In the Bible, we see that God does something very similar. The Old Testament, which is that period of redemptive history before Jesus came into the world, is chock-a-block full of stories that illustrate the faithful, saving nature of God. There are stories of God’s people being saved from hunger, from disease, from slavery, from executioners, lions, snakes, , fiery furnaces, great fish, and giants. God delivers His people from foreign armies, from wicked rulers, from famine, from drought, and most importantly he repeatedly saves them from themselves. Every story of redemption and deliverance in the Old Testament is like one of Van Gogh’s sketches. Although stories like how God brought Israel out of Egypt by parting the red sea, or how he delivered His people from a death sentence through Esther are each brilliant acts of redemption in themselves, they are actually only (as it were) illustrative sketches in advance of, and in preparation for, the ultimate masterpiece of redemption, when God would provide for the salvation of His people through the perfect, ultimate sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. That is the final, full-color masterpiece that all those other sketches illustrate and point toward. And when we study these stories with that in mind we see their rich depth of meaning for us.
Marks of a Delivered People
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Vincent Van Gogh, of course, is one of the most famous painters of the nineteenth century, and arguably one of the most famous painters of all time. At the Vincent Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam they have on display many of Van Gogh’s best-known masterpieces. In the basement of the museum, however, there is an interesting display of sketches Van Gogh did in advance of particular parts of his final masterpieces. So, for example, on the first page of one sketchpad, there is a pencil sketch of a human hand. On the next page there is a sketch of the same hand, and on the next another, and on the next another, and so on. He was famous for filling entire sketchpads with hundreds of pencil sketches of the same subject— most of them nearly identical to the common eye. If you were then able to take that sketch and put it next to the hand of a character in one of Van Gogh’s masterpieces, you would find it was nearly an exact match. These hundreds of pencil sketches—brilliant in themselves—were all sketched in preparation for the final full color masterpieces.