We’re going to take some time and we do this pretty much every year to celebrate creativity, consider the intersection between arts and faith. And our focus this morning is a little passage from the Old Testament book of Exodus, chapter 31, where God gave detailed instructions for the construction of the tabernacle. And that was a a portable church that God’s people a place of worship that would accompany them on their journey through the wilderness on into the promised land. So as we read this passage, think about the implications for art and for creativity, for making things in our world. Said the Lord said to Moses, “See, I’ve chosen Bezale, son of Yuri, the son of her of the tribe of Judah. I have filled him with the spirit of God, with skill, ability, and knowledge in all kinds of crafts. to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver, and bronze, to cut and set stones, to work in wood, to engage in all kinds of craftsmanship. Moreover, I have appointed Oh, Holab, son of Ahismak, of the tribe of Dan, to help him. Also, I have given skill to all the craftsmen to make everything I’ve commanded you. The tent of meeting, the ark of the testimony with the atonement cover on it, and all the other furnishings of the tent, the table and its articles, the pure gold lampstand and all its accessories, the altar of incense, the altar of burnt offering, and all of its utensils, the basin with its stand, also the woven garments, both the sacred garments for Aaron the priest, and the garments for his sons when they serve as priests, and the anointing oil and fragrant incense for the holy place they are to make them just as I commanded you. So let’s draw out from this passage some principles that we observe for to help us both understand and appreciate the arts whatever form it takes. It could be drawing or painting or music or making movies or poetry, literature, dance, design, graphic arts, even even flower arrangements or or arranging the furniture in your living room. It’s all a making. It’s all a creating a form of art. And what do we learn from God’s instructions about the tabernacle that inform those endeavors? What Bellazisel was gifted and instructed to do? Sure, it was timestamped. It was taskspecific. None of us are called to build the tabernacle. So, not everything here is completely normative for all Christians of all times. But if we zoom out from this particular project, we do learn something very important about God, about creativity, about artistry in general. First, just consider the value that God places on the arts. Belellisel was both chosen, gifted by God to do his artistic work. See, I’ve chosen this guy. I’ve filled him with the spirit of God with skill, ability, and knowledge in all kinds of crafts. skill, ability, knowledge, craftsmanship. He had a spiritfilled infusion of those gifts. And I’m sure he wasn’t a complete artistic klutz before that infusion of the Holy Spirit. He probably had some natural interest in making things and and uh but this was a very special commission from God. Build a tabernacle endued with inspiration from the Holy Spirit to a much greater degree. Came supernaturally through the spirit of God. And just think of the sheer variety of media he was to work with. His commission involved metal working and stone cutting and woodworking and sewing and embroidery and even mixing oils for anointing and incense for burning. So the tabernacle that Bezel was commissioned to create, it demonstrates God loves all kinds of art. He was given a very competent assistant, a holab, who we later learn in chapter 38. He was a craftsman. He was a designer. He specialized in cloths, in embroidery, in blue and purple and scarlet yarn and fine linen. So there’s a sizable team also of of subcontractors, other craftsman that God said he had given skill to. Skill, ability, knowledge was given to be bleazel. His his artistry filled his mind and what he thought about. So you can imagine him working on something some problem during the day and it wasn’t quite coming together the way he wanted to but he’d wake up the the next morning with some fresh ideas and insight. So his artistry involved the head involved knowledge. It would pass through his heart and and flow out through his hands skill and ability. He was given some very specific instructions about um that that wouldn’t allow for any variance. things like specific measurements and uh specific materials. But most of his work was not like that. It wasn’t paint by numbers. He had wide latitude to use his imagination for this project. So God loves our variety of creativity. Bible begins with God’s great creating work himself. He’s taking something that is called formless and empty and he fills it and he arranges it like a painter painting a canvas or a composer putting notes on a page. And after creating, God gave his artistic judgment to what he had done. God saw that all he had made and saw that it was very very good. So human art is meant to reflect the mind and the skill of our maker. Theologian Abraham Kyper said like God himself, we’re we’re unique creatures and that we have the possibility