This week on Things Unseen, I'd like to think with you about the ultimate unseen.

But I feel just a little odd telling you what I want to talk about, because I want to talk about God.

We do it casually, don't we?

And it's not only unbelievers, but also sometimes it's Christians who empty God's name of content.

We forget that it's God we're talking about, not the next door neighbour.

And the problem with our assumed familiarity and easy talk is it actually diminishes

and almost destroys our sense of the privilege of knowing him.

Because that's created not by our sense of familiarity, but by his identity, by who he is that we have come to know.

I sometimes think of it this way.

I see a line of ants scurrying across a paving stone, amazing creatures as the book of

proverbs reminds us.

But as my shadow falls on them, I'm sure it doesn't even cross

their minds to ask, why does Sinclair Ferguson keep blocking out the sun? We need to tell him we're

fed up with the way he towers over our lives. That an ant would talk about me is ridiculous.

No comparison between an ant and me.

No comparison between its brain and mine its instinct and my understanding.

Maybe if I were an entomologist who was also a qualified neuroscientist, I could perhaps compare

ant brains with human brains and detail the vast gulf between us and ants.

But the gulf between God, the Creator, and ourselves, his creatures, is immeasurably greater. We're talking about the God who spoke the

cosmos into being in all its vastness and diversity, the one whose imagination is of such

genius that he created the seemingly endless variety there is in the world. And usually when we talk about that, we're thinking only about the world we can actually see.

We take it for granted that we know what we mean when we say God.

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