God Is the Best Artist, and the Highest Critic

You can stumble across just about anything online. I came across this exchange tonight:

A: I don't think there is a God. And if there were a God, I doubt he/she would be an aesthete. But if there were, that's the kind of God I'd want.

B: Who could see the form of a story? 

A: Yes. I think of someone like Denis Johnson, who's just a great American writer, as somebody who writes in a voice like the God I wish we might have.

At first this sounded a little funny, but after I thought about it for a while, it struck me as profoundly wrong, even absurd. It really is sad that someone could be led to think God is most probably a dour moralist, or a boring pragmatist, or whatever.

God is the supreme Aesthete. God's perfect and infinite love for his Son is the highest appreciation of art in the universe. And God loves the infinitely beautiful in Jesus more fully and intensely than anyone in history. The triune God of the Bible is not only beautiful, but the source of all beauty and everything beautiful. Our own longing for beauty is merely a reflection of God's pleasure in his own glorious beauty.

God not only loves his son, but he is pleased with everything he does. The Father loves the story of his Son, and his story is the grandest story ever told. Believers are ever to blame if they never talk about the gospel as epic story, as captivating as it is true.

But perhaps no one has shared the beauty of the gospel with this professional writer. What makes his statement patently absurd is the stuff outside my window. Hundreds of slender cloud fingers straining the pale light of a large moon, in turn reflecting sunlight millions of miles old. Rain drops on leaves. Morning glory in the morning light. The smell of a fresh breeze and grass clippings.

Creation is crammed with the beautiful, the excessively colorful, the delightful, the extravagant, and the poetic. Can you watch an episode of Planet Earth, and then tell me then tell me that our earth plays by pragmatic, evolutionary rules. No, the brush strokes of the master artist are visible everywhere. Walk outside and use your sensory organs.

Do you seek the beauty of story? Look at the man next to you. I live with three young men—all wonderfully unique, with their stories, and surprising plot turns, and funny quirks. God wrote billions of such characters into his ballad: more alive, rounded, and entertaining than the best of Dickens. All our novels and plays our mere imitation of his masterly storytelling.

Mr. writer, read God's story. If you listen, you may find that he is a great writer indeed. For all our art is only the shadowy imitation of God's imaging forth of all his divine glories in Jesus Christ, and of Christ's speaking that glory into creation.