CREATIVITY & DESTRUCTION

                                                             Creativity & Destruction

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Our creativity comes from our Creator, whose creativity can be sampled by us through our using any one or all of our five physical senses together, which in turn can be appreciated by our soul/mind to the elation of our spirit. In other words, there are many things that delight us as humans, such as food, art, and music. ‘Imagination for creativity is a gifted extension of abstraction, allowing conception of things not yet in existence.’ (Ron Kirk). Imagine then that you’ve gone to a whole lot of trouble planning a fancy candlelit dinner with the one you love, with nice food preparing, fine wine chilling, and soft music playing. Sitting at the table gazing into each other’s eyes your phone rings. An emergency! Creativity and destruction. Ants at your picnic, rain on your parade, a fly in the ointment, a dog at a kid’s soccer match!

The eternal Father and Son and Holy Spirit brought into existence what He had mind. ‘In the beginning God, created the heavens and the earth’ (Gen. 1:1). Everything was rosy in the garden until Adam ate the God-forbidden fruit that his wife had given him. ‘The serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness…’ (2 Cor. 11:3). So, we see then that Satan, the serpent, the devil, is creatively destructive! Why did God enter His creation as a human being? ‘For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil’ (1 John 3:8b). Jesus then, came to destroy destruction, or from our perspective, He came to put death to death that we may have life, everlasting life. Creativity and destruction working hand in hand.

How does Jesus destroy the works of the devil? It is here that we see the creativity of God in action. Scripture speaks of Jesus as ‘the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world’ (Rev. 13:8b). With this in mind, we can easily see that God had the destruction of the works of the devil in His mind even before He created creation. God had the ‘conception of things not yet in existence.’

As per the promise of Scripture, the Seed of the woman crushed the serpent’s head at ‘a place called the Place of a Skull’ (Gen. 3:15; John 19:17). So, it’s at the cross that the destroyer gets destroyed and it is through the preaching of the cross, ‘Jesus Christ and Him crucified’, that his destructive works are destroyed (1 Cor. 2:2; Gal. 6:14). We are talking about the ultimate in creativity – the Gospel! Only the Creator could be this creative: ‘For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe’ (1 Cor. 1:21). How was a holy and righteous God going to reconcile to Himself human beings who had destroyed themselves through sin? The Gospel! ‘For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him’ (2:5-21). So, Jesus, by His cross, removes our sin, our destruction, from us. In other words, Jesus put death to death for all who believe. ‘For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Rom. 6:23). The message of the Gospel, then, is the free gift of eternal life to all who believe. And what happens to those who believe? ‘Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new’ (2 Cor. 5:17). Does it get any more creative that this? You hear the Gospel. You believe it. And so you have gone from something that had been destroyed to something newly created. Creativity and destruction!