‘Behold, the Lamb
of God’
ide
o amnos tou theou
College Study
68th teaching
3.17.2013
“God’s Creativity:
Made in His Image”
Project
Scriptura: LAST
ATTRIBUTE! THE END OF THEOLOGY PROPER! God’s Importance. Find one Bible verse
to show me why God is important
Review:
What was our subject last week? What are some definitions
for the word Blessed? What does this tell us about the personality of God? What
are three causes for God’s Blessedness, or happiness; three reasons why God is
essentially happy? How did God’s Impassibility figure into our study last time?
How can we apply this doctrine of God’s Blessedness, essentially how can we be
happy?
End of Review
Given tonight’s subject matter, I think you’ll permit me a
passing reference to one of the great pleasures of life: Legos. I love Legos.
We’re going to be talking about creativity tonight, and for
as long as I can remember Legos were the toy that simply radiated creativity.
As a child, and admittedly in the years following childhood, I could spend
hours creating things out of my Lego collection: whether it was a medieval
castle, a race-car, a spaceship, or a medieval castle-spaceship on wheels. But
it was the building of new things, the endless possibilities, the application
of the imagination and the changing of the dream into the reality which kept me
entertained with the little plastic bricks, tinkering on projects for weeks and
weeks.
I still have great respect for Legos, and I’d like for my
own children to someday know the exhilarating thrill of creation. But I respect
Legos all the more now having seen some of the incredible things adults have
done with Legos. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Lego-land (and forgive me
if this sounds like a commercial for the place) but they’ve built some amazing
things!
Even scouring the internet, there are constructions which
seem to cross the line between toy and art form, between a plaything for
children and an expression of beauty or insight, the things we associate with
art. How incredible to think of little plastic bits as evoking emotion, wonder,
passion or any of the things art evokes!
But, we come tonight to a subject which transcends not just
Legos, but which necessarily transcends everything we humans can ever produce
and call art. Tonight, our study is entitled: “God’s Creativity: Made in His
Image”.
When we come to talk of God’s Creativity, we must realize
from the start that we’re talking about a kind of creativity that is entirely
unique. Case in point, I gladly return to our example of Legos.
You can surely be creative with Legos. You can surely build
anything you want with whatever pieces you’ve got. Ah, but there’s a
limitation! You’ve got to have all the right pieces to build what you want to
build. It’s no good trying to build a spaceship unless you have spaceship
parts: wings, engines, those cool transparent cockpit-shields, etc. And so, as
a child, and admittedly in the years following childhood, I bugged my parents
for cash to purchase sets of Legos so I could take my constructions to the next
level. Building with Legos, then, requires pre-existing pieces. You have to get
the pieces first before you can use them to build something.
Not so for God.
Theology uses the Latin phrase creatio ex nihilo, which means creation
out of nothing. Theologians such as Augustine, John Calvin, John Wesley and
Matthew Henry identify this concept in Scripture: God made the universe ex nihilo, out of nothing. He didn’t
take pre-existing pieces and simply piece it all together. Rather, he spoke it
all into existence.
True, there were some early Christian church fathers who
argued from Plato’s philosophy that the world as we see it now was made with pre-existent matter, but
even they admitted that the pre-existent matter itself came out of nothing. So
resolutely and universally, this is the Christian view on creation: ex nihilo.
And that immediately sets God’s Creativity above and apart
from any human creativity. At best, we can only create things out of the things
that already exist. Human art simply reflects upon or builds out of the things
that are. God, on the other hand, made the things that are out of nothing. In
this sense, it can only be truly said of God alone that He creates. Men and
women can only make, but we cannot create out of nothing. Even the newest
invention came out of the machine of the human brain, a machine which God
Himself invented in the first place.
*Another idea which
shows that what we’re dealing with here, God’s Creativity, is something far and
beyond what we understand from a human standpoint, is the idea of the
appreciation of art.
