1.
Please pray with me. May the words of my mouth and the meditation
of our hearts be pleasing in Your sight, O Lord our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen. The
message from God’s Word this morning as we begin our sermon series on What
Do You Know about God, is taken from Romans 1:18-25 and it’s entitled, “What
Do You Know about God…Through Nature,” dear brothers and sisters in Christ.
2.
He’s standing on the kitchen counter. He’s
pushed a chair over to help him climb. He has no shoes on and he can’t quite
reach the bag of Oreos stashed on the top shelf, so he’s hanging on to the
bottom shelf and getting ready to step on the microwave to get a little higher.
That’s when you come in. You say something gentle and enlightened, like “What
do you think you’re doing, young man? Get down from there this instant!” “But, Mommy,” he says, “I just wanted a
cookie.” “You ask for cookies. You don’t
just take them. And you don’t climb on the kitchen counter! You know that.”
“But Mommy, you never said not to.” And the tears begin. He’s right. You never told him not to go for
that bag of Oreos. You never forbade him to drag a chair over there and climb
up on the counter. It never even occurred to you to explain that one doesn’t
stand on a microwave oven. So he has a point. You didn’t tell him. But you
think, “He should have known.” And you’re right.
3.
He did know you wouldn’t like it. Why do
you think he did it while you were in the other room? Yes, you never said, “Don’t
eat the Oreos.” But your little boy didn’t just meet you yesterday. He
already has some idea of the kind of things that are okay and the kinds that
aren’t. He could have figured out that you would be upset. That’s one of the
reasons you are upset. So despite his plea of ignorance he gets time out
and no cookies.
4.
Romans 1 tells us that we are in a situation
like the little boy. God has made the world so that it shows us something about
him. Romans 1:18-25 says (read text from
bulletin) In fact, v 20 says that the world shows us clearly that God
exists and he is all powerful. We can learn that from the things God has made.
When God created the world he made it a source of revelation, a place where he
himself is revealed. That revelation tells us enough to know that there is a
God and that we owe him honor for his creation.
5.
Revelation is what you do when you communicate
something about yourself to another person. It’s disclosing yourself so that
someone else can see what you are like. We do this all the time in various
ways: the way we dress, the houses we live in, the cars we drive—all reveal
things about us. We also reveal ourselves in what we do: if you’re sitting
there frowning with your arms folded, I can make a pretty good guess at what
you are feeling. Most clearly of all, we can reveal ourselves in words, saying
much about who we are, what we need, and how we feel. Still, it is amazing how
much we learn about each other in nonverbal ways.
6.
God is a person. He has spoken to us. We have a special
revelation in Jesus and the Bible. They are God’s words of
revelation. But as a person, he also reveals himself in the things he does, in
nonverbal ways. The most visible of all the things he has done is all around
us. It is our environment. It’s the air and the earth.. It’s water and fire.
It’s you and me. All these things were made by him. In Bible language, they are
his creation. And they are made to reveal something about him to anyone who
cares to look. We call this his natural revelation. Nature, which he
created, reveals something about God.
7.
Creations reveal certain characteristics of
their creators. Right from the beginning we put our own unique stamp on the
things we make. Parents can walk through a school open house and pick their
child’s art work out of dozens of others because of the unique style that
little creator has. Romans 1 and Psalm 19 tell us that God’s creation does the
same thing. It bears the stamp of someone divine, powerful, and glorious. The
Creator is revealed in his creation.
8.
Why then doesn’t everyone know God? Why are
there so many confused ideas about God? Why do some people even deny that there
is a God? Evidently the revelation to be found in creation isn’t as clear as
you might expect. Paul says in Rom 1:18–19 that “God has made it plain,”
but it doesn’t seem all that plain. Plenty of people seem to be getting
it wrong. What use is a revelation that doesn’t do a very good job of
revealing?
9.
