“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”
Genesis 1:1
And so it began. Everything we see. Everything we hear. Everything we touch. Everything we create started because God created first.
With His creation there were no boundaries, no lines to color within. But after calling all that He created “good” He designed margins for His creation--boundaries that He wanted us to create inside of and not erase.
Adam, the first man, was asked by God to name the animals yet he had to do so within the “lines” of their appearance with which God had given them. He couldn’t take the tusks of the elephant and give them to the alligator. He couldn’t remove the feathers of the bird and place them upon the salamander. Adam was given creative liberty to name them whatever he wanted but within the boundaries God had ordained.
This creative desire of man continued from there. While that first family stayed within those margins God’s creation would remain good and beauty would continue to blossom, but it withered quickly. In Genesis 3 Adam and Eve sought to change (a.k.a. be creative with) the rules God had set concerning that one forbidden tree. Cain desired to manipulate the truth of God’s plan for offerings in Genesis 4. We then find this rebellious mindset trail-blazing its way from Eden through the rest of Biblical history. In doing so these would all discover something that is still true to this day—it is only when mankind colors outside the lines of God’s design that sin begins to ruin the picture.
Since Adam and Eve’s sin in the Garden of Eden we still hate to admit that these barriers exist. Our desire to change those boundaries has not gone away and in some respect has only become greater. Deep down, as we continue to create, we are quickly seeing that creativity has suffered in our modern world because the patterns of God have been rejected.
Creativity with no boundaries equals confusion; creativity within the boundaries of the Divine plan equals beauty. That’s the way God created it from the beginning. Artists and all of mankind like to think that creative liberties force us to push the limitations and erase them altogether to get to “real art.” Yet when we change what the Creator has set what we create becomes inferior. Why? Because God’s truth is the prism from which every ray of beauty originates.
As we saw from the beginning this truth goes way beyond art. Romans 1 tells us that people have sought to erase the lines of who God is and God’s nature has become tarnished in the minds of many as a result. We have sought to erase God’s lines in marriage relationships and marriage is in an ongoing state of decline. We have sought to remove God’s lines in a person’s gender and children are growing up in complete identity chaos. As we seek to change and be “creative” with these boundaries of Divine origin our idea of originality always suffers.
Our society is finding out very quickly that it is difficult to color anything when the lines are erased—a truth not only for the generation that is but for the ones to come as well. True creativity is finding something unique within the walls setup by our Creator not without them. That is where beauty can still be found. And that is why much of the art of today is forgotten tomorrow while, at the same time, we walk outside at sunset and still proclaim with camera in hand, “God, how great thine art!”
May we trust the Master Painter.
May we submit to the true Original.
May we seek to glorify the only One who could ever color without lines and still call it “good.”
Or, to be more precise, “very good.”
“And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.”
Genesis 1:31
No comments:
Post a Comment