Today's soundtrack is Zao: The Well-Intentioned Virus. When I first started listening to heavy music, Zao's "A Parade of Chaos" was one of my favourite cassettes. This album sees them coming back to the sound they reached on their classic album "The Funeral of God," which was my favourite period of theirs.
This evening, I'm reading the fifth chapter of John Calvin's The Institutes of Christian Religion, "The knowledge of God is evident in his creation and continual rule of the world."
Calvin says that "complete happiness is knowing God" (p. 32); so that we may know Him, He has shown us how perfect He is by the orderly way that He made the universe. Even though His ways are beyond our understanding, His presence is inescapable. It is impossible to claim ignorance of God's hand in the creation of the worlds. Calvin says that the universe is almost like God's clothing: it is how He presents Himself to us. "Wherever you look," says Calvin, "there is no part of the world however small that does not show at least some glimmer of beauty; it is impossible to gaze at the vast expanses of the universe without being overwhelmed by such tremendous beauty" (p. 33). Even though God is invisible to us, we can see Him reflected in his creation by looking around us.
The danger that we face is forgetting that the creation is not what we should worship; the Creator is the One worthy of our praise. We think of coincidences and of chance; instead, we should consider God's providence. Calvin says that "[w]hen we wander and go off track, we are rightly cut off from any sort of excuse, because everything indicates the right path" (p. 35). Because of our hardened hearts, unless God opens the eyes of our hearts to see Him, we will attribute the traits that He shows us about Himself in His creation to something else; "[w]e draw the worship of justice, wisdom and goodness away from the fountain-head, transferring it elsewhere. Even more, by the wrong assessments we make, we either obscure or pervert God's creation so that we rob it of its glory and withhold the praise due to Him" (p. 35).
