[Part 1 of 4]
Since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—His eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. (Romans 1:20 NIV)
The first-century Christian convert, Paul claims that we can “clearly” see God’s eternal power and divine nature (that which compels us to worship) in what He has created. So what is it we can actually witness in the wild? This question compelled me over the years to attend more carefully to the natural world and also to learn from others about what they have discovered while reading pages from the “book” of God’s works in the wilderness. Here’s a sampling of what I believe we can witness most dramatically when we enter the unspoiled areas of what John Calvin called “the theater of God’s glory”:
Seemingly endless time and space. Arguments in the church about whether the earth is young or old often blind us to the fact that, according to Paul, the material world will provide evidence of God’s power being “eternal.” Time has no beginning or ending apparent to our human senses or understanding—a fact I realized as a teenager that would sometimes cause my mind to whirl in the dark hours of the night. Because the earth-bound human mind cannot conceive of eternality, we want to either deny it or somehow bring it into our human scope. But we can’t. Space too has no span measurable by our human instruments. Using our most powerful microscopes, we find no limit to smallness. In the largest telescopes, bigness gets forever bigger. Yes, timelessness and infinity are frightening realities for time-bound finite creatures to ponder. Nonetheless, they are actualities we can “clearly see” in order to keep us on bent knees before our Creator.
Mystifying light, energy, and matter. Even in this day when scientific studies tell us so much about the cosmos, the true nature of light, energy, and matter still defies human definition and understanding. Because we know so m
uch about what these natural features do and how they do it, we usually forget that we operate with them much like a person who skillfully drives a car, but knows next to nothing about what’s under the hood. We need to recover the sense of awe that primitive civilizations had regarding these core elements of nature—not that we might worship them but that we might better worship their Creator and Sustainer.
Conservation of energy Campfires have to rank near the top among the joys of a wilderness adventure. One of the first things we do when we reach a campsite is to build a fire and seek to maintain it. Then come nightfall we sit cross-legged and transfixed by the phenomenon of carbon being consumed and being turned into light and heat energy and carbon dioxide—CO2 that the trees from which we took our fuel are “ingesting” and turning into oxygen so that it can help burn the 
wood the next generation will use to build their campfires! What a delight. What a mystery. All the energy and matter the Creator gave us in the beginning is still here: the definitive example of recycling! For all our human wisdom, we don’t really know much about the why and how of this fact. When it comes down to it, as Einstein discovered, we ultimately can’t even tell the difference between matter and energy. Perhaps it is this that fascinates us about campfires—and the reason that building a campfire almost becomes a sacrament, a celebration of creation that honors the ultimate inscrutability of our Creator. That’s no doubt also the fact that drew wilderness-dwelling Moses to the burning bush, because for the first time a human being, as far as we know, was seeing the Author of matter and energy change the rules. And from that unusual fire came the voice identifying itself as the “I am”—the eternally existent One and the source of all things. That’s also the reason the religious authorities of first-century Israel were so astonished by Jesus’ confession that He too was the “I am.” The great Creator became our Savior!
Astronomical extravagance and magnitude. Realizing how immense one galaxy is and how many stars, planet
s, and moons it contains staggers the mind, but grasping the fact that there are billions of such galaxies is beyond the human mind’s capacity to take hold of. We think we can somehow bring into human scope the dimensions of God’s cosmic creation by using specific measures like “light years.” One night under the stars in the wilderness, however, is enough to show us that the extravagance and magnitude of the universe is beyond our imagination and beyond our mathematical calculations. Astronomers say, for instance, that one star is twenty million light years away and another is a billion light years distant from Earth—figures based on the speed of light (at 186,000 miles per second). In saying so, we think we’ve made the universe measurable. How foolish. How proud. Reality mocks such an assumption.
Wonderful life. Life is a human mystery like light, energy, and matter. Scientists don’t know what it is or how it came into a cosmos that is almost totally hostile to life. And there is no evidence that it exists anywhere else in the universe. In the 
wilderness there is one constant celebration of life, the varieties of which are without number. That’s one reason that abuse of our wilderness areas seems to be so profane. Realizing that human beings are carelessly causing the extinction of thousands of life forms that are the miraculous handiwork of God ought to fill us with shame—and apprehension. The Bible affirms that God loves all that He has made. Certainly our destruction of these living creatures will not continue without negative consequences for humanity.
[Next week: Fearful, but essential, death; awesome power; revitalizing stillness; profound mystery]
Dean Ohlman is the host of RBCMinistries' Wonder of Creation website: wonderofcreation.org
