Thursday, May 4, 2023

 

Thursday, May 4, 2023


Psalm 80

Exodus 28:1-6; 29:1-9

John 11:45-54


You who are enthroned upon the cherubim, shine forth!


While working our way through this section of Exodus, with all its close attention to detail on things that seem irrelevant for Christians several thousands of years later, we might almost be able to forgive the compilers of the lectionary for letting us skip over so much of it. Indeed, through the death of Christ we have been released from the need to offer animal sacrifices day after day before the physical representation of the ark of God. Our High Priest, Jesus Christ, offered the one true and final sacrifice for sins; and as for His priesthood, He is in the order of Melchizedek, not of Aaron and his sons.


But the specifics of the rituals and worship of the ancient Israelites in the wilderness is contained in the inspired words of scripture, which means we have them to be able to read today for good reason. One of those good reasons was identified by Francis Schaeffer in his little book Art and the Bible.


Take any of God’s attributes; say, for example, love. It is fair, then, to look at everything that God has done that we know about and know that it has been done for the sake of love: love for us, love for creation, love between the Persons of the Trinity. We also know that God is beautiful: and that is something that explodes from these pages in Exodus about the priestly vestments.


One definition of art might be “beauty for beauty’s sake”. That God has decided to clothe His creation with all sorts of colours, sounds and smells; animals of all different shapes, sizes and noises; and then implanted us, the image-bearers, with the ability to take this natural beauty and put our own spin on it is a glorious reflection of God’s inherent, eternal, and unchanging beauty. He sits enthroned upon the cherubim, and His beauty shines forth; we simply need to lift up our eyes and enjoy it.



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