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Creativity
in the Bible
©
1999 by Dr. Barry Liesch
The
Church should not only seek to be relevant to local culture, but also an agent
of transformation.
Creativity:
The Reformed View
Creativity
- Troublesome Word
If asked today, what
institution in our society clearly espouses creativity, our response would
probably not be the church.
Just
as "performance" is a troublesome term, so is creativity. Artists
value this term, and often feel the churches have an inadequate understanding
of it, and will not allow much of it.
Are
we "workers" or "creators," "imitators" or
"imagers"?
Bara
Creativity
Creativity
has become a buzzword in our society. Everything from a child's scribble to
Einstein's theory of relativity is considered creative. In the Scriptures the
Bible "create" is reserved for extraordinarily exalted activity. The
Hebrew and Greek words for it, respectively, bara and kitzo, are very similar
in meaning and are employed sparingly to denote only the pinnacles of God's
achievements.
In
the Bible, creative activity must contain something of the miraculous and the
mysterious (Exod 34:10 And he said, Behold, I make a covenant: before all thy
people I will do marvels, such as have not been done in all the earth, nor in
any nation: and all the people among which thou art shall see the work of the
LORD: for it is a terrible thing that I will do with thee.). If the phenomenon
can be explained away by natural means, it is no longer bara activity.
Bara
creativity is illustrated in Numbers chapter sixteen where the sons of Korah
were rebelling against the divinely instituted leadership of Moses. God
instructed Moses to tell the people to separate from the tents of these rebels:
Do
not touch anything belonging to them, or you will be swept away.... If these
men die a natural death and experience only what usually happens to men, then
the Lord has not sent me. But if the Lord brings about something totally new,
and the earth opens its mouth and swallows them, with everything that belongs
to them, and they go down alive into the grave, then you will know that these
men have treated the Lord with contempt.
As
soon as he finished saying all this, the ground under them split apart and the
earth opened its mouth and swallowed them...They went down alive into the grave
with everything they owned; the earth closed over them and they perished and
were gone from the community (Num 16:26, 29-33, emphasis added).
The
words translated "totally new" in the above passage are a rendering
of two successive bara words ("bara beriah"), the only time this
succession occurs in Scripture. A strictly literal translation would be the
Lord "creates a creation."
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In this excerpt you see where God did something in the earth that man had never seen up to that point in time. It is ironic that God describes Himself as, "I am the Lord, I change not", but yet He is constantly doing new things. This to me can only mean one thing: God always does a new thing! It is part of His nature to be creative. We were created in His likeness. It's time that we become creative! Get out of the rut, box, hole, or whatever is keeping you from releasing the new expressions that He has placed in you.
1 comment:
I attended this class and loved it. I learned so much about God.
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