“For we are His masterpiece, created in Christ Jesus…” Ephesians 2:10.
When a great artist creates a masterpiece, they believe in what they have created. Artists, don’t like it when other people criticize their masterpiece because they know that what they have created is a stroke of their own genius. The lump of clay that God had to work with was our fallen and broken humanity dominated by the reign of sin. In the incarnation Jesus clothed himself with that lump of clay, and in Him that broken, marred, enslaved lump of clay was transformed into God’s great stroke of genius. We were created in Christ, sharing His life as our life, as God’s greatest masterpiece. The creation of mankind was certainly an act of God’s creative brilliance, but the re-creation of mankind in union with the very life of the risen Christ is God’s most brilliant act of creativity and genius.
Ephesians 2:4 – 7 says, “God being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which he Loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together in Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up together and seated us together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, IN ORDER THAT IN THE AGES TO COME HE MIGHT SHOW THE SURPASSING RICHES OF HIS GRACE IN KINDNESS TOWARDS US IN CHRIST JESUS.”
The “ages to come” will be the art gallery in which God displays us as His great masterpiece in Christ. Christ is both the content and the context of who we are and the life we live as God’s brilliant workmanship. The word “masterpiece” or “workmanship” in the original Greek language is the literal word “poem.” You and I in Christ are the greatest poem ever written by the greatest Poet who ever existed. The stanzas that make up your unique humanity and day-to-day story in Christ are the most stunning ever written. God is going to spend all of eternity celebrating and displaying who we are as His extraordinary work of art. Maybe it is time that each of us joins Him and starts celebrating who we are as unique persons in Christ. That’s not a lack of humility. It is simply coming into agreement with the great Artist and how He feels about us. The curse of self-rejection denies the genius of God.