Kuyperianism and Art

Automated transcript of the sermon audio, generated with OpenAI Whisper (small.en). It has not been checked against the recording and may contain errors, especially in names and Scripture references.

First thing I want to do is recommend some books. Obviously, this book we keep recommending, and you don’t even need to read it. You can listen to Glenn read it for us. And it’s really excellent the way Glenn reads it. This is the touchstone for these lectures. But I titled my message a little different, being a Kuyperian dispensationalist, which is like something that the theological world doesn’t even recognize at the moment. But call us back in 50 years, and they’ll have a category for us. We even have a website, so how can they ignore us, right? But the issue is that you’ll see, as I introduce my message, that I think we’ve got something there.

The other book is Art and the Bible by Francis Schaeffer. This is an excellent little book that covers all the categories that I’m talking about. And it answers the questions like, I don’t want to look at a picture of Jesus because if you paint a picture of Jesus, you’re painting a picture of God. And I can’t look at it because you’re going to worship it. Here’s the bottom line. I don’t worship the pictures of Jesus as God, OK? Most of them are incorrect anyway. I’m going to make some really pointed comments about certain works of art that we look at that are just so wrong that they’re stupid. But the people are trying to convey something over that.

And that’s where we need to be, I think, to talk about it. So the idea is we can make these images, but we are not worshipping these images. Now if I make an icon that I go into my private prayer closet and I pray to, now we got a problem. And that’s where the Eastern Orthodox people get really close with their teeter-totter. We’re not really praying to the saints, but we revere them and all that kind of stuff. The Catholics at least admitted that the saints give them a target or a destination to get there. That’s not right, not biblical, no good. The other book I’d like to recommend is The Bible in the British Museum. I actually bought this at the British Museum. It’s an excellent book showing a lot of the stuff they have in the British Museum, just reinforces the Bible. One of my favorite sayings is that Archaeology is the anvil that the Bible is on.

The anvil is the Bible. And archaeology is the hammer that keeps beating on the anvil to try to crush it. But every time it beats on the anvil, there are no Hittites. Bang, bang, bang. Uh-oh, now we discover the Hittites and they were an incredible civilization. Oh, sorry about that. But they just then bring up another subject and start banging the hammer on the anvil of the Bible. The Bible wins every time, OK? The other book that is the base book for a lot of books, this is not the best book, but I didn’t want to go out in the garage and look through my 70 books or boxes of books to find the better one. But this is the primary book that was written first.

It’s called Signs and Symbols in Christian Art. There are a lot of signs and symbols in the pictures that were painted in the Renaissance and other places that the unliterate population was looking at these pictures to get Bible stories. And there were all kinds of things. Mary’s foot is just getting ready to crush a flower. There’s a guy standing in the background with a plate with women’s breasts on it. There’s eyeballs on another plate. What is all that about? Where they get these crazy symbols? That’s where these kind of books help you understand what those symbols were and what those people were trying to tell.

The last book I want to show was incredible. We showed up there in, I think it was 2000 and, yeah, it might have been 1999 or something. The exhibit in the British Museum was the apocalypse, the shape of things to come. It was a huge exhibit of artworks by artists that had shown they believe the kingdom was coming.

This was given to us by the British Empire and the British Museum under the Anglican Church who does not believe this stuff and yet the exhibit was incredible and this book is really chucked full of those examples of artworks of people that were showing you when Christ comes he will set up a literal kingdom. Now that already being being being I need to be a kyperian dispensationalist to even say that, right? So I need that category to blend it in. The other thing I want to point out tonight, and this was a total God thing, about three days ago, Sean sent out an email to myself and himself and Gail Martin, who makes our kids’ corners. And Sean is very careful to give her words to put in the thing and, you know, things so she can make the famous little puzzles all mixed together, all that kind of stuff. I just told her, make a frame so the kids can draw in it. I tried for like 30 minutes to get a picture, a line drawing of Michelangelo to put on that they could color on the back. I couldn’t figure

out a way to download it that didn’t give me a bunch of garbage that I didn’t want to put in there. So I just told her, well, put a frame so kids could draw in it. So So she put this frame. I’m going to make comment on this frame later on. There is all kinds of information just in this one stupid little picture of a picture frame that we can talk about. And I think it was a real God thing that she happened to put that in there. OK, so now I want to start what I want to talk about. A dictionary definition of art is The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form, such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.

