Manifest Testimony

Writing under divine inspiration, Paul has informed the Romans that God is angry with human beings and is bringing upon them the consequences of their actions, specifically their suppression of the truth, their determined unwillingness to acknowledge the existence of God. Now, in a pair of verses packed with truth and important implications, he moves back in time, as it were, to expand on the human actions that have provoked God’s wrath.

The truth, Paul says, is that no matter how hard people work to convince themselves that there is no God, “what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them.” How could this verse be any clearer? Paul is asserting that though men try and try to deny the existence of God, they simply cannot do it. His existence is “manifest,” or plain. How so? Through creation. “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.” The existence of the creation in which man finds himself is a clear indication of the presence of a divine being. The fact that something exists now indicates that something has always existed, and the scale and complexity of creation demand that that something be a divine being. That is what Paul is driving at when he speaks of the creation revealing God’s “invisible attributes,” specifically His “eternal power and Godhead.” Dr. James M. Boice explains that by these terms Paul is saying that all men can know from creation that God exists and is all-powerful. “Nature contains ample and entirely convincing evidence of the existence of a Supreme Being,” he writes in his Romans commentary.

Boice goes on to point out that nature’s revelation of God is limited in the sense that it tells us nothing about God’s attributes of holiness, grace, mercy, and so on, and we must be aware of these things to know Him savingly. However, creation leaves no doubt that God is there, and that means that all people are without excuse. When the time comes for them to stand before Him and receive the wrath they have been treasuring up for themselves, they will not be able to plead ignorance. In short, atheism is hypocrisy—those who express the belief that there is no God are lying to themselves, suppressing the truth of God’s existence that creation screams at them all day long.