Have you ever really just enjoyed a piece of art? Doesn’t
have to be a visual art. Unfortunately, we suffocate our imagination to think
only in terms of the visual arts. Not only paintings, sculptures and cinema
occupy art. You can think of art in terms of music, or literature, that is
literary art, in terms of language, verbal art, in terms even of engineering,
architecture, technology, philosophy and even, even mathematics. There are
people who can look at a formula and admire its mathematical beauty!
But whatever the art form, whatever your media of choice,
if you’re appreciating it and admiring its beauty, there’s a kind of unique
sensation you feel: a kind of peace, a kind of awe, a kind of harmony,
tranquility, inspiration and illumination that takes place all at once
somewhere between the shared feelings of your heart and your mind. Really,
there’s nothing quite like being lost in your favorite painting, forgetting
reality when you watch a favorite film, racing across the pages of your
favorite book, or being moved by your favorite music.
Consider God also appreciates these things. God is an
art-lover. He’s crafting the greatest story ever told through human history. He
surrounds Himself with the music and the songs of angels in heaven. He invented
the visual masterpiece of sunlight passing through our atmosphere. God
appreciates art, indeed.
Now can we consider God’s creation an art form? I think so.
For we can experience very much the same feelings as I’ve
just detailed, with all the inspiration and all the wonder, when we walk
through a forest, when we admire a sunset, when we feel the touch of grass,
when we hear the murmuring of water on stones, when we gaze upon the majestic
waves of the sea, when we peaceably take in a vast landscape, when we feel the
wind and when we feel the sun. Many people have said that they feel closest to
God when they’re out in Nature. Experiencing God’s creation can feel just like
appreciating art, only on an unspeakably grander scale. Even Almighty God
Himself, having spoken everything into existence, looked upon them and
appreciated His art, Scripture saying “It was good”.
That profound feeling you get when you stare into the night
sky is there because God made the night sky: you’re admiring the work of the
Great Artist Himself.
No wonder the ancient religions all turned their worship to
creation! They can hardly be blamed, except for the fact that they worshiped
the thing created and not the Genius who created it in the first place. But we
recognize that Creation is God’s divine art form, not to be worshiped but to be
admired and to deepen the worship of the Creator who put it all here in the
first place.
And speaking of putting it all here, let’s turn now to that
first act in Genesis 1. We’re going
to read the creation account: creatio ex
nihilo.
1:1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and
the earth.”
The world is full of creation myths, but here we’re given a
glimpse not into myth or a fable, but into the original instant, the first
moment of our universe. Note immediately the order of things and the simplicity
of things. In the beginning, God was already there. He Himself wasn’t made from
anything. He didn’t come out of the world, rather the world came out of Him.
And the creation myths of man’s religions threw in all
kinds of weird details into the very origin of the universe: flowers and chaos
and whales and stars and turtles and dwarfs and gods and goddesses and demigods
and semigods and half-gods and whole-gods who created the water, while another
made the fire, while another the air and so on and on. It gets as weird as
believing that the universe came out of a cosmic egg. Upon surveying these
myths, you’d notice that the pagans considered their creator gods as merely
part of the world itself. They identified their creators as being the sky or
the earth, or as coming out of the shapeless expanse prior to creation.
In stark and startling contrast, the biblical view is
different: simple and unique. God was around before the sky or the earth. God did not come out of the shapeless
chaos. The Christian worldview holds that God is transcendent above His creation
as Creator. He is the first Uncaused Cause.
Read 1:2 to 2:3.
Before we delve into our study and take a summary
look at the points we’ll address tonight, I’d like to share with you a little
trick I learned to help you remember the seven days of Creation and
specifically what God made on each day. I learned this is bible college and
I’ve never forgotten it, it’s so catchy. This is known as a mnemonic device, to
aid your memory.
It goes like this: One Bun. Two Blue. Three Tree. Four
Door. Five Dive. Six Sticks. Seven Heaven.
One Bun. Picture a bun, like a bread bun. It has a dark
side and a light side, so that can help you to remember that on day one, God
made the light and divided it from the darkness, Day and Night.
Two Blue. Easily this reminds you of the blue sky and the
blue ocean, and the fact that on day two, God separated the sky from the
waters.
