This post is part of my year long study of Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion. To facilitate this course of study, I am following along with Princeton University's "A Year with the Institutes", which also includes an audio reading of the text.
Calvin's Institutes - 1.5.10-12
This is a photograph that I took while hiking in the Superstition Mountains, on the Peralta Trail. Note: click the photograph for a larger view.
As you can see, the rewards of this somewhat challenging hike were great!
When we reached the trails summit, there were a fair number of people simply sitting, and gazing in stunned silence. The sheer beauty was overwhelming. But where did this beauty come from? Chance, or God? You will never get me to believe that this, and all the other evidences of God's hand, are simply chance.
If then, this is God, then does it not call upon us to seek Him more fully? Can we stare at the handiwork's of God and simply ignore His presence? For many reasons, my answer is no. I can not behold God's creation and simply be content with the creation. I deeply desire to know the Creator!
Calvin:
"Bright, however, as is the manifestation which God gives both of himself and his immortal kingdom in the mirror of his works, so great is our stupidity, so dull are we in regard to these bright manifestations, that we derive no benefit from them. For in regard to the fabric and admirable arrangement of the universe, how few of us are there who, in lifting our eyes to the heavens, or looking abroad on the various regions of the earth, ever think of the Creator? Do we not rather overlook Him, and sluggishly content ourselves with a view of his works? And then in regard to supernatural events, though these are occurring every day, how few are there who ascribe them to the ruling providence of God—how many who imagine that they are casual results produced by the blind evolutions of the wheel of chance?"
Because many would content themselves with creation over Creator, then in the many other doings of our lives, false philosophies and gods become an inevitable part of our lives. We become the inadvertent dupe of our natural, selfish inclinations.
Calvin:
"Hence that immense flood of error with which the whole world is overflowed. Every individual mind being a kind of labyrinth, it is not wonderful, not only that each nation has adopted a variety of fictions, but that almost every man has had his own god. To the darkness of ignorance have been added presumption and wantonness, and hence there is scarcely an individual to be found without some idol or phantom as a substitute for Deity. Like water gushing forth from a large and copious spring, immense crowds of gods have issued from the human mind, every man giving himself full license, and devising some peculiar form of divinity, to meet his own views."
If you have the belief of God over chance, then I implore you to seek Him in the holy Scriptures. Therein He repeated tells of His desire to be known.
If not, then it is exceedingly likely that you too will be lost in the labyrinth of man's fiction.
