OUR LORD'S INVISIBLE ATTRIBUTES

Yesterday, we looked at our Lord's eternal power that serves as a witness to God's existence . Today,  we continue with Romans chapter 1 to look at the invisible attributes of God that are listed as another witness from creation affirming that God truly is there.

To consider the span of our universe and to ponder the astonishing things it contains like solar systems and habitable planets and the  biological realm of living creatures, is to confront a question that has stupefied thinkers for eons. 

What qualities would a being have to possess in order to bring forth the varied and beautiful phenomena we see around us?

What qualities would the creating being have to have in order to conceptualize three dimensional space set in a river of time? What would such a creator have to be like in order to set in place a full-scale space/time continuum?

What would it take to imagine and design living things and imbue them with life? 

What about conciousness and intelligence? What would the maker of such things need in order to set out the parameters of sentient life and then further to that, build sentience that operates at a level high enough to ponder these very questions we are asking?

Romans chapter 1 verse 20 - 21 describes God's invisible attributes as being clearly seen.

For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. 

For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened.

The invisible attributes are described as 'clearly seen' because the realm we live in is a metaphoric representation of the realm from which God created ours.  

If, as an example, we consider the intelligence of living things and see how this intelligence is required to decipher the dynamics of our world and as well, be used to engage in the building and sustaining of complex systems, we can perceive the intelligence that the originator of such an attribute would have to be  imbued with in order to dispense it.

 This would be like examining the workings of advanced computers and their purposes and being able to perceive how intelligent the builders  of such systems would necessarily  have to be.

This visible functioning  of intelligence among people  is a representation of the intelligence possessed and operated  by the invisible God.

In another example, the distinction between living beings and non-living things gives us a contrasting property by which to characterise what kind of being the creator is.  We look at our own world and see that being alive is a fundamental property needed in order for puposeful and intentional activity to be executed. 

We can thus correctly infer that the creator of all things, by seeing that creation would require purposeful and intentional activities, is a living being. One of the invisible attributes that God has is that He is alive.  

We can see living and intelligent beings working to create sytems  in our physical plane ( albeit in a derivitive sense) and from that, clearly see how these attributes can be inferred or extrapolated to our invisible God who Himself created complex systems writ large.

Bless the almighty God.

Amen.