Yesterday I said that I thought we probably needed to think more about this biblical idea

that since the whole of creation is a revelation of God, then nothing is ultimately atheistic.

There's no last exit from divine revelation.

I mentioned a Dutch Theologian Hermann Bavink, let me mention another great Dutch Theologian

Abraham Kuiper. He is a beautiful statement he makes in his encyclopedia of Theology when

he says, if the cosmos is the theater of revelation, in this theater man is both actor and spectator.

We were thinking yesterday about being spectators of revelation, but we're also actors on

the stage. Why is that? Because we're made as the image of God. We're made to reflect God.

The creation account in Genesis 1 climaxes with God making man in a different way from the way

he had made other creatures, making man after holding a divine counsel and making him in particular

as his image in order to reflect him and to imitate him. And so you see in the opening two

chapters of the Bible that as God has created all things and filled all things. So man as his

image is given a little garden and he's told to tend it and keep it and to fill it and indeed

to extend it. It's almost as though God wanted Adam and Eve to be able to walk with him in the

cool of the day and to discuss the things they had in common. It's a beautiful picture.

But you see what it means. It means that we can never escape the revelation of God not only

because we are surrounded by it, but because in a sense we carry it around with us even although

we have defaced and deformed it. Which is exactly the point that Paul makes in his sermon

to the Athenians when he quotes a couple of pagan writers as saying,

in God we live and move and have our being and we are indeed his offspring.

So that it's not only that there is no last exit from divine revelation that surrounds us.

It actually invades us. Remember how Ecclesiastes puts it, God has set this burden upon us.

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