On Art and Mistakes

Andy and I went to one of those Wine and Design classes in December.  We painted pictures of dogs with the help of trained artists.  If you follow my blog, you know that I dropped my art class in high school to take a remedial math class (even though I was also in Calculus that semester).  That is how bad I am at art.  What was amazing was that just when I was sure I had destroyed my painting, one of the instructors would come over, mix some paint on my brush, and even out my mistake so that I could keep going with a decent picture.  Sometimes she might say something like, “Yeah, well now let’s do this instead,” but every time what I thought was doomed for disaster was fixable in her eyes.

 

Yesterday, I was reading about the Israelites trying to enter the Promised Land for the first time, and I thought of that painting class.  The Israelites have traveled from Egypt to Canaan, and they are finally outside the city.  They send a group of men to explore the city and report back about it.  When the men return, 10 out of the 12 are afraid to fight for the city – even though they know God has promised it.  Those 10 men convince the rest of the Israelites that they can’t possibly win against the giant Canaanites.   “We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them,” they protest (Numbers 13:33).  Two men, Caleb and Joshua, try to convince the Israelites that the majority is wrong and that with God’s help they can take the city, but the people are frightened.  They refuse to fight for God’s promise, and they suggest picking a leader to take them back to Egypt – which means going back to slavery.  Angry, God threatens to kill them, but at Moses’s request, he agrees to forgive them for their sin against him and promises to bring them into the Promised Land; however, it will take 40 more years and all of the people 20 years old and older who grumbled against him will die.  Moses delivers the news to the Israelites, and the next morning, they tell Moses that they are wrong and will go fight the Canaanites that day.  Obviously, they don’t win.  God is true to his word, they are forgiven and they do get the blessing, but due to their sin, they have to wait for it. 

 

The passage made me think of the art class because, as a reader, it looks like the Israelites have ruined the story.  I spent all of Exodus reading about how they are going to the Promised Land, and in one move it looks like the whole painting is destroyed – like they have drawn a bright red line over the canvas and wrecked what God has been painting.  But they haven’t.  The picture changes, but God and his purpose don’t.  My friend, Rebecca, used to work at a Pregnancy Center, I remember going to a few of their banquets where guest speakers would give their testimony and tell how the Center had helped them.  I remember one woman talking about how she had become pregnant before she was married.  She discussed how difficult her pregnancy made life and how it caused an enormous strain on her relationship with her boyfriend.  Eventually, though, they got married and had their baby.  By the time she was a guest speaker, her life had reached a point of peace.  She had a beautiful family and an amazing testimony, but I will never forget her comments about abstinence and waiting for marriage.  I remember her saying that she reached her blessing, but that the road to the blessing was much more difficult than it might have been if she had done her relationship God’s way.  She discussed how much easier a pregnancy after college and marriage would have been than the path she took.  The Israelites probably would have agreed that living in a “land flowing with milk and honey” for forty years would have been preferable to living in the dessert.

 

Here is what is cool about God.  In my opinion, we aren’t going to mess up his plan.  We aren’t going to destroy his art.  God promised the Israelites they would enter Canaan.  And they did.  Their sin caused a delay, but they did not lose the blessing.  In fact, think of all God taught those children who saw how close they were to entering the Promised Land and then grew up in the dessert because of their parent’s lack of faith.  What might that experience have taught them about faith?  What lessons might they have learned that allowed them to march around Jericho to watch the walls fall down?  I suspect that God created an amazingly beautiful picture even with that red mark of sin.  It might not be the same picture he originally intended, but the purpose remained – he created beauty in the lives of his people and put them where he promised.

 

I hear people say all the time they are thankful for their bad decisions and the lessons they learned in times of sin.  Often they will say those are the times when God deepened their faith or taught them more about his character.  God is that big.  I’m not advocating sinning so we can grow in faith.  Had the Israelites followed God originally, they would have enjoyed 40 years of blessings that they missed because they didn’t follow him.  In fact, most of the adults died in the dessert and never lived in the land God promised.  Sin can cause us to miss good gifts from God.  But, sin is not something God can’t overcome.  He is bigger than all our mistakes, and bad decisions on our part do not mean he can’t take us somewhere beautiful.  God is a master artist, and we are prideful and wrong when we think our choices can ruin his painting.