Day 36

Exquisite creatures

Ship at anchor in calm waters by Ivan Aivazovsky

To Start

This is the first day of our last week meditating on Hebrews 11. I hope you’ll carry this practice of silence into your future relationship with Yahweh. If you’ve been skipping this part, perhaps you might commit to trying silence for the last week. If you’ve been enjoying it and want to dive deeper, I’d suggest Martin Laird’s book, Into the Silent Land.

Spend a minute or more in total silence. Five minutes is even better.

Pray

Father, as we’ve read Hebrews 11 together, You have revealed much, challenged much, comforted much, and unravelled much. As we step into this last week of meditating on Hebrews 11, draw everything together. Give us a sense of a good ending—tie up loose ends, resolve disharmony, punctuate our understanding. Let us walk away with confidence, clarity, and lasting transformation.

From JL

As this is the last week of our Hebrews 11 meditation, today is the final time we’ll read the entire chapter in a gulp. Before we do, I thought I’d share something…

A year or so ago I visited my local art museum to see an exhibition called “Exquisite Creatures” created by the taxidermy artist Christopher Marlowe. It’s difficult to describe Marlowe’s work, because every time I do it sounds macabre and weird and not beautiful (it’s a massive display of thousands of dead, harvested creatures curated by kind, color, and shape). But the truth is it’s just the opposite. You see his work, and you feel stunned to life.

I saw the exhibit twice. Both times I cried. Many of my friends saw the exhibit, too. They all cried, too.

As you walk through room after room—

Beetles of every color, beetles like gemstones

Birds, one size but each one different, positioned like tiles in a mosaic

Sharks patterned in Malian mud cloth

Fish in bouquets of extravagant expression

I couldn’t help thinking—God never ever runs out of new, different, beautiful…

The whole thing left me knocked over with awe. Truly. I couldn’t get up.

I can feel this way when I read Hebrews 11—knocked over with awe.

Story after story after story of God’s faithfulness to the people of faith

Story after story after story of what’s possible when we believe in the realness of the unseen world

Every person’s faith story is unique, but grouped this way it’s so easy to see them as related, a family’s stories, stories written by one Author who never runs out of new, different, beautiful…

I might have thought that grouping a hundred fish in one frame on one wall would underline the scale of creation at the expense of the intricacy of creation—that seeing all those fish and bugs and animals this way would overwhelm me with God’s glory but cause me to overlook the particularities of His expression. But it wasn’t that way at all. It hasn’t been that way at all. Instead, seeing the stories set next to one another emphasizes their particularities. I look more closely. I see more than I might have if the stories were individually framed.

Reading Hebrews 11 is a way of reading all of Scripture in one quick go. It’s a kind of summary of all the stories. Inevitably details are lost. Inevitably certain things are emphasized and other things aren’t. But I’m realizing as we sit here in this chapter that it’s a way of holding all of Scripture at once. And the mass of all this new, different, beauty…

On its surface, Hebrews 11 is a compilation of the lives of people long dead—corpses pinned to the wall for scrutiny. But when you read it, it doesn’t feel like that.

“Even though he is dead, he still speaks through his faith…” The Spirit, like a good taxidermist, animates the dead.

But it’s more than that. These people aren’t dead at all.

Read

Read Hebrews 11. You might read aloud. You might read a favorite translation. You might read a new translation. You might listen to the text read aloud.

Let its wholeness bring its particularities into greater focus. Let its particularities amassed lend its wholeness greater glory.

(I’m not going to include the full text here. I want you to make an intentional choice about how you want to encounter Scripture today. Ask God to help you make a good choice.)

Pray

Thank You, Father, Son, and Spirit, for writing these stories of faith. Please keep writing.

In the Comments

Think about the big picture painted in Hebrews 11. How would you summarize it in a sentence? How does it make you feel?

Think about the details of Hebrews 11. Which one sticks out to you as a favorite?

Godspeed,

JL