In the beginning, God created … The first words of the Bible reveal a God who is at heart a Creator. He is a painter, potter, and performer. He hovered over His easel, raised His brush, and the dark canvas exploded in a big bang of Technicolor. He took a formless lump of clay, spun it on His orbitary wheel, and sculpted a planet. He spoke a majestic monologue into the empty void and His voice returned a dialogue full of life. In order to make sure His symphonic soliloquy didn’t fall on deaf ears He created beings equipped with Divine Voice Recognition Software. He filled the planet with image-bearing Art patrons capable of creatively embellishing His divine words and returning them back to Him in a chorus of praise.

“For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven

and do not return there but water the earth,

making it bring forth and sprout,

giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,

so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;

it shall not return to me empty,

but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,

and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it. (Isaiah 55:10-11)

What does the Bible mean when it states that God’s words shall not return to Him empty? Does He want to hear a transcript of His inaugural creation speech, or is He more interested in listening to the analysis of the human press corps? If He just wanted to hear an echo of His own words, He would have created an empty world with better acoustics, but instead He chose to fill it with sound absorbing creatures capable of offering His words back in an astonishing array of human aesthetic. We all have engaged in Divine Word detailing, but sadly most of us fail to postmark our gifts back to God and end up hoarding His praise. Thinking we are collecting rare pieces of human genius we end up bottling up the human response to the sacred.  Instead of worshipping the Creator we venerate the created, and our art exhibits become studios of self-adulation rather than galleries of Godly gratitude.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder not because beauty is relative, but because it is experienced uniquely by every being created in God’s image. He delights when image-bearing artists-in-training embellish His creative words and offer them back to Him in a dizzying array of imaginative praise. Our individual responses to God’s world are like unique pieces of art adorning His Edenic sanctuary adding inimitable optical nuance to the heavenly feng shui. As He walks the hallways, He sees familiar pieces of His own work embroidered with a distinctively human touch and smiles because He knows that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

The light God called into being initially served as stage lighting for the unfolding universe, but once it lit upon His image-bearing prisms it was refracted into a rainbow of praise. We have a choice, we can stand in the spotlight and take a bow, or we can offer back a performance of image-bearing wonder. We can let His spoken words pile up like junk mail at our door, or we can artistically respond to every word, repackage them, and mark them Return to Sender.

Photo by Ilnur Kalimullin on Unsplash