Even if we had no Bibles, and no preachers, the psalmist says that God would still make his majestic beauty known to us through the skies, the stars and the sun. And this, incidentally, is why the Bible doesn’t try to prove the existence of a Creator. It’s just assumed.

Open a Bible about halfway through.

You should find yourself in the middle of a collection of songs called “Psalms.” And in the nineteenth one, the psalmist describes two ways in which God speaks to us. First, He speaks to us through the world that He’s made.

Just listen:

The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they reveal knowledge.
They have no speech, they use no words;
no sound is heard from them.
Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.

What does that mean? It means that there’s a sense in which God “speaks” to us through the world. Nature is an open book. The beautiful things He has made declare His glory—His greatness, His kindness, His creativity, His provision for each one of us, and so on.

This understanding of God, communicated through creation, is known as general revelation.

When I was twenty, I went on a trek in the Himalayas. At about 2 a.m. one morning, everyone was asleep, I came outside and looked up absentmindedly. And for a moment my brain couldn’t process what I was seeing, it was so unearthly.

There was Mount Everest. And I could see the wind blowing the snow off the peak. And there was a full moon. And the moonbeams were reflecting off all these billions of ice crystals, as they drifted lazily through the darkness. It looked like a ghost, clinging to the top of Mount Everest.

And then beyond it, there were more stars than I’d ever seen in my life. It made me physically stagger back a couple of steps.

Have you ever felt like that? That kind of beauty does something to you, doesn’t it? In that moment, though you may understand the mere science of it, your gut-level response—a sense of profound awe and wonder—betrays you. You know there’s something more going on than one bunch of atoms looking at another bunch of atoms on a Nepalese hillside.

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