Three Tree. On day three, God brought forth the dry land of
the earth and made all the plants and vegetation.
Four Door. This one’s tricky, but you won’t easily forget
it. You have to open the door and go outside to look at the stars. You go out
of doors to look at the heavens, and so Four Door reminds you that on day four,
God made the stars and the sun and the moon.
Five Dive. On day five, God made birds in the air and the
creatures of the sea. So picture a bird diving through the air and a fish
diving under the water, and remember Five Dive, birds and fish on day five.
Six Sticks. Picture a man playing fetch with a dog and a
stick and you’ll remember that on day six, God made humans and land animals.
And then of course, Seven Heaven. On day seven, God rested.
And it is simply heavenly to rest after a project is finished. It isn’t that
God was tired, we hasten to add, but He rested to take pleasure in His work.
Alright, so I hope that will help you to always remember
the seven days of creation. On to our points tonight:
1. What is Creativity?
2. Biblical Basis for Creativity
3. God’s Three Arts
4. The Image of God
1.
What is Creativity?
Creativity is indeed a marvelous and profound thing we as
human beings share with the nature of God.
Wikipedia calls creativity a “phenomenon whereby something
new and valuable is created (such as an idea, a joke, an artistic or literary
work, a painting or musical composition, a solution, an invention, etc.)” I
like that creativity is called there a “phenomenon”, an interesting something
that can be unusual or difficult to understand or explain. Creativity is just
that sort of thing.
Creativity is unusual in humans among other biological
life-forms. True, the animals can build homes and nests, heck I’ve even watched
footage of the intelligent mammals, elephants and chimpanzees painting, but
nowhere in the animal kingdom is there anything like the sheer proliferation
and mass-production of art as in the human cultures.
Have you ever stopped to wonder at the fact that even the
earliest human cultures had their own forms of art and expression and
creativity, whether in their stories, their myths or the scribbles they made in
stone and wood? Creativity is truly a phenomenon in earthly life, unique to
humans, something which we almost feel compelled to do: to create.
I recently read an article about the unveiling of newly
discovered masks in the Judean desert. They’ve estimated the masks, which are
made of stone, to be several thousand years old, as old as the 7th
millennium BC. Dating aside, it’s safe to say that these relics are very, very
old. They may be creep-tastic, but they’re evidence that for many millennia,
mankind had been making art, here in the form of masks, whatever they were used
for. The masks went on display on March 10th at the Israel Museum in
Jerusalem.
*Now the concept of creativity has undergone some
interesting change over the years of history. Beginning with the ancient
cultures, we discover that most of them had no word for creation or creator or
creativity. For example, you find among many ancient religions the concept of
birth, as in the birth of the universe. In Chinese Daoism, they envisioned the
first concept, called the Way, as giving birth to unity and on down the list of
created things. But the keyword was birth
not creation.
For another example, in ancient Greece, there was no term
for creating or creator except for their word for poetry: poiesis. They considered the poet to be a kind of maker. But even
Plato did not consider art to be a form of creation but merely of imitation. He
said the painter doesn’t make something, but rather imitates through his
paintings.
The concept of creativity, surprisingly or perhaps not so
surprisingly, originated in Western culture as it was heavily influenced by the
Christian doctrine of divine inspiration. Creativity was considered then to be
a quality of God, and that humans could not make something new except as an
expression of God’s own work. Creativity in human beings, then, was linked
directly to being inspired by the Spirit of God.
It was not until the Renaissance that we got our modern
idea of Creativity, which unfortunately involves the separation of the sacred
from the concept of creativity. Now, we almost always think of creativity in
humans as something separate from God, not inspired by God, but merely stemming
from the abilities of the artists themselves.
So though creativity now no longer has any link to the
Divine, we as Christians recognize that we’re creative because the God who made
us is creative and we are made in His image. It’s a shame we can’t get back to
that.
But here’s a straightforward, modern definition:
“creativity is the ability to make new things or think of new ideas”. The
classic definition of creativity would add that this ability comes from God.