both to create something beautiful and then delight in it. So the value God puts on the arts is very high. And if you’re an artist here this morning, you may not always feel that. You might feel that your work is often devalued and others don’t consider it consider it important or vital. God would not see it that way. Whether it’s your vocation, you’re actually trying to make a living with your art or it’s an avocation. It’s just a part-time passion that you can’t extinguish. You might not feel like you’re getting the recognition you like. If so, you’re in good company because the poetry of Emily Dickinson, the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh, music of even the music of Bach, all were discovered mostly after the death of the artists. Yet, their works are now considered essential to our culture. Our world would be a much poorer place if any of those artists lacking recognition had quit and stopped creating. So we see with Bezel how God’s filling, inspiring, his gifts of skill and ability were poured out into the making of the tabernacle. God loves and values artistry. And whatever we do to make things is representative of what God himself does. And if all that’s true, and humans are created by God, we’re hardwired with these creative abilities that mirror God’s own, then art and religion must be somehow inseparable. God knows. He looks at his world. He knows and he evaluates what is good, what is true, what is beautiful. Therefore, art is never a morally neutral, a neutral enterprise. It’s not something that doesn’t have to pay any attention to truth and goodness and beauty. If it’s to be considered good art, it must in some fashion point toward what is good and true and beautiful. Meline Langel makes a sharp statement which says bad art is just bad religion. In talking with some of the folks running the Fringe Festival this year, they’ve seen a pretty large increase in ticket sales for the shows compared to last year’s, which means there’s a big appetite for people like us to experience wide range of theater during this festival. And and and with the Fringe Festival, it’s a very wide range indeed. How do we use God-given discernment to distinguish between good art and bad art? Is it even is it even right to talk about art that way and to judge it in that manner? Well, the latitude that God gives us to use our artistic imagination and presentation, it can’t mean that anything goes. That God’s standards are absolute and he asks us to keep in step with his spirit and his standards. Bezel, oh Holab. Obviously, they weren’t to use their imaginations to form things that violated any of the ten commandments which had which had just been given to God’s people, including the commandment not to uh create idols, not to have false worship. So, good good art always has to have some moral guard rails around it. Not everyone wants to hear that. In our in our late modern or post-modern world, the assumption is often made that there really are no absolutes. Philip Reichen writes that over the last century, many artists and writers and musicians have become increasingly cynical about the possibility of knowing the truth. In many cases, they have abandoned the quest to discover and express transcendent meaning. And that shriveled perspective is often shown in the kind of art that is produced. Now, now no one wants to argue that for art to be good or clean or Christian that it always has to has to be really soft and muted and sentimental or or woodenly literal and never abstract. With the tabernacle, there was a lot of symbolism and abstract creating going on. I mean, the ark of the covenant was going to symbolize the atonement, the covering over of people’s sins. And the golden lampstand was going to symbolize the light of God’s glory and grace. And for some reason, pomegranates were embroidered on the robe of the high priest. Colorful curtains were spread out everywhere. So some of the art, I’m sure, would be recognizable as being very literal, but some of it was far more symbolic and abstract. And from the example of the tabernacle, we see that abstraction has God’s blessing as much as any other art form. Abstraction can still point people toward thinking about goodness and truth and beauty. Art that aligns with the Christian worldview. It doesn’t always have to be soft and gentle. It’s like the voices of the prophets in the Old Testament. It can be shocking, can be disruptive, it can challenge the status quo, but it can to still do all of that within the framework of the goodness of God because it shocks us in the right direction. So the Bible doesn’t tell us a lot about what what is good art and what is bad art. But we can be sure that God himself knows the difference and has a taste for what is excellent. So art that pursues goodness can’t be immoral. It should have a quality of of excellence. So when we do some making, we do some art, we wouldn’t be embarrassed or ashamed to offer it to God as representing our very best work. As art reflects the goodness of God, it reflects his truth. Art sometimes serves to penetrate the surface of things. We just