“To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light … could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.” – Charles Darwin
Is there anything about our world that blows you away? Perhaps the way that every colour can seamlessly blend together across a vast landscape and not look messy, or the contrast between the intricate symmetry and colouring of delicate flowers and the awesome power behind a lightning storm? Or how about something to do with us human beings that you think is simply amazing, like the fact that we have hundreds of thousands of miles of nerves running throughout our bodies? All of these do it for me, and they’re just a few of the innumerable examples of the stuff that has the power to stop me in my tracks and leave me saying ‘wow’.
The Bible tells us that ”… 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.” (Romans 1:20), and I think that makes complete sense; there’s a reason we go and sit at the seaside with our fish and chips and not in front of the local car dealership, right? To use another car analogy, whilst we can certainly appreciate the workmanship and skill seen in a factory-fresh Lamborghini, park up next to a big, old tree or in front of a glowing sunset and the difference in appeal and beauty between the two will be unavoidably striking. The fact is, there’s an incomparable beauty to the natural world that we are all drawn to. But why is that the case? Why should anything be beautiful without a divine creator? Surely if all things came to exist by an unpredictable and entirely unplanned series of events, there’s no such thing as beauty because there is no absolute standard by which we can say if something is beautiful or not. In other words, without an ultimate source to tell us what is beautiful in the first place, why would we think anything is beautiful at all?
I pray that the next time you’re stopped in your tracks by some unexplainable beauty in our world, or even the wider universe, you remember that it might just be that you’re pinching back the curtain and catching a tiny glimpse of just how magnificent God is. The great news is that we aren’t meant to simply look-on from afar until we die. That same God, who’s beauty is revealed throughout the universe, came to this Earth in the person of Jesus Christ to take care of everything that gets in the way of our eternal destiny with Him. He became His own creation in order to save it from itself. Now, that really is something to leave us speechless.
“That if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.” – Romans 10:9-10
