No Excuse

Romans 1:20

“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.”

There is a certain amount of information about God that has been made readily available to every man, woman and child who walks of the face of this earth, whether they want to recognize it or not. This valuable information wasn’t sent via text message, e-mail, a blog or letter mail. He has chosen to write this universal knowledge upon the type of parchment that has prevailed ever since people have walked upon our planet. He has given us these specific facts within the form of the earth and sky themselves.

It isn’t as if He has written every fact about Himself in this form. If you look to the skies and are able to see the message that He has entrusted to them, you won’t read the Ten Commandments. Neither do they reveal His stand on gay marriage, tattoos or Hanna Montana. What we have all been given, has been enough of a prompting in order to come to the place where we could know Him. Specifically, the earth and sky reveal to us His eternal power and divine nature.

What are the implications for this truth? If any of us were to take the time and look at the lives of those who spend the most time under the clear blue sky, sleeping on earth’s terrain, what would we find? If you charter a helicopter and are dropped off in the midst of some African tribe that has never made contact with the civilized world, what will you find? When the European world landed on the shores of North America some 500 years ago, what manner of people did they encounter? Atheists? So I’ve picked on Africa and North America. Perhaps these are isolated phenomenon. How about the indigenous people of Australia; the Aboriginals? The truth under investigation here is neither isolated nor regional. It is universal.

You find some striking similarities among these people groups do you not? They might not have known His name, nor His ‘great commission’, but there are some things that the earth and skies have revealed to them; His power and divine nature. These invisible qualities are described differently between peoples, and each group has a different way of putting the message together. What they do all have is the sense that there is some great power, and that power in itself has certain inescapable realities for the life they live. Unbelief doesn’t incubate very well apart from civilization.

Still, even among the more civilized, it takes some convincing for us to believe otherwise. That is precisely why the more prominent agnostics and atheists of our day need to be decent debaters. Have you ever asked or heard someone ask something to this effect?

“How could God allow something like this?”

The very fact that this question is ever asked reveals so much of what the human mind really does acknowledge about God. That question, in and of itself demonstrates that we know the very things which are revealed to us upon the land below and sky above; His Power and His Divine nature. That question would never be asked of someone who is known to be either powerless or bad.

If God were known to be powerless, we could never expect Him to do anything about the situation in the first place. If we knew Him to be bad, then we would never expect Him to uphold anything that is good. That’s why no one ever asks, “How could the devil allow something like this to happen.?” It tends to be those who those without faith who ask the question, ‘If God is good, then why do bad things happen?’, even though the very query itself, exhibits the indicator to the truth within.