Romans 1:20

Sons;

Today's Bible verse is one I rather like: Romans 1:20 - "For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse."  A bit wordy, perhaps, but then that's Paul.

To understand this, we need to first think about Paul specifically.  Peter and the other original disciples are mostly "working class" guys - fishermen and so on.  They're going to have some education, enough to read the scriptures, but not much else: they were seen as "uneducated."  So, if they have the equivalent of, say, an 8th grade education, Paul is a Ph.D.  He's been trained to be a rabbi, by some of the best rabbis alive at the time.  He is smart; as a Roman citizen he is probably literate in Greek philosophy and maybe even Roman history.  Obviously he knows the scripture backwards and forwards.  

Romans is, more so than his other letters, a deliberate statement of Christian theology.  This, he says, is what it means to be a Christian.  In starting out, he has to explain why one would need to be a Christian in the first place: the idea that we are unsaved, and that only by Christ can we become saved.  This is where Romans 1:20 comes in.

In this verse, Paul is saying that no one has an excuse not to realize that there is a God, and act accordingly.  Simply looking at nature ("what has been made") is enough to illustrate that.  Only God can create such a world.  And since you have nature in front of you, you don't have any way to say there is no God.  If you do, Paul says, you are deliberately denying it.  

This goes in with my own personal beliefs.  I am, in today's parlance, a believer in "intelligent design."  I recognize that evolution as a concept exists and has operated, but I believe that it was never random, but guided by God's active influence.  Why do it that way?  Who knows?  But that's the way God created the world.  However, I refuse to accept as logical the idea that all that we are, that all this magnificent diversity of the world, could ever be just the result of random chance.  Even our very concepts of biology seem to refute that idea - if you look at evolution authorities, at some point they will have to say the word, "somehow...."  The one thing they don't want to do is admit that that "somehow" is God.

What does that mean to us?  Well, for one, it gives us a way of understanding God's world better.  And, I think it gives us a new way to appreciate God (one your mother can certainly speak to us about), by looking at nature, at the trees, bugs, fish, whatever else, and thinking about how God created such a perfect world.  It's something to keep in mind, because in creation, God is all around us.  

Love,

Dad