Hike

"For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” - Romans 1:20

When I was younger, I used to love those rare occasions when I got the opportunity to hike along the fire break trails in Southern California’s San Gabriel Mountains.  The trails were often quite steep, dust and rock covered, but almost always passable on foot.  The goal would be to take the fire break as far up as you could, and then just sit for an hour or two and look over the lower hills and down into the valley.  And then allow gravity to pull you back down the trails before the evening crept in.

It would be so peaceful, so majestic.  Sometimes you could hear the dim roar of the city a couple of thousand feet below you, but most of the time all you could hear was the bristling of the sage brush in the breezes and the occasional cry of the red-tailed hawk.

One time I did a hike with a friend far above Marshall Canyon, to the top of the front ridge and we wound up sitting and talking for hours about the mountains, the view, the canyons, the wildlife and the forested much higher peaks behind us. And I can remember saying, it seems odd that all this beauty is just the result of a set of random chances and forces that seem also to be far too accidental.

And my friend said, “It isn’t and they aren’t.  A creator had to have started all this.”

The conversation stuck in my craw for a few years.  About three years later, I gave my life to Christ….

The apostle Paul understood that everything we need to know about God is brilliantly displayed in His creation…yet we can’t see it, or are unwilling to acknowledge it.  As a species we are incredibly intelligent and intuitive…and at the same time we are dense as the stones on those paths and as blind as the sagebrush. 

The evidence is clear.  But without the light of Christ, we remain in darkness.

On your hike today, look around.  What do you see?  Can you see what God has done?  Or is it all just a game of chance and theory?

We are without excuse….