God’s Art

I sometime watch the artist named Bob Ross on PBS. If you ever seen him you would know that he is a white, disco, afro sporting, painter. I have watched him work and the things he does look awesome. There has been times when he is painting something beautiful and he will make a large dark mark almost in the center of the painting. I will think to myself, “What the hell is he doing, he just messed up a beautiful painting.” But after letting him finish, he ends up making something that is more interesting and beautiful than what I first expected. God in human history works somewhat like this. What we interpret as God messing up can in realty turn into something more beautiful.

Another analogy is if you ever watch a painter that slaps the paint on the canvas in what looks like a random matter. It looks like the artist has no rhyme or reason to what he is doing. But once he is almost done it all of a sudden pops out to you what he is doing. In the middle of human history we do not have the perspective to see what God is ultimately doing. Like the artist what looks random but isn't, God is doing something beautiful although it looks to us like randomness. We really won’t have the perspective until God is done with history. Now this perspective takes faith that the artist knows what he is doing.



These analogies fall short in many ways. One being that humans play a part in God’s artwork in human history. This make it even more complicated to interpret what God is doing. When an artist uses a brush, the brush cannot choose to reject the artists work, while humans can. Through this, in a way, we are able to share in God’s glory.