Sinclair B. Ferguson

Paul puts it like this in Romans 1, verse 19, God's invisible attributes have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made.

John Calvin puts it, I think, delightfully when he says this,

The acts of creation were like God putting on his outside clothes in order that we might see who he is, what he is like, and what he has done.

It's in this way that the invisible God makes his invisible attributes known to us invisible things.

And that's revelation.

But we're blind to it because of our sin.

And our eyes are opened to it by the grace of Jesus Christ.

That's why the hymn writer Anna Laetitia Waring once wrote, something lives in every hue that Christless eyes have never seen.

You know, as Christians, we certainly don't know everything.

But the great thing is we know something about everything.

We know that it's been made by God.

We know that we're living in his world.

And we know that we are secure with him.

We've been thinking all week about the new year.

And as the years pass, sometimes they become a bit of a blur.

Sometimes we watch politicians on television, for example, and we're staggered by their remembrance of dates and places and what was discussed at meetings.

And most of us forget more than we ever remember, it seems.

But it's interesting, isn't it, that events that transform our lives, events that shape our destiny or that change our future, even though we may not have thought too much about them at the time, are events that we remember forever.

And I suppose most of us can point back perhaps even to a single moment, a single hour, an experience, somebody we met that has radically changed the direction of our future lives.

Often at the beginning of the new year, I think about the experience that the prophet Isaiah had in this connection.