That’s Webster. So they are application of human creative skill to make something that in visual form, visual form, such as painting or sculpture, producing works that go, oh, that’s so cool. Look at that guy there, looking up at the sky. That’s wonderful. And he carved it out of a block of stone. How did he do that? Totally inadequate, that definition.

Our buddy Kuiper realized the inadequacy of that definition, and he said in a footnote the chapter on art here on the first page of that chapter. Another definition of what art is comes from Kuyper’s lectures on Calvinism. Art has been defined as the embodiment of beautiful thought in sensuous form as for example marble or speech. As a image bearer of God, man possesses the possibility both to create something beautiful and to delight in it. Okay? So think about that. Art has been defined as the embodiment as a beautiful thought in sensuous form, as, for example, marble or speech. So we sing visual art, painted arts, or speech, communication, poetry, song, story.

OK? As an image bearer of God, man possesses the possibility both to create something beautiful and to delight in it. And then he goes on, and I will butcher this Dutch word, I’m sure, kernst ver Mogen, is the term that is in man no separate function of the soul, but an unbroken and continuous utterance of the image of God. Man is made in the imago dei, in the image of God. And is in man no separate function of the soul, but an unbroken continuous utterance of the image of God. Now, fallen man can pollute that image and give you a false image of God. Fallen man can be a great and very talented artist that can give you a false image of God.

But when everything clicks and he gets it right, he gives you a correct image of God. But the whole point is man in no separate function of his soul, but an unbroken and continuous utterance to try maybe, or even to give the image of God. We are born that way. We are born to make things. We are born to create things. We are born to work hard and do this or that and go, wow, that was pretty good. Now, the thing is, God made us to make those things. And sometimes we make things that are very good. And is it wrong to be proud that you made a good thing? I don’t think so. I think it’s a good thing for you to feel that way and feel swelled up and to do it again.

And then to realize, wow, I really did good in that thing, But I could have made it better if I just did this and make it better. Okay. That is part of the human existence, part of the joy of seeing the next generation take what you did and do it even better, which is my prayer all the time. Cause my generation didn’t do so good.

All right. I was involved in the art business in New York city for five years in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. As a single man, I was a salesman on Madison Avenue. I worked for a gallery that gave Picasso his last show in New York City of his etchings. Salvador Dali, Alexander Calder, all kinds of the big muckety mucks. I happened to get very fortunate to get hired by a gallery that that allowed me as a high school, well, I graduated high school, then when I went to Vietnam for three years, got out and came back to New York City and wanted to be in the art business, wanted to be the next Bob Dylan, all that kind of stuff.

And I was very fortunate to get hired by a gallery that was owned by a guy that was the professor of prints and drawings at Harvard University. And then he retired and started this gallery in New York City. He was the agent for Picasso in New York when we had the 347 etchings, which were Picasso’s last series. Then Salvador Dali, his last series, had all these guys come to New York, and I’m this bozo from Arizona that got this job because of different things that I was able to answer when I did my interview. But anyway, sold art during that time. Then I decided I was going to be in the music business and came back through Arizona to go to California.

I had a job at Capitol Records as an A&R man. During that time, I met my wife, Gail. The night I met her, I told her I was going to marry her, that I wasn’t in love with her, but she needed to be my wife. We got married in six months. It should have been sooner, but her middle sister needed to get married before that. Moved to California. The day I showed up for my job at Capitol Records, I met Etragon, had bought Capitol Records during the weekend, and fired the guy that hired me. So I moved with a brand new wife. We got married on Friday. Monday morning, I’m showing up for the job. And they tell me, the guy that hired me is gone.

My whole department’s gone. I don’t have a job at Capitol Records anymore. You need to go home. What can I do? Well, fill out a form, do this, do that. I said, you’ve got to be nuts. Anyway, so I went back to North Hollywood in our apartment, and my wife was very excited. How did you get away from work so quickly? And I told her, and she went, oh, this is not good. We basically got jobs. We kind of hot sheeted it in the bed, where I worked at a nighttime job. She worked for a law firm in downtown LA. We saved the money. We then moved back to New York. We went during Thanksgiving weekend, did job interviews. She got hired.