look on the surface, but art gets us below the surface to see what’s really going on. And the tabernacle was built to tell a story about God and his relationship with people, how to approach him, how to receive his blessing. Each part of the tabernacle said something about God, his authority, his holiness, his power to deal with our sin. Tabernacle told a true story and art should do something similar. Now, some art like pop music or the images you read on a serial box, uh Adrien Chaplan makes the point that those serial box images probably were were drawn by someone with a master of fine arts degree who’s very dissatisfied in how they’re spending their lives. But we we don’t expect all art to communicate something terribly serious. You know, Paul McCartney wrote a silly love song about some people wanting to fill the world with silly love songs. And he asks in the course, what’s wrong with that? And there’s nothing wrong with that. We don’t demand that all pop culture be very deep. It’s not fair to ask every artist or every work of art to tell the whole Christian story. We only ask that it not violate the goodness or the truth of God. Whatever art teaches, whatever emotion it stirs within us, it’s good art. If it isn’t profane or pornographic, if it doesn’t celebrate a story that’s opposite to the story of the Bible, the story of redemption. I mean, God’s story is that we were all created and humans fell into sin and the ultimate grace of God is displayed through Christ on the cross in our redemption. And for many centuries, roughly the years 300 to about 1700, the arts in the western world focused very specifically on that story, on that because it was the grand story. It was the great story. For many of those years, the the church was the primary patron of the arts. And they would commission artists to work on themes that commemorated the crucifixion and nativities and gospel parables, final judgments, apostles, saints. The Christian stories saturated the world of Western art. 2017, a visitor strolled through the National Gallery in London and afterward sent out this tweet. Well, that’s Western art for you. Thousand years of crucifixions and then stripes. Now, as a summary of Western art, that’s probably fairly reductive, but if any of us strolled rapidly through a western art section of a museum, we might say the same thing. And author Glenn Scriber, he muses on that tweet and he says, “Behind the humor, the quip gets at something remarkable. Jesus Christ and especially his gruesome death has towered above Western civilization. The cross is the most globally recognized symbol certainly of religion, but perhaps of anything. An outsider to Christianity and its art might expect depictions of Christ’s birth or to predominate or his baptism or anything really other than his violent death. The idea of presenting a tortured man as art is subversive to say the least. Of course, the art produced in the Western world, it’s not the beall and endall of all art in the world. But it’s remarkable that artistic expression would be captivated for so long, for so many centuries, with that single event that took place on the outskirts of Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. Because it was considered the greatest story ever told, artists were drawn to tell it. Philip Reichen makes the comment that modern art, postmodern art, it often claims to tell the truth about life by focusing on pain and the absurdity of human existence. But that’s only a portion of the story. The Christian approach to the human conditions much more complete. It’s more hopeful and ultimately more truthful. It’s not naive idealism, nor is it hopelessness. It’s redemptive. You know, one of the best known and certainly most successful Christian artists of uh of all time really was a painter by the name of Thomas Concincaid. And he referred to himself, he came to be known as the painter of light. And he was famous for at least a thousand paintings of landscapes and churches and gardens and lighouses and seascapes. And he would include a little Bible reference, a Christian symbol of a of a fish along with his signature. He’d always disguise the the letter N somewhere in his painting to honor his wife and sometimes he would disguise the names of his four daughters. And his paintings and prints just sold by the boatload. His company made millions and millions of dollars. Not just not just paintings and prints, but they were put on on cups and on plates and on cushions, even on a lazy boy chair. His work was all over the place. It’s it would be highly unusual if none of us have happened to see any of his work in our lifetime. Sold millions and millions of dollars, renown in the commercial art industry. Describing his work, he said, “My paintings are halfway between a memory and a daydream. My whole ministry is an expression of Matthew 5:16. Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your father which is in heaven.” I try to produce a recreation of the past without the hard edges. I love to create beautiful worlds where light dances and peace reigns. I like to portray a world without the fall. When you think about that, a world without the fall. Now, his efforts to portray that world, they were ridiculed by serious art critics. They viewed his work as just sappy and sentimental and kitschy. They didn’t consider him at all to be a serious artist. One art historian, Charlotte Mullen, said, “Thomas Concaid style is illustrative saccharine fantasy rather than than art which you can connect with at any meaningful level. Seems you either loved the guy’s work or you loathed his work. Throngs, particularly Christian consumers, bought his paintings, making him probably the best selling painter of all time. It’s estimated that uh pieces of his work would show up in one of every 20 American households. And by age 41, he knew he’d never have to work another day in his life. Didn’t want to. He said he wanted to use his paintings as tools to expand the kingdom of God in an arrangement with the Christian organization World Vision that he would give away one of his prints to everyone who sponsored a child in need. Now, despite his work displaying a world that was eternally sunny and bright and a world without the fall, Thomas Concincaid’s personal world certainly uh darker and um and more complicated than his art. He became a a serious alcoholic and especially struggled when he was alone on the road. He had a hard time staying away from bars and strip clubs. his heavy drinking, his behavior at home, it was at frightening for his family. Despite their efforts to intervene, uh it eventually cost him his marriage. On the night of Good Friday 2012, age 54, Concaid died from an apparent overdose of alcohol and Valium. And Ryan Curry mentions Thomas Concincaid’s ending in an essay entitled, “Are Christian artists free to ignore the fall?” And the point isn’t that Concaid was a fraud, just that he was human. As with all of us, he had a lot of light, a lot of darkness in his soul. But he in his art, he was only letting the light part through and he was covering up all the rest. A recent documentary about Thomas Concaid entitled Art for Everybody. It highlights a vault that he kept on one of his properties contains some 6,000 works that had never been publicly exhibited as part of the Thomas Concincaid uh brand. His daughters began sifting through those works in the vault in 2015. Among them were many paintings described as dark and psychologically intense, self-portraits, brooding and awkward and disturbed and introspective. They weren’t reassuring. They were isolated, haunted looking humans. Uh not these brightly illuminated cottages that he was known for. Urban scenes and dark alleys and skies filled with fire and ominous landscapes. a shack in the middle of nowhere, a nun pointing a gun at herself, and giant monsters and distorted faces. And Curry’s point in his essay isn’t that every work of art must convey the whole story of creation and fall and redemption, but we really can’t afford to ignore part of that story for very long. author Andrew Claven. He’s a guy who became very successful writing murder mysteries. And he said, “One of my problems with Christian art is it only shows you happy endings. It will only show you pleasant scenarios and family entertainment. All of which I have no problem with. But if that’s the only thing you do, you’re going to give Christians the idea that they’re going to win out on earth, that if they just follow the Christian world rules, everything’s going to be great.” We all know that’s not true. when it turns out to not be true, when you face true hardship and face true evil, it becomes very easy to lose your faith. He says,”I believe a a writer who is a Christian should deal with everything, should deal with the world as it really is. I’m a mystery writer. I’ve written about murder all my life. One of the things I’ve always tried to do is make sure that you see that someone is actually dying and that there’s grief. And this is truly sad thing because I believe there is a God. I don’t believe that it’s just a fantasy. I believe that that is an essential part of reality. I believe that if you write the world truthfully, God will be revealed. Now, if we return our attention to the tabernacle commission given to Bezel and the others, the things that he was instructed to make, they were going to be beautiful and they were going to be awful. Tabernacle shimmerred with beauty. You look at the priestly garments alone. They were designed, it says, to display glory and beauty. Altar of incense was made of gold. Must have smelled wonderfully. And the designs were required to be artistic. It wasn’t just utilitarian or practical. But as it glimmered in beauty, the tabernacle also told the story of sin with curtains and a beautiful veil and cherubim that guarded the way into God’s symbolic presence, keeping people out. On the bronze altar, animal sacrifices were to be made because sinful people couldn’t just walk into God’s presence. Blood was required to maintain the covenant between God and his people. There was a ransom payment uh called atonement money that all people had to pay when when the children of Israel were numbered. Sin offerings were made