Subtractives

SUBTRACTIVE - (n.) a sculptural technique which material is carved or cut away; carving is a way of making sculpture by cutting away unwanted parts

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"Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness," God said, speaking through the prophet Isaiah (51.1) to His people.  "Look to the rock from which you were hewn and to the quarry from which you were dug.  Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you; for he was but one when I called him that I might bless him and multiply him."

It strikes me that personal image is everything to us.  The markets for beauty products, exercise equipment, diet plans, and self-help books are enormous.  We're content so long as our outward appearance is positive, and even more so if we can get to that place on our own.  However, although we maintain an impeccable personal image in public, at home we can let it all "hang out."  In other words, it's okay for us to be broken and sinful and utterly selfish if nobody else knows about it, or if we can find an appropriate justification.  Ironically, the tried-and-true type of quality we demand in the products we buy and the people we keep as friends is often a significantly higher standard than the one to which we hold ourselves.  We're content to be rotten inside so long as the outside looks pretty.

"Whitewashed tombs," Jesus called the Pharisees, the religious leaders who were content with hand-washing rituals and never made an attempt to cleanse their hearts.  For those of us who belong to Christ, our image belongs to God, and it is holistic.  It can't be merely skin deep.  The image of God necessarily includes holiness, purity, sanctity.  Those things are implied in the idea of being a new creation, where all the old things have passed away in order to make room for what is new.  We've been given hearts of flesh in exchange for the stone placeholders we once bore.  Of course that doesn't mean we are perfect.  He isn't finished with us.  We are His workmanship, a work in progress, which will only be completed upon entry into heaven.  Yet those of us who have been purchased by His blood will bear fruit and keep His commands.

Additionally, we're to remember the cloth from which we've been cut; the rock from which we've been carved.  In other words, God tells us to remember our heritage, our past, our origins.  For Israel, Abraham was the beginning of their nation: God counted his faith as righteousness and so blessed Abraham with the honor of being the father of his people.  For us, we can trace our spiritual lineage back through the church age to the Great Awakening, and further to the Pilgrims, and even back to the Protestant Reformation.  For some of us, we can look back specifically at the very families in which we grew up, recalling the godly heritage that our parents passed on to us.  Perhaps those who have had poor familial relations want to keep that past as far away from them as possible.  However, even in the dysfunctional family, there is benefit in remembering where we've come from.  Abraham's family certainly wasn't the ideal model: through the ages, his descendants would war, murder, rape, and steal from one another.  Yet God specifically instructed His people to look back at the rock from which He had sculpted them, so that they wouldn't continue in their arrogance, thinking that they were a self-sufficient people.  That's why He used passive tense: "were hewn," "were dug."

In that regard, perhaps the thing we idolize even more than personal image is personal independence.  We want to think of ourselves as the sculptors and the excavators - the ones doing the designing - but that isn't what we were created for.  We're the raw block of marble, impotent until God begins His gracious work on us.  Sure, we've been blessed with gratuitous amounts of personal freedom in this world, but that is not the end which God had in mind when He created us.  He didn't design us to be healthy and wealthy and free to relax.  In fact, the language the Scriptures use to quantify the nature of our relationship to God is that of a bondservant: someone whose entire life is pledged in service to a master.  Luxury is an idol, a myth of entitlement that we devised for ourselves in order to smother the real reason we were placed on this earth.  Christ said that anyone who would follow in His steps would need to pick up his or her cross daily.  There's no room for easy living in that picture.  Christ leads and we follow; he designs and we submit.

It's a good practice to keep the past in perspective.  It keeps fresh in our minds our capacity to fail as well as our understanding that we have and will always need help - that our activity is always dependent upon God's sovereignty.  Even those who have had poor familial relations and those who drag behind them spiritual baggage from years of failure, abuse, and neglect can glean from the experience.  Don't forget your roots.  Remember the lessons your parents taught you and the ones you can glean from their examples.

Don't forget the rock from which you were sculpted -- the rock from which God is still sculpting you.

Computer-generated representations of statues from a series by Michelangelo, entitled "Slaves."
It is speculated that the master sculptor perhaps intentionally left them unfinished, a decision that
would beautifully illustrate the sentiment behind the title.