Bezalel and Oholiab
Before We Gather by Zach Hicks
| Scripture
Read Exodus 31:1-11
| Devotional
There are some passages of Scripture where, after reading, you just stop, look up at heaven, and say, “Thank you, God, that you put that in there!” For artists, this is that passage. There is something affirming and dignifying when we hear about God’s concern for the craftsmanship and artistry involved in setting aside Bezalel and Oholiab for ministry.
Yes, I said ministry.
We tend to spiritualize ministry, like some of us tend to spiritualize worship. Because our worship involves immaterial, spiritual reality, and because the God we worship is unseen, we can fall prey to the idea that it’s only the immaterial things that matter-or at least that are most important. Because we’re prone to idolatrously abuse physical objects, buildings, technologies. and all the other stuff of worship, we double down on the spiritual nature of worship.
But we need to remember, God cares about the physical world. When he created it, he called it good, and when he created us, he said we were very good (Genesis 1). After the fall of Adam and Eve, God responded by becoming flesh and dwelling among us (John 1:14). And when Jesus rose from the dead, he had a glorified physical body, becoming the firstfruits for all of us, to show us that all of our selves-including our physical bodies will be rebuilt for eternal life (1 Cor. 15:20-23).
So we mustn’t spiritualize worship too much. Worship should be as physical as it is spiritual, which means that ministry is physical too.Our passage here in Exodus 31 shows us that God attributes dignity to the artistitic technologies around us, employed to beautify and intensify the worship experience by gripping our senses of sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. No, this doesn’t mean that we utilize these artistic technologies haphazardly or uncritically. If you read on in Exodus and in the other books after it, God provides artistic specifications to avoid pollution by the surrounding culture’s idolatry.
but make no mistake – Bezalel and Oholiab were ministers set apart to make worship beautiful and compelling, to make it a feast for the affections. Artists were so important to God’s plan that our passage says that God did something in those days he only otherwise did for prophets, priests and kings. God said about Bezalel, “I have filled him with the Spirit of God” (Ex. 31:3). Yes, when you experience artistry in worship, you are experiencing the fruit of the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity.
Churches should be robustly creative places. The obvious creativity we should honor and enjoy includes music, architecture, and the beautiful items adorning and accompanying our spaces- communion tables and vessels, baptismal fonts and pools, pulpits, paintings, stained glass, graphic design, projected images and backdrops, and , for more liturgically oriented churches, vestments and materials that signal the season of the church calendar.
Worshipping God should include observing and absorbing these things, knowing that the Spirit has empowered our sisters and brothers to create them. The Holy Spirit therefore intends to use them to speak to us. As we see our spaces, hear our music, touch our chairs, pews, and kneelers, and taste and smell the communion bread and wine, we allow all these multi-sensory means to be ways to hear God speaks to us.
And finally, we also seek to give thanks for God’s gifts of artistry among us, perhaps by making that gratitude tangible. Maybe this week, maybe today, we can go out of our way to thank one of the artists among us — to exercise one of the horizontal dimensions of worship where we glorify God by offering thankfulness from our hearts to someone else in Jesus’ name (Col. 3:16-17).
| Prayer
Aim your prayers in this direction:
- Offer up special thanks for specific artists in your community who have contributed to worship’s beauty and power.
- Ask the Holy Spirit to give your worshipping community a deeper and more powerful experience by opneing up your senses to receive rich communication through artistry.
- Pray specifically for vocational artists and other artists who draw some of their livelihood from their art-making, that God would faithfully provide for all their needs and encourage them that their works is dignified, important, and valuable.