"Special" & "General" revelation

Three nights ago, an amazingly beautiful summer night in Michigan... and I was flopped in the lawn chair catching the end of the sunset. As the sun disapppeared, the clouds took on the shades of the sunset, and they seemed to radiate off each other nearly endlessly.

Yet, all of this bright red and orange and every shade between disappeared within minutes. Those same clouds began to look dark, scary dark. They contained no storms nor rain, and yet they had changed so dramatically within twenty or thirty minutes.

What seemed like just a few minutes was much more, and it was an entire transformation from daylight to bats darting over my head catching their dinner meal, or perhaps it was really breakfast for those little flying F-16's.

With all of those observations filling my head, you need to know that I was raised as a good reformed protestant kid. But here was my question for the night after all of my observations, "Why was 'general' revelation so downplayed while 'special' revelations was the primary focus of our theology?

I had observed a nightfall that was amazing beyond words, and yet it would have been termed 'general.' For one thing, it wasn't just general. It was the hand of a creator God, or perhaps it was just evolution...
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Secondly, my mind now has a beef with this crazy dicotomy. 'Special' revelation suggests that we need the life, death, and ressurection of Jesus to know God. I've always agreed. Yet?

What if we 'believe' that Jesus died for or sins, and yet we don't recognize the creation as being the handiwork of the Creator (God the Father), it seems that we've also denied part of God's very being.

On the other hand, if we recognize a Creator God and we believe in the Spirit of God but pay little or no attention to Jesus Christ, we've also denied a significant part of God's being.

I have no theological conclusion for these thoughts other than the following: For whatever reason, the protestant church has found it incredibly easy to qualify people for salvation if they believe (in their mind at least) in Jesus Christ as savior. For whatever reason, has taken on a more significant part for savation purposes than either a believe in God the creator and God's Spirit.

I'm perplexed....