A teacher tells her class of five-year-olds they can paint whatever they like.

After 20 minutes or so, she walks around the room to see what they've painted.

Oh, that's a nice house, Johnny. Well done. What a lovely fish, Cynthia. Good job.

Finally, she gets to Jeff, and his painting is a wildly abstract blur of colors and shapes.

Oh, that's nice. What's that, Jeff?

It's God, says Jeff.

But no one's ever seen God, says the teacher.

Well, says Jeff, they have now.

Over the years, there have been no shortage of people who've painted imaginative pictures of God.

There have been gods in the shape of animals, gods in the shape of fire or

water, gods who look like the stars and the sun, distant gods, inner gods, benign gods and fearsome ones.

And if I were to ask you to paint your picture of God, I'm guessing it would be different to Jeff's,

and probably different to

mine. Some people presumably would just leave the paper blank. But would any of our pictures be

accurate? How would we know? The only way we'd know for sure is if God had actually revealed

himself. Theologians speak of two ways in which God has

revealed himself. There's general revelation and there's special revelation. General revelation

is God revealing himself to everyone through the universe he's created. The natural world.

This is what Psalm 19 means when it says, the heavens declare the glory of God.

It's what Romans 1 means when it says God's eternal power and divine nature have been clearly

perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made.

So, the existence of the glass wing butterfly, the Pacific Ocean, and the hourglass nebula

...