I got hired. We moved back to New York City, and I was back in the art business making reproduction antique picture frames, which we’ll talk about as we get to long in this. So during that time, art was the thing. Music and art was the thing for me. I didn’t care about anything else. My dad and his brother had become very successful in the bearing business. They had chain bearing stores. They had a store in San Diego that wasn’t doing well. We got burned out in New York. They offered for Gale and I to come and live in San Diego and take over this business. I went to a thing, took some classes on the product that I was going to sell next, which was an industrial fluid ceiling product, which I knew zero about, and went to Boston.

And in a two-week class, became an expert, of course. And off I went to San Diego. And we started a business. And then we expanded it to Los Angeles. And by 1984, I was getting ready to open a store in Norfolk, Virginia. And I had a salesman in South Carolina that was doing good and all that kind of stuff. The Navy cut down those things and we hired a guy that gave me the gospel. And when he gave me the gospel, it hit me right up the side of the head. We hired him like in, uh, would have been about November. And by February I was saved. And by that August, I was in seminary taking classes in Greek. Um, I got saved into fundamentalist Christianity.

It was easy for me to become a dualist. I had totally immersed myself in all the arts and all the sensual desires. I’ve told in other sermons that I actually took classes to be a shaman at the New School of Social Research. A shaman is a witch doctor. I took classes on how to be that. So anyway, I show up and I realize this is the answer. Jesus is the answer. All the rest of this, throw it out. So I was the perfect candidate to become a dualist. And I jumped in with both feet and both arms and all my heart and all my soul. We burned enough books that we actually melted a pipe, a cast iron pipe in our fireplace in Rancho Palos Verdes so that the gas was coming out of it, whoosh, and we didn’t know what to do because we had burned so many books and we made it so hot that the pipe burned off.

And I’m sorry, I burned a lot of those books at this point, but anyway, it was interesting how we did that. We had a celebration of pouring out every drop of booze we had, which was considerable. That all went down the drain. I gave up playing pool. I totally just, all I could do was become a monk. And so I jumped into that. The whole time, I’m listening to these guys give me this truth, and I’m going. I was older. I was 37 years old at the time. Sometimes I was older than my professors and I would go up to them and I’d say, what about this part of life? Don’t worry about that. Just do this. Just, you know, parse these verbs, do this thing.

And I said, but there’s a whole nother world out here that’s not being addressed. Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about what the Bible says. Okay. Yeah. So I learned that stuff, but all the time I realized, wait a minute, There’s something more to this than what they’re telling me. I lived with that tension for a long time. Privately, I would talk to a lot of people about it. I’ve mentioned before, I was a member of a committee where a guy had a lot of money and invited a lot of very big time muckety muck Christians. And he would keep them for a week in his extra guest house up in Palos Verdes. And then they would speak during the weekend.

During the week, we could meet with them. I had a store in Torrance, California, which was very close, five minutes from his house. We would sit and talk to these guys and get to know them. It was Walter Martin, R.C. Sproul, you name it. They all came. This guy had a lot of money and was able to get them all to come. And as I talked with them, I realized some of these guys realized there was more than what was being told to me from my fundamentalist side. So when I came upon Kuiper, or we came upon Kuiper, and thanks to Doug Wilson and classical education and all the other experiences we’ve had, when we came across the thing, there is not one thumbs width of the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who his sovereign overall does not cry mine.

I realized, well, this is the guy I need to listen to because he’s realizing all of this is under Christ’s control. The takeaway from any of these series needs to be that the elders are bringing you this is science, politics, art, you know, you name it. God has his thumb over it. Now, my favorite trick is go to the extreme. That’s why I love teaching logic. Go to the extreme. The extreme is, who’s in control of evil? God. If God’s not in control of evil, we’re in a dualistic system where, oh, I hope God is stronger than Satan. I hope he wins. Oh, I hope that he can beat him. No, no, no, no, no. He only gets to do things God gives him permission to do in his great plan for his glory.

Once you cross that bridge, you’ve crossed everything. You can’t bring up any other thing that God doesn’t control. And once you get comfortable in that, you will see all of this is open to you. Now, all the things that people make, are they good or bad? That’s where you have to be wise and understand, do I want to participate in that? No, that’s bad. That’s promoting bad things. promoting good things even by a guy that doesn’t even believe in God. And that happens a lot of times. And that’s what really screws your head around. You realize because this guy has some image of God in him, he knows he shouldn’t just go out and murder people. Where did he get that from? He didn’t get it because he read some stupid book. He got it because he He knows in his heart he doesn’t want to kill those people.

