The Silent Sermon

This is the second entry in a four-part series, Ways to Know God. You can read from the beginning here.

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. — Psalm 19:1

Paul makes a claim in Romans 1 that should give us pause. He does not say the natural world suggests God, or that it might point toward a Creator for those who are inclined to believe. He says God’s invisible attributes — His eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly perceived in the things that have been made, ever since creation began (Rom. 1:20). The word he uses is kathoratai (καθοράται): clearly seen, fully visible, perceived without ambiguity.

This is a strong claim. And the psalmist agrees. The heavens are not whispering. They are declaring. The sky is not hinting. It is proclaiming. Creation is a silent sermon that never stops preaching, and the congregation is every human being who has ever looked up.

Consider the sea turtle. She crosses thousands of kilometers of open ocean and returns to lay her eggs on the exact beach where she was born — not a nearby beach, not a similar one, the same one. No map. No compass. Scientists explain this through sensitivity to the earth’s magnetic field, a biological instrument calibrated to a precision we are still learning to understand.

But here is what the explanation does not explain: why that instrument exists at all, why it works, why the world it reads is stable enough for it to work in. Every layer of the answer opens onto another layer. And at some point the layers stop being science and start being wonder.

The psalmist saw this. O LORD, how manifold are your works! In wisdom have you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures (Ps. 104:24). Creation does not merely function. It overflows. It is excessive in its complexity, extravagant in its order, as if made by someone who found the making delightful.

Francis Collins led the Human Genome Project, the effort to map the three billion base pairs of human DNA, completed in 2003. He had started his adult life as an atheist. What changed him was not, in the end, a scientific discovery. It was a dying patient who asked him what he believed, a question he could not answer, and a long road that eventually led him to C.S. Lewis and then to faith.

But when he arrived at faith, he brought his science with him. He looked at the genome — the instruction book written into every living cell — and called it the language of God. Not as a metaphor exactly. As a description of what he saw: information of staggering complexity and elegance, the kind that in every other context we associate with a mind.

He later wrote that the God of the Bible is also the God of the genome, and that the laboratory can be as much a place of worship as the cathedral. A man who had spent his career reading the book of creation had come to believe there was an Author.

But here is what the sermon cannot say.

It can tell you that Someone made this. It can fill you with awe at the scale and precision of what exists. It can humble you, quiet you, open something in you that daily life keeps closed. The heavens declare the glory of God. That declaration is real and powerful and not to be dismissed.

What the heavens cannot tell you is what that Someone is like.

They cannot tell you whether the Creator loves you, or is indifferent to you, or is pleased with you, or has any thoughts about you at all. They cannot tell you what to do with your guilt, or what waits after death, or whether the ache you carry has an answer. They point upward but cannot introduce you to what is up there.

Paul knew this. He is building toward something. The visible things reveal the invisible power and nature, and that is extraordinary. But it is not enough to know God. It is only enough to know that He is.

The sermon is real. But a sermon is not the same as a conversation.

This week, something in creation will try to get your attention. It may be the way light falls in the morning, or the complexity of something living, or a moment of quiet so complete it feels like a presence. These moments are not accidents and they are not sentiment. They are the silent sermon, still preaching.

The question is whether we are listening, and whether we are willing to follow what we hear toward the One who can finally speak back.

Creation opens the door. Something else has to walk through it.

That is where we are going next.

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