have because you’re a drama teacher. So yes, the actual words—and by the way, God speaks too. If any of you were around for the thunderstorm yesterday—God has a voice. But in creation, most of God’s voice is nonverbal communication. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not speech; it doesn’t mean that it’s not communication—just that it’s nonverbal.

“They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice—the body language, if you will—goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. In the heavens, God has pitched a tent for the sun.”

And the text goes on from there. So that’s a little taste of how God speaks in creation.

But what does creation tell us? What does creation tell us?

Romans 1:19-20 says:

“What may be known about God is plain to people because God has made it plain to them. 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.”

And by the way, this is called General Revelation, as opposed to Special Revelation, which is Scripture. General Revelation is God’s revealing Himself through His heavens and earth, and then Special Revelation is God revealing Himself through Scripture. So we’re in the realm of General Revelation.

There is no reason why people should not believe in God because He’s made His invisible attributes—His eternal power and divine nature—clear to all of us, to everyone, to every human being.

Some of these qualities of God—these invisible qualities—you know what they are. I actually fast and pray for people one day a week, and the first entry in my note is a list of God’s attributes, which I review—not every week, but often. And by the way, when it says in the text “His invisible qualities, His eternal power and divine nature”—invisible power is dunamis, that’s His omnipotence. And His divine nature—that’s His deity. Those are examples of His invisible qualities—that’s not the complete list; those are just a couple of examples.

But here are some others:

• Holy
• Sovereign
• Great
• Awesome
• Almighty
• Creator
• Loving
• Gracious
• Merciful
• Faithful
• Patient
• Omnipotent
• Omniscient
• Omnipresent
• Omnibenevolent
• Self-existent
• All-wise
• Eternal
• Invisible
• Infinite
• Immortal
• Immutable
• Transcendent
• Immanent

And many more invisible qualities that we see.

If you want to, you can turn with me in your Bibles—well, of course, I don’t turn anything anymore; I look it up on my phone—but Romans chapter 1, and we go one verse up into verse 18. This is a place where I think the Mehrabian concept of tone of voice is very apropos because the text says:

“The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all godlessness and wickedness of people who suppress the truth by their wickedness.”

So, tone of voice: “The wrath of God is being revealed”—revelation—“against all the godlessness and wickedness of people.”

Or, if you look at the hospitable nature of Earth compared to the vastness and darkness and harshness of the rest of creation—and how you get a few miles off the face of the Earth and you freeze to death instantly, and somebody taps you and you crack into a million pieces—the kindness and the love of the deity of God—you might also read this:

“The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all godlessness and wickedness of people who suppress the truth by their unrighteousness.”

I like the NASB version; it doesn’t call it “wickedness”; it calls it “unrighteousness.” I think that might even be a better way of putting it. NASB, by the way, is a word-for-word translation, and so sometimes people, when they want to really get the nuanced meaning of a verse, will go to the NASB—well, actually, they’ll go to the original language.

So, eleven times in Genesis 1 it says “God said”—in English, with perfect diction—“Let there be light.” It would be interesting to know what God’s language is, but I always think of Him—when I’m reading along, I’m just thinking, “Well, yeah, He’s speaking in English,” right?

But it says “suppress the truth, suppress the truth, suppressing the truth.” When I was in seminary, R.C. Sproul was teaching the Systematic Theology class, and he gave the most vivid illustration of this. I tried to improve on it this week; I couldn’t improve on it, so I’m just going to tell you the way R.C. Sproul described this suppression of the truth.

He said it’s like taking a giant coiled spring—like the one you might put in the suspension of an automobile—and trying to press it down. It’s so hard to press it down, and you can only hold it down for so long. That’s what this text is saying—that you can’t suppress this truth; you can’t suppress this truth because God’s invisible qualities are made plain by what is seen.

So the big idea again here now: I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist. You can only suppress that truth so long. Even Richard Dawkins, one of the most famous atheists of our time, has now declared that he’s a cultural Christian. He says, “I still don’t believe in Christianity, but I declare myself to be a cultural Christian because I see the benefits of Christianity in society. It’s a much better way of living,” he says.

And then—I forget the guy—he wrote a book called… Well, I guess I shouldn’t go there because I just thought of it and I can’t remember the whole story. But anyway, there’s another famous atheist who just converted here within the last few years, because you can suppress the truth—you can only suppress the truth for so long.

