Day 14: God Don't Make No Junk

When the forbidden fruit became the feast of disobedience, a shattering sound was heard, reverberating throughout the whole of creation.  Disobedience in the Garden of Eden in Chapter 3 of Genesis has become the story’s way of making sense of the brokenness of our world. Prior to the “the fall,” there was sense of melodic harmony.  I love talking about creation within the metaphor of music.  God created all that is.  Bearing within creation was to be the melody of God’s glory and graciousness played throughout all the various instruments and voices of God’s design.  Each instrument and voice is different, but it is that beautiful difference aligned with God’s melody that creates a harmony that resonates.

However, the radical disobedience (or departure from the melodic composition of God’s design) in the Garden created a dissonance (it no longer sounds as it should, something is off) that has deeply affected the whole creation.  Now the instruments and voices are at odds with one another.  Humanity finds itself at odds with God, at odds with nature, at odds with one another, and at odds with themselves.  In short, “things got broke, things fell apart.”  This leads us to what I believe to be yet another theme and thread that ties together the Scriptural Story.  The theme is Restoration.  The thread of God’s Character is as ARTIST (CREATOR).

Too often we think of “creation” as a one-time event at the beginning of history.  That’s an unfortunate reduction of “creation” and a tragic missing of the character of God.  As Creator, God has the imaginative capacity to dream of what is yet to exist and through the work of his faithfulness and power bring beauty out of nothingness (and in many cases, beauty from brokenness.)  Without a doubt, Creation at the outset was the work of God.  And, at the outset, creation was good and beautiful.  However, this God that creates, doesn’t stop creating when the ball was set in motion at the beginning of time.  No, God’s tenacious and steady influence on the whole of creation throughout time is an exercise of this imaginative capacity and creative (recreative) power.

Why does this matter?  Because “things got broke, things fell apart.”  If God was a one-time Creator, when things got broke, that would be it.  “I made it.  You broke it.  It is what it is.”  We would be doomed to suffer the “forever” dissonance of a harmony that had gone tragically wrong.  We would be doomed to always be at odds with one another.  However, the story of Scripture tells us of a much different story.  In fact, our story tells us of a God that creates (recreates) beauty on the rubble of our brokenness.  We call this RESTORATION.

God has as His passion to restore to beauty that which has been marred, corrupted, perverted, and broken.  God seeks to reclaim the “good” intention of His design.  God seeks to realign all of creation to His melody and invite difference to again contribute to harmony rather than difference serving as the catalyst for dissonance and conflict.

To do so, God stays true to His Character as Creator or what I call Artist.  I love to envision God as artist.  This is not without reason.  Throughout the Scripture God is referred to as a Potter (Jeremiah 18), His Word is poetic, life is painted on the canvas of creation, and when creation aligns itself with the composer’s melody, there is no tune like it.  God has this infinite capacity to look upon what doesn’t yet exist, or what exists in its most broken form, and imagine the beauty of what could be.  He then sets out to exercise his artistic influence to restore all that is to its originally created beauty.

This means…

• God has the capacity to create and recreate!
• God is never finished with his artwork!
• God is a masterpiece maker!
• “God don’t make not junk!”
• God doesn’t traffic in junk or knock-offs!
• God looks into the “trash heaps” of our world and finds the raw material for beauty!
• God has the capacity to take even the most broken shards and shattered pieces and transform them into a breath-taking mosaic.  
• God isn’t simply a composer, but also a conductor!  He seeks to woo creation’s diversity back into alignment with melodic score of His symphony of Beauty.  

I know, I know, I’m all over the place with my metaphors.  Is God a composer/conductor, potter, poet, or painter?  The answer is, YES!  All of these metaphors work!  All of them speak to the capacity to take something from the place of an imagined dream and, whether working with nothing or raw materials, make that dream into a beautiful reality.  As an artist, God is restoring all things to His original dream.  He longs to declare once again, “Ooohhhh that’s good!”  When read through this lens, our doomsday fears, our “to hell in a handbasket” fatalism, and our fears are quelled by the hopeful faith and expectation that God’s still at work forming and fashioning a future of beauty, moments when dissonance will disappear, and what we will be left with is the melodic harmony of God’s instruments and voices declaring again the glory of its Artist.

Time to journey back into Scripture:
Today, you’ve only got to read a little bit.  I’d like for you to read Luke 11:1-13 and Matthew 6:9-15.  In today’s Scripture, we are introduced to what’s often called the “Lord’s Prayer.”  Many of us know this prayer even before we are followers of Christ.  However, I want you to read (and perhaps pray) this prayer in light of today’s theme.  How might this prayer be prayed in the anticipation of all of creation aligning itself again with the beauty of God’s melody?  If God’s an artist and we want His Kingdom on earth as it is in Heaven, how might that affect the beauty at play in our daily lives?