God As Master Artist

God as Master Artist

Excerpted from “God Rejoicing in the New Creation”

Sermon #2211, July 5, 1891

When you see a purple sunset or a field full of daffodils or a breathtaking mountain vista, what does it tell you about the Creator? This world is far from perfect, but God has given us glimpses of himself—and of the New Earth—in the beauty of his creation.

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas. O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! Psalm 8:3-9

Spurgeon • Concerning the joy to which we are called, we would say, it is a joy in creation: “Behold, I create new heavens and a new earth. . . . I create Jerusalem to be a joy, and her people to be a gladness” (Isaiah 65:17-18).

I must confess that I think it a most right and excellent thing that you and I should rejoice in the natural creation of God. I do not think that any man is altogether beyond hope who can take delight in the nightly heavens as he watches the stars and feel joy as he treads the meadows all adorned with buttercups and daisies.

The man who is altogether bad seldom delights in nature. He cares little enough for the fields unless he can hunt in them, little enough for lands unless he can raise rent from them, little enough for living things except for slaughter or for sale. He welcomes night only for the indulgence of his sins, but the stars are not one half as bright to him as the lights that men have kindled. For him indeed the constellations shine in vain.

One of the purest and most innocent of joys, apart from spiritual things, in which a man can indulge is a joy in the works of God. I confess I have no sympathy with the good man, who, when he went down the Rhine, dived into the cabin that he might not see the river and the mountains, lest he should be absorbed in them and forget his Savior. I like to see my Savior on the hills and by the shores of the sea. I hear my Father’s voice in the thunder and listen to the whispers of his love in the cadence of the sunlit waves. These are my Father’s works, and therefore I admire them. I seem all the nearer to him when I am among them.

If I were a great artist, I should think it a very small compliment if my son came into my house and said he would not notice the pictures I had painted because he only wanted to think of me. In doing so he would condemn my paintings, for if they were good for anything, he would rejoice to see my hand in them. Oh, but surely everything that comes from the hand of such a master artist as God has something of himself in it! The Lord rejoices in his works. Shouldn’t his people do so? He said of what he had made, “It is very good.” If a man thinks that what God has made is not very good, he cannot be very good himself. In this he contradicts his God. It is a beautiful world we live in.

There are lovely spots on this fair globe which ought to make even a blasphemer devout. I have said, among the mountains, “He who sees no God here is mad.” There are things that God has made which overwhelm with a sense of his omnipotence: how can men see them and doubt the existence of the Deity? Whether you consider the anatomy of the body or the arrangement of the mighty heavens, you wonder that the scorner does not bow his head—at least in silence—and own up to the infinite supremacy of God.

Alcorn • I resonate with Spurgeon’s story of the great artist whose son says he won’t look at his father’s paintings because he wants to think only of his father. There is a false spirituality among some believers who say “We must love God, not his gifts” and “We must worship the Creator, not his creation.” They have forgotten the very purpose of God’s gifts and what he created—to reveal his greatness to us! As Spurgeon says, we should look for God in what he has made and praise him for it.

If we take literally the earthly depictions of life on the New Earth, we can make a direct connection between our current lives and our future in Heaven. When I’m eating with people here, enjoying food and friendship, it’s a bridge to when I’ll be eating there, enjoying food and friendship at the banquet table God has prepared for us (Revelation 19:9). This isn’t making a blind leap into a shadowy afterlife; it’s just taking a few natural steps in the light Scripture has given us.

Every joy on Earth—including the joy of reunion—is an inkling, a whisper, of greater joy. The Grand Canyon, the Alps, the Amazon rain forests, the Serengeti Plain are but rough sketches of the New Earth.

All our lives we’ve been dreaming of the New Earth. Whenever we see beauty in water, wind, flower, deer, man, woman, or child, we catch a glimpse of Heaven. Just like the Garden of Eden, the New Earth will be a place of sensory delight, breathtaking beauty, satisfying relationships, and personal joy.

God himself prepared mankind’s first home on Earth. “Now the LORD God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. The LORD God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food” (Genesis 2:8-9, NIV). The phrase “planted a garden” shows God’s personal touch, his intimate interest in the creative details of our earthly home. If he prepared Eden so carefully and lavishly for the first people in the six days of Creation, imagine what he has fashioned in the place he has been preparing for us in the two thousand years since Jesus ascended from this world!

Just as Eden is our backward-looking reference point, the New Earth is our forward-looking reference point. Notice the Earth’s restoration to Eden-like qualities prophesied in these passages:

Indeed, the LORD will comfort Zion; He will comfort all her waste places and her wilderness He will make like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the LORD; joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and sound of a melody. (Isaiah 51:3, NASB)

They will say, “This desolate land has become like the garden of Eden; and the waste, desolate and ruined cities are fortified and inhabited.” (Ezekiel 36:35, NASB)

Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress tree, and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree. (Isaiah 55:13, NKJV)

Once we understand that all we love about the old Earth will be ours on the New Earth—either in the same form or another—we won’t regret leaving all the wonders of the world we’ve seen or not yet seen. Why? Because we will yet be able to see them.