They are real people. And so as you really understand that, you realize common grace is a huge subject that can cover a lot of people and give us things we can use. They can give us better screwdrivers, better drills, cars that work, all kinds of things that we can use and enjoy and use for the good of God. How all that works is a very complicated subject and how you put all that together can really get to be interesting. It’s just like Sean was talking about, I didn’t know his product from Andrew Snyder. But here’s a guy that wanted to help but he just didn’t know that he needed to stand non-biblical truth for the biggest part.

And when Sean brings up something like, well, OK, I know that you want permanence in the family, but as permanence for this child in a sodomite family, is that a good thing for that kid? Or impermanence, knowing that if I’m put into this permanent family that has two guys that think they are a model family, husband and wife, that is so out of whack you can’t even put it in your mixer and get it to make sense. If they don’t even know there’s man and woman, how do they demonstrate to this kid that there is man and woman and then that makes the baby? I mean, it’s like, it’s so stupid you can’t even deal with it. So at that point, maybe the seed is being planted in him that, oh my goodness.

Now, did I say that every sodomite in the world didn’t say a bad thing or didn’t say a good thing? No, you’re going to see as we go through this art thing, it’s crazy. There’s a lot of crazy people out there that make really beautiful things and make beautiful music and make beautiful stories and all kinds of stuff like that. They’re sinful creatures just like you and I are. Some of us are forgiven, some of us are chosen, some of us aren’t. That makes it a little more difficult, but that’s the way it is. All right, my next thing that I’m going to do, and I’ve already taken up 25 minutes. This is great. I always have way too much stuff.

The first thing I want to talk about is all you kids have this great little thing. It’s just a frame, a frame around a picture, right? I had no idea Gayle was going to make this, but I think it’s wonderful. I’m going to show you a frame maker that framed a picture that if today you bought the picture frame, it would cost $2,500,000 to buy the picture frame. If you look in the corner of this, you have these straight lines making little boards that go on the side. Then when you look up in the corner, you’ll see these crazy kind of corners. Those are Louis XV corners. Louis XV was the king after Louis XIV. Louis XIV made the Versailles palace.

Louis XV took nature’s symbols. You’ll notice that these little curvature things look like waves. And what happens is he takes everything that Louis XIV had in straight lines and makes them into curved lines. So as this comes up, this straight line should have lumps in it like this to the center, designating the waves and then coming around like that. But if you look at the corner carefully, you’ll see that there are waves breaking over into the endless part that comes in with the little connector parts where the two waves come together. Those of you that like surfing, see that as the perfect part where that wave comes and you can be in the curl.

And then right here is the point you pop out in your little board and go, eh. So all of this fits together. God made the waves, he made the frames, he made the whole idea of Louis XV frames. So now I’m going to shift to the back and start showing you pictures of art stuff and sounds of art stuff that I’m not saying everybody I’m showing you are Christian but I am showing you things that the image of God has produced just as it was said way back here when he said that in man no separate function of the soul but an unbroken continuous utterance of the image of God now that can be done sinfully and wrong, but when it’s done correctly they make beautiful things.

Okay, so I’m going to go back here and we’re going to start looking at pictures. Okay, the first subject is Troy. The reason I picked Troy is because it was just easy and it finds me a way to get into British poets and Bob Dylan. Okay, Now, this is something that you guys need to really appreciate. We live in a time where you can get on the internet and go to the British Museum. This is incredible what this is showing you. This is for free, okay, and it’s showing this exhibition is November 21, 2019 through March 8, 2020. And this exhibition is called Troy Myth and Reality, sponsored by British Petroleum. Oh, evil oil.

Okay. Now, as you scroll down, they give you the ability to click on this link. And we should be getting it. Here it comes. Come on. They’re refreshing the host. As we get down here, we were moving to tell you about Troy and to tell you about the Iliad and how it was conveyed. And the little connections that I have show how even today there are people in Turkey that are like just on the border of Turkey and Russia that have songs that last for one hour that talk about how Alexander conquered Turkey. And they get up with their little kind of guitar-like instruments and sing these things. And each song will be like an hour talking about the conquering of it.

