What the Bible says about God's Invisible Attributes Seen in Creation
(From Forerunner Commentary)

Genesis 1:26-28

Two things are made especially plain. God states three times in verse 27 that man is created. In verses 26-27, He says four times that man is created in the image of God. He wants us to grasp those points because the same applies to us! Even though we are now about 6,000 years from when He first spoke those words, these realities have not changed one iota.

In addition, God clearly gave us beings created in His image authority over animals. That authority has not been taken from us. This dominion implies responsibility in managing them that we owe to our Creator.

Many people seek to escape the responsibility of answering to our Creator, devising complex explanations to deny His existence to themselves and others. They may reason that, if He does not exist, how can they be responsible for submitting to His commands?

They will move heaven and earth, as the saying goes, looking for proof to back their denial of God. The great bulk of mankind lacks the resources, the time, or the education to make such a search, so for their own benefit, they simply deny His existence by ignoring Him. These two categories of people are part of the “Nones”—those who claim no spiritual attachment whatever—of this generation.

Others, without making any real effort to search out the truth, create a god or goddess they are comfortable with and worship him or her to salve their consciences. They do not seem to grasp that their dodges do not alter their responsibility to conform to what God laid out in the beginning.

Another category is quite worrisome: the sincere folk who consider themselves Christian. However, either due to false teaching in their churches or perhaps their own laziness, they believe that much of the Old Testament no longer applies to them. In their minds, it has been “done away” along with what they consider Old Covenant laws, deliberately ignoring what Jesus Himself says about those same laws (Matthew 5:17-20).

However, God's Word still stands, and mankind is still responsible to follow this covenant, as Romans 1:20-21 declares:

For since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead [margin, divine nature], so that they are without excuse, because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened.

John W. Ritenbaugh
Leadership and Covenants (Part Five)

Romans 1:19-21

The tension between God's keeping a secret and sharing it with others mirrors another basic dichotomy, His presence and His absence. God's presence (or His messengers') is revelatory, while His absence perpetuates the “mystery of godliness,” which the apostle Paul speaks about in I Timothy 3:16.

This same apostle pointedly tells us one of the ways God reveals Himself. Anglican clergyman J.B. Phillips captures the spirit of Paul's comments nicely:

Now the holy anger of God is disclosed from Heaven against the godlessness and evil of those men who render truth dumb and impotent by their wickedness. It is not that they do not know the truth about God; indeed he has made it quite plain to them. For since the beginning of the world the invisible attributes of God, e.g. his eternal power and deity, have been plainly discernible through things which he has made and which are commonly seen and known, thus leaving these men without a rag of excuse. They knew all the time that there is a God, yet they refused to acknowledge him as such, or to thank him for what he is or does. Thus they became fatuous in their argumentations, and plunged their silly minds still further into the dark. (Romans 1:19-21, The New Testament in Modern English)

One of the design-characteristics of God's creation is its ability to reveal the power and divinity of its Creator. It does that so clearly, Paul emphasizes, that mankind has no excuse whatsoever to deny His existence. Whether these wicked individuals instruct about astronomy in an Ivy League university's lecture hall or write a book about theology, their arguments, Paul says, are fatuous—mindless and silly.

Charles Whitaker
Clouds (Part One): A Really Special Cloud


 

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