Christ is the Lord of our whole life. Not just of Sundays, but our family time, our work time, our leisure time, the arts, and everything else. And our faith grows as we see how it all fits together; one reason for our confidence that what we believe is true is that (like a good scientific theory!) it speaks to the whole of what we experience. And as we grasp that increasingly, we can rejoice in the riches of our faith, and recognize how God enriches us through it!
Now the application of this to the arts is a bit personal for me. My mother, and her sister and her father, were highly gifted artistically, musically and in painting, drawing, poetry. But the church stream they lived in didn’t have a biblical understanding of the arts. And so they expressed their giftings just so far, and then felt that discipleship meant they should pull back. I don’t doubt that (as in other such situations) the Lord valued the sacrifice, even though it was one he did not want. But I know there was – beside the waste of potential – the inevitable hurt and frustration of unexpressed gift. It was only when Francis Schaeffer’s books came on the scene – most notably the short (61 pages) but brilliant Art and the Bible – that light dawned; and, for them, it was more than a bit late.
Where then does God’s Word first speak to us about the arts? I think it’s sometimes said that that’s Genesis 4:21ff, as we read of the rebellious line of Cain. But it isn’t. Think about Genesis 2. This chapter shows us a confident, attractive vision of humanity `as we were meant to be’, before the Fall, before everything went wrong. We see Adam, God`s creation, as an explorer and adventurer (look at the interests expressed in 2:10‑14); a worker (2:15); a scientist, called to discern the nature of each member of the animal creation (2:19); and someone built for friendship and companionship ‑ a lover, a sexual being (2:18, 22‑24). Above all, we read earlier in 1:26-27, human beings are actually created `in the image of God‘ (1:26‑27) – an astounding phrase!
And amidst all these we find that God has made us with a wide-ranging aesthetic sense; look at 2:9-12 and 19-23: `Out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight.` (So the love of artistic beauty isn’t just an accidental by-product of evolution; it’s something deeply human – and related also to the nature of our God, who also is an artist who creates and enjoys what is `good’ (1:4)! Beauty is not ultimately unreal, as postmodernism might suggest: things are genuinely, objectively, beautiful because God made them so! (But much contemporary art has lost that sense, and the result is often chaos.)) And `Out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is ….good for food… [Also] A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers. The name of the first is the Pishon; it is the one that flowed around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. And the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there.` [So, now we have both culinary and artistic craftsmanship – we’re beings called to make use of the earth’s wealth for beautiful and practical purposes!] `Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field.` [So, the unfallen human being is an artist with words, capable of taking language and using it to create something new, that will give expression to what is present in God’s created reality]
`But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said,
“This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called Woman,
because she was taken out of Man.”`
[So, the very first love poetry, as the unfallen human being bursts out in exuberant song as he encounters his lover!]
When therefore we feel joy at the glory of the human being expressed in these artistic ways, we aren’t just being sentimental; we’re relating to what it is to be authentically human as God created us. He is the Creator of radiant sunsets, snowy mountain ranges, mighty animals, beautiful trees, unimaginable galaxies; and we are made in his image, therefore we are creative too. When we are fruitfully active in painting, writing, cookery, flower arranging, it is because we are made in the image of God. Indeed, doing these things before God and for his glory (and deliberately giving thanks for them too, for a fine jazz-rock band or a side-splitting TV comedy for example), could actually be called an aspect of 24/7 worship; it is part of being what God has put us on this earth to be! The biblical vision isn’t shrunken and shrivelled, rather it takes in every part of life; `everything God created is good’ (1 Tim 4:4), a gift we receive thankfully as from his hand. And the more we grasp Genesis 2, deep down, the more our entire life becomes a unified act of lived-out worship before him. It is good to be human!
Thank you Lord! And there’s much, much more, as we’ll see next time…