And how that is how Homer probably started as a bard singing these songs to people. And then they started writing them down, or he wrote them down. And it shows that, and then there’s this Irish guy that is absolutely illiterate, he doesn’t write or read, but he has all these Norse myths that he recites by memory to this guy from Oxford that’s taking them down to record them. Now these are the things where people think that Beowulf and all of these kind of things came into being. before there was literature there was some guy that was singing these songs then the people would put them together and make them written out and it shows you these people speaking you know you hear them talking and then Michael Wood who did this series on the Iliad he asked questions he said what’s a what’s he singing or what’s he saying and the guy says well he’s talking about how the The storm was so bad that the waves were mixed with sand and foam coming up.

Now think about that. If the storm is so bad that it’s sucking up the sand from the bottom of the sea and putting the sand into the wave breaking over the boat, you’re in a big storm. It’s a bad thing. I was in a bad storm in 1967 in the Tonkin Gulf, which is outside of Hanoi. We were plane guarding for a carrier that was bombing Hanoi. The storm was so bad that the carrier’s rear end lifted out of the sea and its right propeller – it has two propellers – its right propeller fell off the ship into the ocean because it got so far out of the sea and then went down and we’re a tiny 300-foot destroyer behind a 1200-foot aircraft carrier, and, you know, that’s bad. And we had to go to Yakuzuka because it was the only dry dock that could take a carrier to get accepted.

Now, living out a storm like that, you start to understand when this guy is singing this little Irish ballad about some people maybe in the year 1000 that were out fighting, And their ship was in such a storm that the sand was coming up and turning over and causing – that’s a bad storm. Now, very poetic function transferred by song art to make a written form of art. Okay? Then my next thing, it provided we get it up, it looks like we’re getting close, is that it? Can I scroll down on the page? That’s the blog of the British Museum, that’s good.

We’re getting close. All right. Yeah, you can. All right. Well, maybe I got it All right, but let me explain where we’re going. So what I’m gonna go is show you then TS Eliot who is the 19th century. Oh god, I’m sorry 20th century poet in 1915 writes a poem called the love songs of J. Alfred Prufrock and And different lines are created in that and who then picks up on those lines and then re-gives you that story back and you can realize that this stuff is being passed on by these people that are reflecting the image of God. Alright, let me see if I can make all this work. Alright, check it out. Who do you think that guy is for those of you that have read the Iliad? What’s he got in his heel?

Yeah, could be Achilles, right? Notice that that was made by an artist that was born in 1777 to 1858. He probably didn’t know Achilles. But it’s a heck of a statue, isn’t it? Carved out of marble. Right? Introducing the epic tale and they talk about things and then bingo, looky here. Oh my goodness. figure M for a vase made in 530 BC according to one version of the story the very moment of her death there are as meat and falls in love with her Achilles keels the Amazon Queen all right now judgment of Paris goes on all these kind of things now I’m just giving you a taste of what you can see on the internet of the things that you’ve learned in your classes and understand and see actual things made during the time that these people are studying that.

Keep in mind, this is 2,500 years ago and we have certain things that keep stepping up the generations closer to us, okay? And here are examples of it. The rage of Achilles, there’s the bottom of another cup, that drinking cup, you know, it’s a little handles. They would put the wine in the top of the cup in this shallow cup and they’d drink it and get pretty slaughtered and all the rest of it, not good. And there they are fighting. You notice one guy’s bleeding. This is the death of Hector. And this is put on another big M4, a big pot, and then a silver one. And you just go down and the death of Achilles were back to that statue, which is really pretty dramatic.

I mean, it’s really cool to see that kind of thing. Then there’s a freeze off of sarcophagus showing the thing. What do you think the horse is there? That’s the horse of Troy. And these guys are dragging it in, getting ready to take over the town. And then there’s more pictures like this with the sphinx. Notice he’s tied to the mast so he can’t listen to him. All of that stuff is being demonstrated. You can see the actual things. And if you go to the British Museum, you can touch them and see them. These are real things being given to you by these people. Now, out of that, we end up with the Trojan War. Now, during this, this is Michael Wood.

