By Chris WittsMonday 10 Oct 2022Morning Devotions with Chris WittsFaithReading Time: 1 minute
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Transcript:
In Part 1, I opened up this very big topic: Is it possible to know God? And the answer is: Yes, you can. Creation is obviously the way we look and ‘see’.
I can recall singing the old hymn:
This is my Father’s world:
He shines in all that’s fair;
In the rustling grass, I hear Him pass;
He speaks to me everywhere.
To me and many others it’s obvious that this amazing world of ours didn’t just happen accidentally. It had a cause—which means there was a ‘Cause-er’! And the more that scientists study—the more they are forced to admit this fact—that creation itself implies a Creator—an infinitely intelligent One! A scientist named Roger Penrose estimates that the odds of our universe just happening on its own are one in 10 Billion to the 30th power. That’s so large I can’t even describe it.
What We Can Learn About God
So the fact is we can know God exists just by looking at the world around us. But by looking, we can also know about him.
For example, we can know God loves incredible beauty.
How many times have you looked at a spectacular sunset—something so beautiful that words are inadequate. We get similar responses when we look at the mountains or at an ocean view or pictures of the stars or even when we use a microscope to look at a tiny cell! The Being who created this universe, has an eye for beauty, doesn’t he?
We can also know that our Creator—God—loves variety.
He made all shapes, sizes, colours, intensities. Did you know that God made over 300,000 species of beetles alone? I mean, couldn’t the world have been happy with just 50,000 species? Why did God create 300,000? Did you know that in one cubic foot of snow there are 18 million snowflakes and no two of them are alike? Now, nobody else is going to appreciate this but God. So he obviously loves variety!
And perhaps God’s most obvious love, is his love for people.
We know this because science shows the cosmos was made with people in mind. The scientist Francis Collins writes:
When we [scientists] look at the universe, it looks as if it knew we were coming. There are 15 constants—the gravitational constant, various constants about the strong and weak nuclear force, etc.—constants that have precise values. If any one of those constants was off by even one part in a million or in some cases, by one part in a million million, the universe could not have actually come to the point where we see it. There would have been no galaxy, stars, planets, or people.
World renowned physicist Stephen Hawking admits:
The odds against a universe like ours emerging out of something like the Big Bang are enormous. I think there are clearly religious implications. It would be very difficult to explain why the universe would have begun in just this way except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.
What God Revealed to Us
Did you know also God has also revealed himself to the created. This is literally nothing new because from the very beginning of time it was God’s desire to be known by the created—by humans—the crown of his creation.
The Genesis record says that God actually walked with Adam and Eve in the Garden that he made for them. Later we see God walking with Enoch, speaking with Noah, calling Abraham, wrestling with Jacob and appearing to Moses in the burning bush. We see this throughout the Old Testament in events like these and in many others like God:
- giving his law to his people
- sending the prophets
- performing great miracles and inspiring the Bible.
It is readily apparent that God desires that his people know him—that they know what he is like.
We see this in Acts 17:26-28 (CEV) where Paul said:
From one person God made all nations who live on earth, and he decided when and where every nation would be.
God has done all this, so that we will look for him and reach out and find him. He isn’t far from any of us, and he gives us the power to live, to move, and to be who we are.
One of the clearest ways we see God revealing himself to us is in the fact that he placed within every human being a hunger to know him.
In Jeremiah 24:7 (NIV) God says, “I will give them [people like you and me] a heart to know me [a longing to know me], that I am the Lord.” Because of this part of our ‘wiring’ I believe all people know in the depths of their being that there is a God. They may not admit it but they know God is there!