No Real Atheists
Things Unseen with Sinclair B. Ferguson
Ligonier Ministries
4.9 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 10 January 2023
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Since we live in a world where everything reveals God, no one can ultimately escape the reality of His existence. Today, Sinclair Ferguson demonstrates how Christians can respond to professing atheists and point them toward the truth.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This week we've been thinking about divine revelation. The word the New Testament uses is |
| 0:12.8 | apocalyptic. The word that gives us the alternative title for the last book of the Bible, |
| 0:19.3 | the apocalypse of John. It means unveiling, disclosing something to us that otherwise would |
| 0:27.1 | be hidden from us. And yesterday I was commenting on the fact that God reveals Himself in everything |
| 0:32.6 | that He has made, as Paul says in Romans 1, 19, His invisible attributes become visible |
| 0:39.8 | to us in the created order. As at Watts wrote to him about this, I sing the almighty power |
| 0:47.0 | of God, and it's last verse captures this. There's not a plant or flower below, but make |
| 0:53.5 | sure glories known and clouds arise and tempest blow by order from your throne. I often think |
| 1:01.9 | in this connection of some words of the great Dutch theologian Herman Bavink. He writes in his |
| 1:08.4 | Reformed dogmatics, according to scripture, the whole universe is a creation, and hence also a |
| 1:16.6 | revelation of God. In an absolute sense, nothing is atheistic. There is no atheistic world, and there |
| 1:28.6 | are no atheistic people. Nor are there atheistic persons. I know that sounds a staggering claim, but |
| 1:37.3 | actually it's just a paraphrase of what Paul says in Romans 1, 19, through 21, isn't it? If |
| 1:43.9 | everything there is, apart from God, has been made by God. Well then, the words of Psalm 139 are |
| 1:51.9 | true in this particular sense, even if you take the wings of the morning and travel at the speed |
| 1:56.9 | of light to the furthest part of the earth, to flee from God. When you land, you will still be |
| 2:03.4 | confronted by the same revelation of God in creation that you were trying to escape from. |
| 2:09.5 | It's as though God had planted quiet voices in everything in creation to make them say, |
| 2:15.8 | there is no last exit from my revelation. I wonder if you see what that means? It's exactly what Isaac |
| 2:24.6 | Watts wrote. Nothing is atheistic. There's not a plant or flower below, but makes God's glories |
| 2:32.2 | known, and since that is the inescapable environment in which we live, as Bavink goes on to say, |
| 2:40.5 | there are no real atheists, there are only hiding atheists. Now, I'm sure Herman Bavink wasn't denying |
... |
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