Building upon that, we’re going to define Creativity for
our purposes tonight in three ways:
First, Creativity
means creative-ability. Creativity involves the power or ability or skill to
create what you intend to create. You can intend all you want, but if you lack
the ability to put your intentions to the test of creating then, then you’ll
come up empty-handed. With Legos, you sometimes meet those people who can’t
seem to build anything more than a simple stack of bricks, a tower. They may
intend to build something magnificent, but without the ability, they’re stuck
with a stupid tower.
Secondly,
Creativity means creative-thought. This is just the reverse of the first
statement I made. Imagine instead that you have all the creative ability in the
world: you have all the talent to paint or craft or write or build or whatever,
but you don’t have any creative thoughts. If you can’t think of what to create,
if you have no intentions of creation, then you’re still stuck. You need both
the creative-ability and the creative-thought, both the skill and the idea to
progress in creativity.
Thirldy, finally,
Creativity means dreaming. You might have all the ability and the best idea to
create, but you still need to dream. The best creations, the best inventions,
come from the deepest dreams and imaginations of our minds. Without the
dreaming of creativity, you’re stuck with mundane ideas, with things that are
just copies of everything else you happen to like. But with dreaming, with the
daring to do something new and unorthodox, untried even, you can make something
that is uniquely an expression of yourself, that’s the point, and it builds
upon whatever ability you have and whatever thoughts you have.
So ability, thoughts and dreams all take part in our
definition of Creativity. Ability is the tools, thoughts are the blueprints and
dreams are what put it all together in the first place and what keeps the
project going.
Now when we come to consider God’s Creativity, let’s apply
this definition.
First was
creative-ability. When it comes to God, He certainly has it. Theologically we
express God’s ability in the word omnipotence,
saying that God is all-powerful. And if God has all power, then nothing is too
hard for Him. And if nothing is too hard for Him, then no creative undertaking
is too hard for Him. God has the tools, the abilities, to create anything that
He desires. And when you consider the ability of God, what kind of power it
must have took to set the stars burning, to implement the forces of gravity, to
create the whole vast and empty expanse of the universe and so on, it’s simply
amazing.
Second was
creative-thought. Again, when it comes to God, we find that He’s in a whole
other league from us. Theologically, we express God’s knowledge as omniscience and His wisdom as omnisapience. That is to say that God
has all-knowledge and all-wisdom. He knows everything and has the wisdom to
make the best decisions based on His knowledge. So in the beginning, God was
not at a loss for what to create. He had fully in mind all the chemicals and
particles and atoms and electrons and molecules that He would create and then
use to build everything else. He had fully in mind the DNA double-helix, the
periodic table, the orbits of the planets, the tidal forces, the geometric
shapes of minerals, the mathematics that would be involved, and the best way to
lay it all out in the right order. Heck, we hardly know anything about
supernatural and angelic life. Who knows what creative genius God poured into
their design?
Third was
dreaming. I think it’s amazing to think of God as a dreamer, as One who dreamt
up all the things we experience in our tangible reality. God had a deep
yearning and desire to create all of this, and though you and I may sometimes
know a shadow of that feeling of wanting to create, I don’t know that we’ll
ever understand in this life the depth of passion that God must have had to see
the greatest creative project through from start to finish. And what’s more,
the creation we live in now isn’t all there ever will be, for Scripture speaks
of a coming creation, one untouched by sin. We wonder at God’s first attempt.
We can hardly guess what it will be like when He gives the act of creating
another go.
*In summary, God’s Creativity involves His omnipotence in
creative-ability, His omniscience and omnisapience in creative-thought, and His
dreaming up everything that we experience around us. You’ll notice than that
God’s Creativity doesn’t strictly mean His Creation. His Creation is distinct
and separate from His Creativity. Simply, His Creation is the product of His
Creativity. There’s no need to confuse the two.
2. Biblical Basis
for God’s Creativity
Now it’s time for your Project Scriptura verses. I
think this was a bit easier of an attribute to search out in Scripture, when
compared to some of the more obscure attributes of God. But what did you find?
Exodus 35:31-32;
Psalm 104:24; Jeremiah 10:12
3.
