Commentary on History-week 2 by Lael Arrington

When we hosted Dr. Walter Kaiser as a guest on our radio program The Things That Matter Most, I asked him, “Are there any clear or even oblique references to Joseph or Moses in Egyptian ruins or artifacts?” His answer was a rather wistful “No.”

And I remember thinking two things: What if the archaeological evidence of Joseph and Moses and the children of Israel in Egypt lies moldering in the dark recesses of some gigantic warehouse like the lost ark in the final scene of Indiana Jones?

My second thought was: Why is the proof for God, the silver bullet that would shatter all our doubts, so elusive? Why doesn’t God show himself and put Richard Dawkins and Ted Turner to shame? (And perhaps come through for me a little more often?)

Then I think about the children of Israel wandering through the wilderness with God in plain sight…thundering atop a smoking mountain…leading in a pillar of cloud by day…flaming in a pillar of fire by night…invading the completed tabernacle with unbearable radiance and terrible majesty…spurting water out of rocks…frosting the ground with manna…raining quail every evening…sustaining the same sandals on their weary feet for forty years. And yet they still had doubts. How much more does God need to show up?

I think what this must mean is that seeing God show up is never enough. Miracles are not silver bullets. Supernatural sightings are no substitute for relationship. What is needed is to walk with God, trusting him, getting to know his heart.

For some reason God is pleased to act in such a way that he can be ignored. He has created us in his image, able to reason and choose. The more we trust and choose him, the more he comes to us and makes his home with us. (Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” John 14:21)

We love because God first loved us. We show our love for God by keeping his commandments. By sheer grace God “manifests himself,” shows himself to us. We experience his daily presence in a way that changes us.

The way I have come to know Jesus and the way he has changed me in that knowing is compelling evidence for my faith in God. Still, I wouldn’t mind seeing Joseph’s name in an ancient tomb on the cover of Time or Newsweek.

Commentary on Contemporary Culture-Week 1 by Lael Arrington

Jesus said, “For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.” And then he offered his hands to the spikes to show what it looks like to be “of the truth.” Truth by its nature draws a line between what is true and what is not. Love unites. Surely one of the hardest things we are called to do is to speak the truth that draws a line with the love that unites, something Erwin has done so well.

And yet that is exactly what is happening today in the Mideast. In his book Breakthrough: The Return of Hope to the Middle East, author Tom Doyle, Middle East Director of e3, who works to encourage Christian pastors and churches, states that millions of Jews and Arabs have come to Christ in the past ten years. And like Erwin, he points to the compelling message and lives of Christians living the truth in sacrificial love as essential.

Doyle and others are reporting that this message of love is confirmed to many Jews and Muslims who are receiving personal visions of Jesus asking them to turn and follow him. A missionary tells how Jesus’ love reached an Iranian Muslim who dreamed he was trapped in a racing fire. Flames engulfed him. Smoke burned his eyes and filled his lungs. Suddenly two strong arms reached down and snatched him out of the inferno. Night after night he dreamed the same dream. Each time the same arms, the same man delivered him.

One day as he walked down the street in his radically Muslim village he saw a crowd gathered. Drawing near he followed their gaze to a video projected on the side of a building. The movie showed a man was stumbling down a street shouldering heavy crossbeams. The man looked up. The Muslim’s jaw dropped. The bloody face under the crown of thorns was the face of the deliverer in his dreams. One man loved his village enough to show the film at great personal risk. Now the Muslim man who saw in it the face of his dreams plants churches in his radically Muslim country.

In matters of love, Jesus goes personally to invite others to become people “of the truth.” May we follow his example and fully grasp how being “of the truth” means being a man or woman who loves extravagantly.

Commentary on Art-week 1 by painter Bruce Herman from “The Body, Beauty and Brokenness.” Bruce is the Lothlórien professor of art at Gordon College and a contributor to A Faith and Culture Devotional on “Sex, Intimacy and Worship”. Enjoy the complete context of these remarks at his website.

[Brokenness figures prominently in Bruce’s art, especially his images of people. He challenges the viewer to consider what is a “beautiful” representation of human bodies and souls.]

This is my central thesis — that images of brokenness are actually more honest, truer, and therefore more beautiful in a fully developed sense of the word. The goodness of true images makes them beautiful. But what of our traditional sense of beauty? If, as Elaine Scarry writes in On Beauty and Being Just , the opposite of beauty is not ugliness but injury — how then are images of the body that show injury to be taken as beautiful?

Yet I would argue that the central image of the Western tradition is the broken body of Christ on the cross—and that very brokenness is the source of beauty, goodness, and truth in our lives…within the pain of crucifixion there is hope to be discovered through images of the broken body.

This is how I too want to be known—as a broken man whose work reveals hope and grace—grace from a loving God who himself has been broken. My belief is that Christians would not feel marginalized in the art world if we were to adopt this stance—of the exile, of the broken, rather that of the triumphalist.

The paradigmatic moment in which this truth is displayed is Christ before Pontius Pilate—the petty bureaucrat who said to Jesus, “Man, don’t you know that I have the power to set you free or to put you to death?” Jesus’ reply is the perfect response to power: “You have no power except that which is granted you by [the one who loves me most] My Father in Heaven.”

Thus, when God says, “My power is made perfect in weakness” (2Cor.12:9) he is not voicing some pious platitude, rather he is describing the lineaments of true power: love and sacrifice. I therefore find myself, a painter late in Western history, heir to a tradition deeply compromised by worldly notions of meaning that attach to prosaic, shallow standards of female beauty and masculine power. I am painting within a tradition that currently favors at best a fairly anemic understanding of the human form, a confused notion of beauty, and a deeply suspicious stance in relation to truth.

If Christ has planted me here in this broken and injured world of art, perhaps his power to redeem will only be found here, where things don’t fit, don’t make sense, and are not immediately understood as beautiful. Only as God’s light breaks through this brokenness will the story come clear and the outlines of the City of God be seen in the midst of the ruined human city.