regularly. And once a year on the day of atonement, sacrifices and ceremonies were enacted at the tabernacle to cover the sin of the people. Of course, we know the New Testament story. That ceremony only came to an end when Jesus came as the true and faithful high eternal high priest who through his sacrifice on the cross took away completely all the sins of those who would place their faith and trust in him for salvation who would call on his name for salvation. Then access was granted confidently to the very throne of grace, the very throne of God. So, the tabernacle was artistically beautiful, dreadfully functional, but it spoke clearly to the glory of God. And God says he’s not going to share his glory with anyone else. That’s the final lesson the tabernacle has for all you artists this morning. Because like any other human endeavor, every other vocation or avocation we can do, it can be worship or it can be idolatry. It can be self- glorifying. It can be God glorifying. Philip Reichen notes how art, it’s always tempted to glory in itself. Nearly every art form has been used to communicate values that are contrary to scripture. It’s not hard when we view art, we watch singers or dancers or musicians or actors, and we really have no doubt about who’s being glorified. It’s the artists themselves that are seeking all the attention, stealing the glory that God says he’ll share with no one. You know in the famous logo for MGM movie studio you have the familiar lion and above the lion are the Latin motto ars gratia artists meaning art for art’s sake but a Christian theology of the arts is that art is not for art’s sake art is for God’s sake and art creating making things it’s an activity highly valued by God that can easily devolve into idolatry it can exist for its own sake or for a higher purpose. Reiken says whenever we experience art or involved in making art we ask who is this for and who’s this going to glorify and anyone who doubts that tendency of artistry to to devolve into idolatry we only have to read the chap the chapter right next to the chapter where God told Moses about selecting beazel to go construct the tabernacle. The next chapter, chapter 32, Moses is on the mountain receiving those instructions about the tabernacle. And Aaron is busy fashioning a golden calf, a piece of art for the Israelites to worship as their god. Art that’s self- glorifying always must be resisted. You know, composer Igor Stravinsky said, “I take no pride in my artistic talents. They’re god-given. I see absolutely no reason to become puffed up over something one has received. Bach is famous for signing his words SDG standing for the Latin phrase solely deo gloria. To God alone be the glory. Good art is also good religion. It seeks in some way to represent or at least not misrepresent the goodness, the truth and the beauty of God. It acknowledges skill and inspiration as a gift and it seeks to use it for God’s glory, not for purposes of selfish idolatry. In his book, Art in the Bible, Francis Schaefer describes a mural by the Swiss artist Leo Paul Robert from the 19th century. And in the background, Robert paints the actual city where the museum is, Nucatel, its lake, even the museum in which the mural hangs. At the lower right is a huge dragon wounded to death. And beneath and around that dragon are representations of what Schaefer calls the vile, the ugly, the pornographic, the rebellious. Above the dragon is Michael the archangel. He’s victorious over evil. High above Christ is coming with his heavenly host. On the left is that great stairway and young men and women are ascending it carrying objects representing different areas of human culture and creativity, art, architecture, music, literature, learning. They’re taking those things away from the defeated dragon and upward to present them to Christ who is coming down to receive them. And Schaefer comments that the artist Leo Paul Robert understood that the lordship of Christ at his return encompasses every aspect of life, including all human creativity. All art will one day be redeemed. And Schaefer says that the hope of the future reality should shape the way we think about art in the present. He says,”For if these things are to be carried up to the praise of God and the lordship of Jesus Christ at the second coming, then we should be offering them to God now.” And may may that be the prayer of all the artists in the room this morning, each one of us in any of our creative endeavors that we would be offering them up to the Lord. Now, let’s take a couple moments just to pray. And this is this is a personal time we do after sharing some of God’s word. Some things you might want to pray personally over the next couple moments is to thank God for the artists you know and work that has really blessed your life and benefited you. Praise God for all the ways that his goodness and truth and beauty are displayed. You can see it in the back of the room this morning. And offer up to God all that you do creative creatively everything that you have made. This is just your time with God for a couple moments and then I’ll close us off.