God’s Three Arts
There are three arts of God in Scripture. There are three
products that come out of the Creativity of God. They are the first Creation,
the Church and the new Creation. Let’s consider each in turn:
We’ve already talked about the first Creation and we’re
pretty familiar with it. After all, we’ve grown up and lived our whole lives in
the first Creation. God made it, as we read, in seven days (and it isn’t our
intention to enter into a debate on the length of those specific days at this
time).
But one thing to note about the first Creation is that it
is an old Creation. In fact, it’s a ruined Creation. Truth is, when God made
this first Creation it was perfect, it was pristine, it was pure… it was good.
But it’s old and it is aging. It is slowly running down. Things are falling
apart. And above all, it is corrupted by sin.
Remember God told Adam in Genesis 3:17, “Cursed is the
ground for your sake…” We live on a planet which retains but a shadow of
its beauty. I think we can hardly imagine what it must have been like before
the Fall of man. Now we’re living on cursed ground, which brings forth thorns
and thistles instead of the evidently lush and verdant landscape and vegetation
that once existed on this once paradise-planet. Paul in Romans 8 speaks of Creation groaning and suffering, waiting for the
day to be set free. Thus God’s work of art, the first Creation, is a ruined
piece of work that is steadily being ruined. It was corrupted and is slowly
being corrupted.
There are analogies everywhere. Take the Great Sphinx of
Giza in Egypt as an example. It is an ancient work of art, the oldest known
monumental sculpture in the world, and estimated to be some four and a half
thousand years old. But today it has been broken and shattered and eroded by
the passage of time. Parts of it, particularly the smelly parts, like the nose, are entirely missing.
When we reflect, then, upon this first Creation, the old
Creation that we’re living in, we recognize that bits of it are missing.
Really, people express this all the time when they say “I feel like something
is missing from my life”. The great thing that this Creation is missing is its
Creator, for now it is cursed, now it is the enemy camp, now it is rebellious
territory, opposing the One who made it.
Next great work of art in Scripture is the Church. We don’t
often think of the church as God’s work of art, but it’s true. I mean, just
think about the church of God: it stands alone on earth. There’s nothing like
it. Oh sure there are other religions and other religions organizations, and
groups and affiliations galore. But the true church is entirely unlike any of
them. The church is no mere country club. The church is a force to be reckoned
with.
Consider that the very first members of the church, a few
guys gathered together in a room in the Middle East caused an uproar which led
to the conversion of an empire, a social upheaval which has effected Western
culture ever since. I mean, one of the apostles, Peter, who was an uneducated
fisherman, stood up and preached the very first Christian sermon ever in
history and it says in Acts 2:41
that three-thousand people got saved.
What? How does that happen?
Could you imagine our little study group changing the
world? Could you imagine one of us getting up and speaking to a city and thousands of people repent and turn to
Christ? You can hardly imagine such a thing. And yet that is precisely what
happened. The church is a powerful force, sometimes in the hands of God and
sometimes, as sad history shows, in the hands of men.
But there are several parallels between the church and
God’s creation. Consider that there were seven days of creation. Well, in Revelation chapters 2 and 3 you may
read seven letters to the churches of Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira,
Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea. Some commentators consider these seven
letters to be representative of seven ages in church history, in which case there
were seven days in the history of Creation and seven ages in the history of the
church.
And in the first Creation, God made living organisms: the
birds, the beasts, the fish and mankind. When God came to make the church, He
made it a living organism as well. The church is compared several times in the
New Testament to a living body, with Christ as the Head. The church is made up
of members and the members make up a living thing that can act and move and
feel and speak.
Paul the apostle, speaking of the Christians that comprise
the church, wrote in Ephesians 2:10,
“For we are His workmanship, created in
Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk
in them.”
That word there translated as workmanship is a Greek word coming from the word for poetry: poiema. Remember how I told you earlier that the Greeks had no word
for creation except for the phrase poiesis,
which had to do with making poetry? So based on the word Paul uses, he is
saying that the Christian is a poetic work of God, a creation of God.
