When God created, He created with intention. That intention created an environment, and that environment created life. What makes human beings unique and distinct is our capacity to perceive beauty, and our desperate sense to make sense of our lives. Most of the study of human history is just an attempt to find out who we are, in the context of where we are at the moment. Through war, art, battles, struggles, music, romance, and the power of story, we are all trying to find the story of “us” and make life mean something. I think that it is possible that the human narrative is the tension between tragedy and beauty; between great faith and unreasonable fear. When God created all that is, it was set for beauty and triumph, but the fall of man introduced tragedy. A fall so great that it caused the fall of Princess faith and the rise of King fear. Every person alive is trying to make sense of these dynamics, all the while hoping that beauty will somehow emerge from the ashes. I wonder if that is what has happened to the human spirit when fear grips us? Is that the very reason why God pursues us with his love, yet we resist it? God offers us his life, eyes, and heart for the world, but we insist on carrying on with our own mundane existence. Could it be that we have embraced the mundane and lost the beautiful?
“Who has believed our report? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant, and as a root out of dry ground. He has no form or comeliness; and when we see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him. He is despised and rejected by men, a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.
Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; Yet we esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed.”
This is exactly what Isaiah said in 53:1-5. There will be a day when God will walk among us, and Messiah will come. There will be a day when Jesus will be here on earth, fully God, fully man, here in flesh and blood. On that day, the beautiful will be in front of humanity as never before, and when humanity gazes upon him, they see not beauty at all. Isaiah is saying that Messiah will come, but we will be so enamored with the mundane; that all we are do is to be religious, follow the rules, and be human. So, Isaiah explodes this vivid passage to us as if to share that Jesus will not bring beauty out of beauty, He will come to bring beauty out of tragedy. And perhaps one of the answers to the question of suffering in the world is that we could see the beautiful in the middle of suffering and pain. One man told me after doing a four-year study of how Jesus interacted with the sinners of the day, he said to me, “There is beauty to be found in the world. Our world is fallen, but Jesus reveals the beauty in the most fallen of places.”
A man recently posed a great question at a Christian leadership conference, “Does art matter anymore?” Most of the panel of modern leaders said “yes” only as it related to their own personal preference of worship music. I thought to myself that there is so much more to the concept of ‘art’ to the Christian world than just music. The truth is that for real art to cause an impact, there must be pain, fear, and despair somewhere in the mix. For beauty of any kind to exist, there must also be hope. Even in a fallen world, God is always taking the initiative to send beauty into tragedy. Maybe that is where you are living right now? Maybe God desires to create beauty out of your brokenness, ministry out of misery, and faith out of what has been feared. In this life, God can take the broken pieces of life, but understand that when God fuses those pieces back together, it is not always some picture-perfect wholeness. He can take all of the broken, fragmented pieces that you and I feel are no longer have any value, and create something that the world will see as beautiful.
**Excerpt from Brady’s book, #FEARISBROKEN.
**Available HERE.
