Sunday, July 12, 2009

God's Masterpiece


I have this really beautiful friend, she's a relatively new Christian who's been through a lot a struggles and has a lot of questions. This friend recently asked me "since god made us new when we asked him into our lives does that mean he didn't like the old us?"
WOW
Is that a loaded question or what?
My first mental reaction to this was something like "really? Why did you ask me this question? I have to go find my bible and find all these references about how God loves us, and how he created us and how sin ruined us and put it all together and try and make her understand and make it all make sense cause its all vague and abstract in my head, and I'm kinda tired and urgh!!"
I love it when God teaches you something while you teach it to others, it's really humbling and beautiful and amazing all at the same time. So of course, God, being God had other plans for this conversation, instead of freaking out and typing some contrived "God loves you, blah blah blah" reply, God in all his awesomeness gave me this wonderful little illustration out of nowhere that I'm going to share with you.
Basically, we are God's masterpiece right, this is made clear several times in the bible, Genesis, Psalm 139, so many places point to just how wonderfully crafted we are in his image.
When I think of the word masterpiece, as most do I'm sure, immediately great works of art come to mind, The Mona Lisa, The Sistine Chapel etc.
We are like a beautiful painting God perfectly crafted and painstakingly painted by hand. So, to refer back to my friend's question is this the "old us"? Not quite, we'll call this the "original us" the back-in-the-garden version if you will. This is where the age old problem comes in: Sin entered the world. Isn't that what it always boils down to? No body wanted this to happen but it did.
That's right, God had a nice little cup of dirty paint water sitting next to his beautiful masterpiece, nothing out of the ordinary for a great artist, and he turned his back for two seconds (or maybe not at all, maybe Satan's that sneaky) and Satan creeps up and kicks this dirty murky water (sin, if you didn't catch that one) all over God's beautiful gorgeous masterpiece. What a jerk! I bet it was a really punky sort of kick to, I bet he scrunched up his face and clenched his fist and just dropkicked that cup as hard as he could.
So when we're "made new" it's really just God cleaning up all the messy dirty stains, a whole new careful, delicate, process. God doesn't mind at all though, he loves every single one of his masterpieces and wants them to be as beautiful as possible, as beautiful as he created them to be. He will spend our whole lives cleaning up our stains if we let him, and that's pretty awesome. :)
 

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