Indeed one of the fascinating things about becoming a
Christian is this idea of becoming a new creation. You’re no longer part of the
old and faded masterpiece. You’re a whole new work. You’ve been made into a new
man or woman, and you’ve become part of a new body: the body of Christ.
II Corinthians 5:17
says “Therefore if anyone is in Christ,
he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have
become new.”
So though you and I were a part of the old Creation, with
all its corruption, inheriting the erosion and the ruin of that old Creation
because of the sinful human natures we received from our parents, now we are a
new creation: the church of God, the body of Christ.
And though we were made in the image of God, that original
image had been ruined and tarnished. Now, as we’re being sanctified, the image
of God in us is being renewed. We’re like old works of art that have been
partially burned and ripped up and destroyed, but God is carefully restoring
the original image, the image of Himself that He created us in.
Colossians 3:9-10,
“Do not lie to one another, since you
have put off the old man with his deeds, and have put on the new man who is
renewed in knowledge according to the image of Him who created him…”
II Corinthians 3:18,
“But we all, with unveiled face,
beholding as in a mirror the glory of the LORD, are being transformed into the
same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord.”
And I Corinthians
15:49 says plainly, “And as we have
borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the
heavenly Man.” Part of being a Christian is being transformed and being
made more like Christ as the Spirit of God works in us, and that involves
moving toward the goal of restoring the ruined image of God within us.
Christians, essentially, are more like Christ because the image of God is being
restored to them, just as an old painting is restored and its colors and
imagery and artistry becomes vibrant again. And someday, that will culminate in
our reception of heavenly and incorruptible bodies.
And that brings us neatly to God’s third great Creation in
Scripture: which is the new Creation.
Revelation 21:1,
“And I saw a new heaven and a new earth,
for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. Also there was no
more sea.”
You know, honestly, I used to read those words sadly. I
remember hearing them sometime in my youth attending a good ol’ Baptist church.
I love the sea. I always have. I grew up near it. And to think that someday it
would be no more brought sadness to my little heathen heart.
But when I think of it now, what am I really sad about? Am
I sad that the new Creation won’t resemble the old Creation? Well, do I even
want it to?
If we think about it, we recognize that we know hardly
anything about the new Creation to come. We know next to nothing. And there are
very few similarities that can be drawn between the old and the new. God
created the first Creation in six days. There is no mention of days for the new
Creation. We don’t know what it will be like: except that it will be
mindblowing. You think nature is beautiful now? Hah.
God give us wisdom to be excited for the future Creation.
It won’t need a sea. There might be something in it totally more amazing than
the sea that only the mind of God could have ever dreamt up.
4.
The Image of God
So we’ve seen tonight that God’s Creativity involves
creative-ability, creative-thought and dreaming. We’ve considered briefly three
great creative products of God: the first Creation that has been ruined, the
Church wherein the image of God is being restored in us, and the new Creation
which shall blow our minds.
But let us return in conclusion to this concept of the
image of God. Something that we touched on earlier was the Christian-influenced
idea that human creativity is a kind of extension or expression of God’s own
Creativity and that when humans are creative it is because they are inspired by
God’s Spirit and because they have the potential to do so because they are made
in the image of God.
What the image of God means is something we can’t delve
into now, but it simply means that there is a kind of likeness between the
Divine life and the human life. There are parallels between God’s ability to
speak, act, move and think, and humanities abilities to speak, act, move and
think. One other parallel, a kind of likeness that we humans share with God
because we’re made in His image is this concept of Creativity. We are creative
because God is creative and we’re made in His image and likeness.
But remember, that image has been ruined by sin and it is
only slowly and painstakingly being restored in us so much as we battle our
flesh back and allow the Spirit of God to work in us.
So we come to the idea of creativity in humanity, our
possession because we are made in the image of God. I have little patience for
people who say of themselves “I’m not artistic” or worse: “I’m not creative”.
Well just as you may come across a man here and there who
cannot speak, though he is made in God’s image, or a person who cannot reason
well, though they are made in God’s image, or somebody who has some kind of
incapacity that sets them apart from the norm of human life, we realize that it
isn’t because they have less of the image of God, or because they’re not
reasonable for example, but because at the base of it all it is because humans
are sinners and sin has tarnished the image of God.