And then creation groans. We have the Fall—we know that—and that is the Achilles’ heel of the Christian argument: this suffering, this gratuitous suffering. But even that’s explained when we get to Special Revelation.

But the creation itself—you can be a glass-half-full person or a glass-half-empty person. But even if you’re not a believer, you can look at the creation and see—as was talked about by our MC—you can see the butterflies; you can see the mama duck and the six or eight little ducklings swimming behind, trying to keep up with the mama with all their life; or you can see the grandeur of the evening sky.

I told you here, when I went through the Grand Canyon—you know, Orion’s Belt for us has, in this area anyway, when you look at Orion’s Belt, all the stars in Orion’s Belt have this kind of haze around them. But when you’re in the Grand Canyon, the haze is gone, and you can see them clearly, and you just marvel at creation. You look at the vastness of the mountains and the height of the mountains, and you think about the mystery of fish being able to breathe underwater—all these different things. And you think about the part of the glass that’s half full—or maybe 90% full, really—and you look at this and you just have to say, “I can’t suppress this truth any longer. I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist.”

And then finally, what happens when we do hear creation? We are filled with awe, with humility, with praise and thanks.

Psalm 8, verses 3 and 4—this was Dr. Martin Luther King’s favorite psalm. It begins by talking about how you put praise in the mouths and voices of infants and children. And then in verse 3:

“When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, human beings that you care for them?”

We’re struck with this awe, and it’s humbling—it’s humbling.

And then, if you look later in the verses that follow Romans 1:20, it talks about how people neither gave thanks nor glorified God, but they exchanged the truth of God for a lie and the glory of God for idols. So when people focus on—and many people do come to a place where they worship the creation or parts of the creation and make idols—instead of being reminded of the Creator who created the heavens and the earth and worshiping the Creator.

But when we do pause and think about the greatness and the majesty of God—“When I consider your heavens, when I do look up into that nighttime sky and I see the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place—what am I that you’re mindful of me? Who are we that you care for us?”—we’re struck by this awe, this humbleness, of the self-existent Being who made something out of nothing.

So, the greatest lesson that I’ve ever learned—I’ve shared it here many times—but this coming to hear God in creation doesn’t come once and finally; it’s like He takes us to school over and over and over again.

I worshiped the creation—in my mid-thirties, I was worshiping the creation. I had made an idol out of my business, and God humbled me. I’m grateful for it—wasn’t at the time. And in the rubble of all that, I’m sitting around one day, and these kinds of psalms are speaking to me in a new and fresh way. And this thought is in my mind, and as I say, I think it’s the greatest lesson—I want to close with that. See if this doesn’t make sense to you:

There is a God we want, and there is a God who is—they are not the same God. And the turning point of our lives is when we stop seeking the God we want and start seeking the God who is. Does this make sense?

Just pause for a moment—what have you been thinking? God is who He is, and no amount of me or you wanting to reinvent God in our imaginations to be the God that we want Him to be is going to have one iota of impact on His unchanging nature and character. And so our task is to hear the voice of God—in this particular session, through creation—to draw us to seek the God who is. And then also to remember, you probably don’t have enough faith to be an atheist—not really.

Let’s pray.

Father in Heaven, thank You for how You speak to men, how You speak to people, and how You speak to us. We pray, Father, that we would have a new and fresh perspective and appreciation—a glass-half-full approach to worshiping You, being filled with awe and praise and humility and thanks for what You’ve done in the creation. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

All right, that’s number one.

Questions for your table discussions:

1. Where were you and what were you doing when God first revealed Himself to you through creation? What was your “blanket” experience?
2. Read Romans 1:18-20. What qualities of God have you clearly seen and understood through His voice in creation? Have you ever suppressed the truth? You might give an example.
3. Have you been a glass-half-full or a glass-half-empty person about creation? What have you been reminded of today that will be helpful, and how so?

Do we have any first-time visitors this morning? If you are—okay, great. So we have a visitors’ table, and Robert, if you want to come there, that’s fine, or stay where you are. Over here in the front right-hand corner—we’d love to have visitors up there and have a chance to say hello and get to know you a little bit.

Let’s break into tables, and we’ll see you next week. Thanks!