Sinclair Ferguson

And the purpose of it all is that those who come to trust in Him might have the right to become the children of God.

Later on in his gospel, John explains to us that that comes into our lives through new birth, through regeneration, when we receive the Lord Jesus Christ.

But what he teaches us in the first chapter is this, that we who in Adam and Eve were created to be the children of God,

to live in loving fellowship with Him, to grow in the knowledge of Him, and who now have been excluded from that Garden of Eden where man and God walked together in love and in faithfulness, that we can now be restored to that, but only through Jesus Christ.

I don't know how long it took me for it to dawn on me that there is something quite spectacular about becoming a Christian.

I became a Christian because I was conscious of my sin and I knew I needed a Savior.

And by God's grace, I found the Savior.

What I didn't expect to find that still opens my mind in awe and wonder is that in coming to know the Savior, I'd actually come to know the Creator of the whole cosmos.

and that coming to know him as Savior meant that I now could look on the creation with fresh eyes, that it was created by the one who came into it in order to save me.

That's why one of my most vivid memories as a youngster singing hymns comes in those words I quoted earlier on in the week from Anna Laetitia Waring that are so true, that when you come to Christ as Savior, you discover that He is also the Creator, and something lives in every hue that Christless eyes have never seen.

I hope that's true for you too.

We've been thinking this week about God's revelation of Himself in creation.

His creation apocalypse, as we might say.

And we've been seeing just how all-embracing that revelation is.

It not only surrounds us in the created order, but it also invades us because we are part of that created order, and especially because we've been created as the image of God.

Now the Bible teaches us that even though we've distorted that image by our sinfulness, it hasn't been destroyed.

We can try to suppress that fact, the fact that we know that God is and that we are made as His image and likeness, but we can never ultimately destroy it.

So there's no escape from revelation.

We're spectators of it and we are participants in it.

Everyone who claims to be an atheist will somewhere, somehow, sometime give themselves away.