And so too with creativity. It isn’t that people are not
creative or artistic, whatever you want to call it. It is because the image of
God in them, involving their creativity, has been ruined. Does this mean that
everyone is an artist? Yes, I think so, in one sense. The sense is that
everyone is creative, some more than others, just as one person may be more
reasonable than another, but there remains a kind of shadow and a residue of
the image of God, and therefore of creative, in any admittedly fallen human
being.
What then do we do about it, especially we as Christians
who are having the procedure done on us of restoring the image of God we were
created with?
It’s a sad thing, and I don’t think he would be in the
least embarrassed if I said this, but a friend of mine said something like this
the other week: “Is that secular music? You can tell because it actually sounds
good.” And you know, I agree with him.
Now why is that? Why should that be? Why on earth should
creative work produced with no aid of the Spirit of God and without any
recognition of the Creator, but in fact in rebellion of Him, be any better than
something produced just the other way around, with a fountain of infinite
resource, wisdom, knowledge, power and energy behind it? Why should Christian
art be so bad? And if you’re honest, you may have already accepted that as
fact. But it isn’t the money or the funding or the self-centeredness that lends
quality to the works of the world. We have a far deeper wellspring to draw
from!
The Christians arts are in need of their own Renaissance.
The Christian arts are in a sad state of affairs, playing around with mere
parody and fuzzy-pictures of feel-good phrases. There’s a whole lot more to be
done. There’s a whole lot more to be created. And God, hear me, is worthy of
more than the passing Christian parody or the underwhelming Christian
inspirational poster.
Just what am I encouraging you to do? I’m suggesting you
recognize that you’re made in the image of God and that His image is being
restored in you, and that you stop shooting yourself in the foot by telling
yourself you aren’t good enough to make anything or creative enough to create
anything. Well of course you aren’t! Creativity stems from the image of God, not the image of you. And the
Spirit of God is there to inspire and work in and through you. What more do you
need, but ah the whole daring of it, the dreaming of it…?
A man who needs no introduction among literary artists,
J.R.R. Tolkien used the phrase “sub-creation” in reference to the fantasy works
he did in crafting his middle-earth, in striving to create an imaginary but consistent
fantasy world. He saw the human capacity for sub-creation “as a form of
worship, a way for creatures to express the divine image in them by becoming
creators.”
My friends, let’s become creators together. Let’s dream up
something. Let’s do something.
I was reflecting with my wife upon the past year and some
months as we’ve gone through this study of God’s attributes, and it dawned on
me that this was the most repeated exhortation through it all: simply get up
and do something. Guys, it won’t be easy but you have the opportunity and
resource to do something new, to meet the noble challenge of placing Christian
art at the forefront of society again, where it can affect and change the
thinking of millions living now and of the generations to come.
We needn’t be shortsighted in thinking only of the visual
arts, to return upon a point I made at the start. You might not be creative in
the sense of painting, drawing and so on with all the things you might think you’re
not creative about. But be creative about thinking of the things you might be
creative about! There’s more! You have a unique skill-set that God has given
you, and you must be creative with those skills that are your own.
In retrospect, I remember that I’ve loved writing for many
years and I now realize that God has given me the opportunity to use my love
for writing to create a nearly exhaustive study of His attributes, which I
would love someday to publish as a book. Why not? Dream big!
What can you do for the kingdom of heaven, for the sake of
Christ, the Lamb who was slain on your behalf, something which nobody else can
do? You are you, and there’s nobody else that will ever be you. If you don’t
rise to the occasion and creatively do what God put you here to do, it will
never get done by anyone like you. Oh sure the work of God marches on. But your
cog in it all will be forever missing because you missed out. Only you can do
what you were designed to do.
What is that thing? I don’t know. But look for it. Seek it.
Ask God about it. And dream about it.
We are the music
makers and we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers, and
sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers, on
whom the pale moon gleams;
Yet we are the movers and shakers of
the world for ever, it seems.
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