What time is it? Oh my goodness, it’s already 7.30. Okay, well, just get a glimpse of this. He starts this out, this is a whole series that you can watch, it’s an eight-hour series, but I plucked this out because I thought it was really good. What is now the western coast of Turkey? Here, Greeks had migrated in the Dark Age which followed the collapse of Mycenaean civilization. It was a new world which would see the birth of western science, medicine, and philosophy. If Homer existed, he worked as a professional singer, a bard, in royal and noble courts on these coasts. His was an oral society on the verge of literacy.

The ancients assumed he had written his text. Modern scholars think that the Iliad was committed to writing in the century or so after his death. But that Homer himself was working in a fully oral tradition. But what does that mean? Chilgalagand, on the Atlantic coast of County Metamos… …are a male island. Here the oral tradition has lingered on. The last performer of epics the length of the Iliad died only 40 years ago, but there are still storytellers reciting tales of heroic deeds in heroic language. They resemble Homer in their style of speech, especially in the formulas or runs whose repeat passages like Homer’s are highly formalized. The storyteller we have come to hear cannot read or write and speaks only Gaelic. His name is John Henry.

For the last ten summers, John’s repertoire has been recorded by Dr. Seamus O’Cahoyne of University College Dublin. John has not yet run out of stories. Okay, this goes on for another five minutes. It’s really interesting for those that fall down the rabbit hole of this kind of thing. But as an example, he’s in Ireland listening to this guy who cannot read or write, but that he has gone on for this guy from Oxford for like 10 summers telling stories out of his head that he has memorized, okay, and he recites this brogue poetry over and over like that. Now so this is an example of in Ireland they’re repeating these stories for people that cannot read, okay.

The example here is going to be carried over into art in the Renaissance where most Most of the population couldn’t read, so the Renaissance artists were painting pictures that people looked at to get the Bible stories and understand what they were saying. So this is the kind of thing that goes on here for another while. Now I’m going to switch to another part of this same… Oop, I need to go here, and I need to go to 15, 18. Okay. is only audience is the tape recorder a sure sign this is the end of this guy and then we’re going to get into him leaving we have no need of such guardians of the tradition today we recall our lists from a computer term and miles from Homer’s wine dog now he’s in Turkey to these lands the Turks migrated from the Central Asian step in the 11th century AD bringing their ancient traditions with them. In the town of Kos, they still survive.

Those are the guys singing in the background that he’s going to go for. So he now goes to the town and comes to the bar where this guy is sitting. Like Homer, these men are professional bards. They sing and play at weddings, feasts and funerals. They were brought up from childhood in the tuition of a master. This man, Shurev Tashliova, was given away at seven years because even then it was seen he had the bardic gift. Seven years old, they identified him. He is now a master. His repertoire includes a hundred tales from the Turkish medieval epic of Kuralu, many of them over an hour long. He’s singing from Kuralu now.

Basically, there are stories of Alexander the Great, conquering Turkey. Here in Koss, the audience sat for three hours, as long as we might sit in a cinema, thrilled by the play and by the pathos of the singing. Here it is still possible to feel the spell worked by a bard when he has an audience who believe in his magic. the prayer beads, the muslim prayer beads.

However distantly, Homer did something like this two and a half thousand years ago when he sang the tale of Troy. Okay, you get the idea. I had it longer in the program, but we’re gonna have to kind move ahead of here so you can kind of get the drift. Alright, so the next thing that happens in this kind of story, that’s how we got the Iliad. And the next thing that happens, let’s move all the way to this century and we have T.S. Eliot, who is the great poet from the 20th century reading a poem of his called The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, okay. And this starts out at 2.08. I’ve got to get to, okay, that’s close enough.

All right, this is him actually reading his own poem. I have a record of this buried in my garage also. In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo. And indeed there will be time to wonder, do I dare, do I dare? Time to turn back and descend the stair and go talking of Michelangelo. Okay, the reason I went back there is he’s the old women are talking of Michelangelo. He makes these little phrases happen in his reading of this that is really good. And indeed there will be time to wonder, do I dare, do I dare, time to turn back and descend the stair with a bald spot in the middle of my hair. They will say how his hair is growing thin. My bald…

You notice he retreats now back to the old women talking of Michelangelo, the bald spot in my hair. Prufrock is going older and older. The famous line in the song is at the end at about 1554, where he says, I wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled as I grow old, grow old. These are famous lines of poetry in 20th century poems. T.S. Eliot and a guy named Ezra Pound were fighting to be the Nobel Laureate poets of their time in the 1950s after World War II. Ezra Pound had supported Hitler and turned out to be a really bad dude. And T.S. Eliot actually was a Christian, ended up writing The Wasteland, other great poems of the 20th century.

