If you’ve never heard the late Rich Mullins’ song, “Calling Out Your Name,” you should stop reading right now and listen to it. There are few pieces of music that have affected me the way it did from the first time I heard it as a young boy. The message of Mullins’ soaring poetry, untethered as it is from grammar and rushing to keep up with his hammer dulcimer, is simple: the western vistas he loved declare the glory of God. The “rumbling of the buffalo hooves” and the “fury in a pheasant’s wings” told him as clearly as if they’d spoken that “the Lord is in His temple.”

I didn’t recognize until years later that this was natural theology set to music. But like the truths Mullins sang about, the revelation of God in creation is something you know before you are aware you know it. When Christian theologians in ages past spoke of “nature,” they meant much more than prairies and sunsets, but they certainly did not mean less. The awe that spontaneously grips us at the sight of snowcapped mountains, the northern lights, or a tossing sea is a universal human experience that nearly always excites worship. Of course, fallen creatures that we are, we frequently misdirect that worship.

Yet the fact that our need to reverence a higher power is so easily inflamed by natural wonders is itself a revelation. It means we were made to worship. We are creatures whose heads and knees bow by reflex. And as Dr. David Haines explained this week on “Upstream,” Christian theologians have always held that a careful observer can learn something about the God we long to worship just by observing His creation.

This type of theology is anything but optional or supplementary. It is the normal way of coming to believe in God. I think most human beings hear His name in birdsong before they can read it in the Bible. Perhaps that’s why the Scripture itself constantly claims that created things from ants to the starry host “declare the work” of God’s hands, “pour forth speech,” and continually “reveal knowledge” in a way that is more universally audible even than the inspired books. It would be hard to state it more strongly than the biblical authors do. The Apostle Paul famously asserts in the opening chapter of Romans that God’s existence, eternal power and nature, and even His holiness are “clearly seen” in the things He has made—so clearly that those who refuse to acknowledge Him or who turn to the creation in worship are “without excuse” for their idolatry.

Even Christian thinkers best known for their high view of the Bible extoled the clarity of general revelation and the importance of natural theology. In his commentary on the Psalms, John Calvin writes:

“When we behold the heavens, we cannot but be elevated, by the contemplation of them, to Him who is their great Creator; and the beautiful arrangement and wonderful variety which distinguish the courses and station of the heavenly bodies, together with the beauty and splendour which are manifest in them, cannot but furnish us with an evident proof of his providence. Scripture, indeed, makes known to us the time and manner of the creation; but the heavens themselves, although God should say nothing on the subject, proclaim loudly and distinctly enough that they have been fashioned by his hands: and this of itself abundantly suffices to bear testimony to men of his glory.”

As Dr. Haines acknowledged, the theology produced by reflecting on nature cannot save anyone. It can only take sinful human beings so close to the Divine throne—certainly not close enough to see that the One who sits upon it is also in another sense Three, or that a Nazarene is among them. That’s what special revelation is for.

But living as we do in a time when many claim not to hear the works of God declaring His glory, it is vital to remind ourselves how seriously Christians in past centuries took natural theology, and follow their example. God is not hiding. He wants to be known. He has revealed Himself in ways so obvious that it takes waxy plugs of sinful self-delusion to drown out His song.

As much pressure as we sometimes feel in a secular age to “prove” that our faith is rational, we must never forget that we are not the ones working overtime to muffle reality. Suppressing the knowledge of the truth is hard work, and it’s not very rewarding. It leaves behind a world that no longer sings, and worse, is no longer worth singing about.

There’s much more to natural theology than that, and my conversation on Upstream with Dr. David Haines is a great invitation to go deeper. His book, “Natural Theology: A Biblical and Historical Introduction and Defense” may change the way you think about creation, church history, and Scripture, itself. Yet this vast and oft-neglected branch of Christian wisdom has a message as simple as the spontaneous praise of anyone who has ever seen a sunrise and credited its true Maker: God isn’t hiding. And neither should we.