It was in mountain country where 20-year-old Annie attended her first Bible study. Soon she discovered that they had a local habit of everybody reading one verse each as they went around the circle. She decided to cooperate and was understandably keen to say her verse right and was hoping for a good one. As it happened, they had got as far as Exodus chapter 28 and the verse that landed on her, and hence her first public reading of Scripture, was “A golden bell and a pomegranate, a golden bell and a pomegranate, upon the hem of the robe round about”.

You’ll be glad to know that it didn’t scare Annie off and I’m glad that she landed in Exodus, surely the artist’s Biblical charter.

The particular passage is describing God’s instructions for the robe to be worn by Israel’s high priest when he was offering sacrifices. The pomegranates in question were to be coloured blue, purple and scarlet. But aren’t pomegranates red? Exactly – that’s the point! God was designing something artistically which went beyond nature as we know it. Here the Bible records art – and not for the last time.

The next thing you know (Exodus 31) God is recognizing the special artistic gift given to some of his people – Bezalel and Oholiab – people who just saw the world differently. Once he had gifted them, he left it up to them to come up with the rest of the designs.

No wonder the Bible has been an inspiration to art for thousands of years. Half an hour in the National Gallery would tell you that. Or listen to the thousands of voices (even in unbelief) who thunder out the majestic lyrics of Isaiah 9 (“unto us a child is born”) every Christmas in their recital of Handel’s Messiah. Or nip into any church any Sunday anywhere and hear music inspired by Jesus – the only figure to do so consistently in each of the past 21 centuries.

The Bible informs art too. The more an artist ingests the Bible and its worldview the better he or she can portray creation, evil, altruism, God’s transcendence. Yes there are great non-Biblical artists. But to artfully express the truth requires that you know more truth than what you have gathered solely from your experience of life.

Exodus endorses art (as if art needed it – God being an artist you’d kind of expect that). And it’s the kind of endorsement that you and I like – the art got paid for! When the Israelites were asked to provide the resources for Bezalel and Oholiab they paid so much they had to be asked to stop! (Exodus 36:4-7).

And then the most important endorsement – we read that Bezalel and Oholiab were artistic because they were filled with the Spirit of God for that purpose (Exodus 35:31). The Bible has just got started and already the Holy Spirit is empowering artists.

Moses must have been a bit of an artist himself. His record of Adam’s first words about Eve are pure poetry (something along the lines of “where were you all my life?!” Genesis 2:23). When they cross the Red Sea it’s poetry again (Exodus 15). At the end of his life he realised that the Israelites were more than capable of forgetting everything he had just spent 40 years teaching them so he came up with a song to sum it up – because he knew they wouldn’t forget a song! (Deuteronomy 32)

Annie read through the Bible for the next 63 years. The reason I know that is because she was my mother. The mountain country was in County Donegal and the Bible study was the only one for miles around. Bible input has done our family no end of good. The Bible records art, inspires art, informs art, endorses art and in the end, it is art.

But that is getting ahead of the story…read the rest in The Electrician’s Children