And during this poem, he’s talking about these older women talking about Michelangelo, Him with his bald spot in the back of his head and he growing old growing old wearing the bottoms of his trousers rolled So those are great lines out of this thing out of this that was 1915 he published that poem and out of this We end up with Bob This is a And he makes a reference back to G.S. Eliot. Okay, it’s the next verse. The problem is I erased this when we didn’t have the back to back.

It’s just slow, he has to think too much about desolation. Okay, so the whole point is he’s paying tribute back to the person that brought him in 1965 to this point, that Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot are fighting in the captain’s tower to be the great poet, but Calypso’s singers laugh at him. This is after Harry Belafonte and Deo, Deo, all of that kind of stuff. There’s all these pieces of history put into place, and he’s in this flow banging back that he understands what he was trying to tell him. So it’s amazing how all these things fit together, and you realize that all these pieces of art fit together to tell the great story, OK?

And that’s the point that I’m making here. Then there’s another reference to the same thing in, I lost this place too, all right. Well, I can quote this anyway. He wrote another song about the visions of Johanna and he’s talking about the museums that you go to. And he has a line in this song and it’s an 11 minute song that goes on. But it’s inside the museum’s infinity goes upon trial. Voices echo, this is what salvation must be like after a while. That’s pretty incredible to think about, okay, we’re looking at all this art, we’re enjoying it, and everybody’s showing us all this stuff. But you just see that it’s this endless repeating of we keep screwing up, we keep screwing up, we need a savior, and it’s not happening.

He’s expressing that. Now to other parts of music. This one is Handel, okay? And Handel comes to us in 1665 to 1759, and he comes to us with this kind of stuff. The bottom line of this is the Messiah, right? Two hours and 16 minutes long to reach the crescendo. It’s an amazing human achievement, right? So you end up with Handel writing that, and we’re talking 1674 to 1748. Then the next guy to come along is Handel. Oops, I gotta go back here. Handel was the Messiah. Next guy to come along is Mozart. This one is a sample of Mozart, Marriage of Figaro. Okay, he goes on and in the Marriage of Figaro, which is an opera, he tells the prince, dance, little king, dance.

And what’s happening is the masses are starting to say, hey, king, it’s over for you, you’re dancing for us. One of the great pieces of revolutionary music, and it’s written in 1756 to 1791. Interesting dates, right? 1776 is our revolution, the French Revolution is right around the corner in the 1790s. All this is happening, and these guys are writing this kind of music. Then the next thing you move on to is Beethoven, and Beethoven’s Ninth. And this is the great choral piece from Beethoven’s Ninth.

Okay, that’s a famous piece of music. It goes on and on. It is incredible. It’s probably the greatest Western achievement in music, and it just blows the socks off of you. But you notice it’s totally humanistic. You notice when they translate the words, it’s all right from the age of enlightenment. Beethoven had taken it, hook, line, and sinker, left God out of it. You’ll notice in your hymn books we sing Ode to Joy, and it’s totally Christian hymn that we steal from them, put different words in. Now, the whole thing is, what’s happening here? This guy that’s writing this, He’s being influenced by God. He’s given this creative impetus and he’s writing this humanistic piece.

What does he leave out? He leaves out Jesus Christ. The problem is I’ve run out of time and I’ve got all those little clickers up there at the top. What I want to try to give you a taste of and showing you pictures is like, here is a great and famous picture that Caravaggio did of the conversion of St. Paul. That’s one version he did. There’s another. There’s Mantegna with Christ dead laid out. Notice the foreshortening, all incredible art in that. Then you go to the Eufizi Gallery and this is Michelangelo’s picture of the Holy Family. But notice the frame and Michelangelo was instructive in carving the frame. The frame itself is an unbelievable piece of art.

It’s just incredible on this major circular picture that he painted. All these plants, the way the fabrics are arranged, the way the feet are arranged, the book in her lap, all this has secret meanings for people that knew the code. That’s why I told you about the book. The Sistine Chapel. Here is a picture of the Sistine Chapel before it was cleaned. Notice how dingy it is. it is. By the end of this video, it looks like this. It’s bright and shiny with super blues and all these things cleaned and these figures just popped out. The art historians were absolutely mad at the Vatican for cleaning it because they had known this for 400 years as this dingy piece of art up on the ceiling.

