I’ve always appreciated good workmanship. Whether it’s with maple, metal, music, or whatever, there’s something glorious about intentional effort combined with honed skill.
This appreciation also carries over into language. Well-written books, thought-provoking sermons as well as clever proverbs and puns not only hold my attention but receive my admiration. There’s nothing random or haphazard about carefully arranging words, phrases, and thoughts to create something worthy of our time.
The ability of human beings to use our minds, bodies, and souls to produce creations that bless and serve others is part of God’s image that we bear. God is the original craftsman and fashioned the heavens, engineered our water cycle and designed complex plants and animals. Everywhere we look in the natural world we see His incredible craftsmanship and creativity.
The Apostle Paul also recognized God’s expertise within us for He writes in Ephesians 2:10, “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” Paul was not just speaking about the physical design of our bodies, which is incredible, but about how God has fashioned our souls and personalities and gifted us in various ways to do good deeds that bring Him glory and us pleasure.
The Greek word that Paul uses for workmanship is poiema which literally means a product or something made. But the English word “poem” also comes from this Greek word and helps us understand a bit more of Paul’s insight into God’s craftsmanship.
Poetry is a particular genre of writing in which words are chosen very thoughtfully. In order to transmit ideas, feelings, and insights, poets carefully construct their creations with the same purpose, intent, and focus as a woodworker or sculptor. Word order as well as meter and rhythm are also conscious decisions made by poets.
This can help us understand God’s work in our lives purposefully arranging our strengths and weaknesses, desires and passions, and limitations and opportunities. He exposes us to individuals and situations that develop us and bring out character traits that will exhibit His created beauty within.
Just as letters are arranged to make words and words are arranged to make sentences and sentences are arranged to create rhyming couplets to transmit meaning and emotion, God arranges every aspect of our lives into days, weeks, months and years. He also arranges us with other believers in His Church that together we might transmit His message of grace and truth to a hungry world.
And just as some poems are quite lengthy, God not only arranges the paragraphs and chapters of our lives into complete lifetimes, He’s even able to arrange multiple lifetimes over thousands of years to create epics that display truly phenomenal craftsmanship and meaning.
The longest poem ever written is the Hindu epic known as the Mahābhārata and tells of the struggle between cousins at war. With over 100,000 couplets and nearly 2 million words, it is approximately ten times longer than the Iliad and Odyssey combined.
God’s greatest epic, however, written through the eons of history far surpasses even this work not only in length, but in beauty and purpose as well. He masterfully reveals Himself and His great grace and mercy for every human being. But rather than battle and conflict, the overarching themes of God’s epic poem are love and peace.
It remains then for us to put ourselves at God’s disposal to handle as He sees fit. We must allow Him to place and use us, as a letter in a word or a word in a sentence, to bring maximum glory to Him and blessing to others.
As we do so, may we ponder how we can best display God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus, by doing good works. And then do them in order that we might be a beautiful couplet in God’s great poem.
Blessings, George