That’s why some Christians have wanted to leave
natural revelation out of theology. You need something stronger, something
better to build a theology. So, they say special revelation is the only way
to truly know God. They distrust any suggestion that we can learn anything
helpful about God except through Jesus and the Bible. One of the most famous discussions about this
issue happened in 1934 between two German theologians. Emil Brunner and Karl
Barth wrote articles debating whether you can build any kind of theology on
natural revelation, whether a “natural theology” is possible. Barth’s
response is famous—an article with a one word title, Nein! “No!” Why did
he feel that way despite the clear statement there in Romans that God has
revealed himself in nature? At Barth’s time some German Christians were using
natural theology to justify some of the ideas of the Nazi party. Supposedly on
the basis of natural revelation, they were arguing that you could be a
Christian and a Nazi too. That frightened Barth because it was so dangerously
wrong. So he said, “No!”
10.
That begins to show us the answer to why so many
people fail to accept God’s revelation of himself in creation. Through the ages
that revelation has been distorted into something ugly. People take what they
know of God, the things that are plain for anyone to see, and they transform
that knowledge into something that has no resemblance to God at all. They do what Paul said in vv 21–23, “For
although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to
him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.
Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of
the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals
and reptiles.” The Nazis took the
natural revelation of God and made it into an image of themselves. Throughout
history that has happened over and over again. You can understand why some
Christians think natural revelation is a bad business. Very frequently people
use it to go in the opposite direction from what God intended.
11.
But the natural revelation is still there. That
little boy climbing the kitchen counter may be trying very hard to forget about
what his mother might think. He may even be trying to imagine that his mother
would want him to get up there and get that cookie. But he knows the
truth about his mother. People who are willing to think about it can learn
something about God from his creation. The
natural revelation is there. You’ve seen it: the Milky Way on a clear night in
the mountains; the waves crashing on a rocky
beach; tomatoes hanging in your garden; geese honking along in perfect V formation; a newborn baby opening her eyes at you. It all
wears the imprint of the One who made it. As the psalm says, “no speech or
words are used,” but “their message reaches the ends of the earth”
(19:2–4).
12.
But the natural revelation can only take us so
far. And too often we take it and go the wrong way. Natural revelation can tell
us about the power of God. It can, show us that he is a God of order. But it
reveals nothing of God’s grace in Jesus Christ.
Yet, God hasn’t left us without knowledge of the Gospel. He’s walked
into the kitchen and caught us in the act and, with love and grace, told us the
Good News of the Gospel. That word is a special revelation. That word is the
Word, Jesus Christ, the Son of God himself. With Jesus, God completes his
revelation. In his Law he clearly shows us our sin and then he reveals to us
the answer to our sin—Jesus Christ. He takes us down off the counter and
changes us into people who don’t want to break his law because we know how much
our Father loves us. He takes our mistakes and our sins and gives us back his
truth and grace.
13.
Special revelation completes natural revelation.
Nature does, what Paul says in Acts 14:17. It shows us something of the
kindness of God. But it’s a kindness that can only be fully experienced and
understood in the special revelation of Jesus Christ. In fact, when we come to
know Jesus we see creation even more clearly. We recognize it as the work of
Jesus himself. The beginning of John’s gospel (1:3) says that Jesus, the Word,
was behind everything God made. “Through him [Jesus] all things were made.”
14.
The natural revelation reconfirms what Paul says
in Acts 14:17. God has not left himself without a testimony to those who do not
believe. As C. S. Lewis suggests, nonbelievers are in constant danger of
discovering God. Because his name is written all over the creation. It’s not
necessarily easy to remain, a non-believer—God has placed himself strategically
all over his creation.
15.
Back in the 1990s there was a newspaper story
about Rosa Parks. She’s the black woman that began the Montgomery boycott of
segregated buses by refusing to yield her seat to a white person. A man broke
into her home and found her sitting there. He recognized her and said, “Aren’t
you Rosa Parks?” She said yes. It was his moment of revelation, he knew
whose home he was in. He had the opportunity to honor her for who she is. But
he robbed her anyway! The natural
revelation insures that non-believers will always have the possibility of
recognizing whose home they are in, discovering that they are wronging God by
not believing. They have the opportunity then to honor and praise him. They may
refuse to do it, but God has given them the chance. Amen.