As soon as they cleaned it, they realized that Michelangelo used all these bright colors to demonstrate it. Well, duh, we want to see what Michelangelo wanted, not what all the smoke and dinginess from all those years had given it. So cleaning it gave us what we really should have seen. Here’s a picture from the Prado. You can get all of this. The Prado is in Spain. This is from Frau Angelico. Notice that they give you the ability to have this little section to put on the thing, and then you can move over, and you can then get in that section, freeze it, and then plus that section. If I move over here and show you, there we go, this section, look down here, these people off to the side.

Who do you think they are? They’re Adam and Eve, and there’s the piece of fruit in the garden. And over here, when we get over here, here’s the angel giving the enunciation allowing Mary to be pregnant with Jesus, which gives us out of the problem. The whole story is being told by a guy, you know, in that piece of art. Washington Crossing the Delaware. I’m going to have to end on this because it’s now 735. If you just look at this picture, in this particular view, let’s see if it comes up, probably won’t because of that thing, but anyway, that picture of Washington Crossing, Delaware, very famous picture painted by a German in 1871 for America.

It’s cute, but really not accurate. They didn’t ship horses across the thing, see the horses in the back here? these ice things that isn’t the way the Delaware was all that but it’s a romantic portrait of what washington did this picture is actually a picture of the way it now looks in the metropolitan and it is unbelievably framed this frame is like twelve foot by twenty one foot it costs It would cost today two and a half million dollars to put that frame on that picture. Back in the day they spent $500,000 to put that picture, that frame on that picture. This frame is a direct copy from a picture that Brady, the Civil War photographer, took of this picture when it was given to us by the Germans.

And they copied the frame that had on it. Over the period of years, they put a simple little stick frame around it and lost the whole presentation of the thing, which brings about framing the whole discussion I was going to give you on that. It just goes on and on like this. So as you look at all these things, here’s a picture of Napoleon Bonaparte. If you notice down here on this chair, let me see if it’ll make it, it’s trying to catch up with me. But you notice this part where I got the axe going on the chair. Come on, maybe over here. Well, on the chair down in this area, there are little bees that are embroidered in the fabric. It’s a message to the people by Jean-Louis David who painted this picture that Napoleon, his symbol was the bee. And he was busy as a bee to make honey for the French people during his reign.

So these bees occurred in fabrics, in picture frames, in furniture. Everything was modeled to do that. There are then picture frames that are married and then gold gilded with bees on them to show what he did. Every country that he conquered, he put symbols of that country on the frames and then they went on the Ampere frames to show he was in charge of that whole thing. he ordered the whole Louvre to be reframed during his rule. There’s a picture of a Vermeer and a whole discussion of Tim’s Vermeer that I think is interesting for people. You can ask me about it if you want. Here’s a picture of Reuben’s, a triptych showing Christ being crucified on the left.

The people are mourning on the right what’s going on. These are whole things. This was the bedroom playboy artist of his day. Sumptuous, incredible pictures that he would make. Here’s a picture by Bruegel of another triptych. Notice creation is over in this little part. And here is Christ looking down on people during the Annunciation. And they’re on top of a haystack, and all the peasants are going after him. Then in the final judgment on this side, there’s burning towers and all this stuff going on. You can see this as you look at all these pictures and they’re available to you where before you had to have a very expensive art book or whatever to get it.

These are Piranesi drawings. This was another thing. That’s good. Okay, I’m gonna finish it up. The whole thing is, my point is all of these things available for you to look at and to understand how God is blessed by common grace. A lot of very talented people through the eons to tell these stories to us. And as long as we put them through our biblical grid, we can gain a lot of wisdom from it, a lot of pleasure, a lot of joy. I mean, these pieces of music, you know, I defy anybody to listen the Beethoven’s 9th or the Marriage of Figaro and not be moved by it or the Messiah or any of those things. I mean you just go, whoa, this is really strong, you know, and that’s given to us as a gift and I think that God has blessed us through all these people. So sorry about the technical glitches but that’s just a taste. Okay, thank you.