Taking in the Whole

I remember seeing a picture of one of Rembrandt’s painting in a magazine. I can’t remember which one it was. But the thing that struck me was the shear size of it. In the picture they had a person standing there in front of the painting so you could see the scale. It was enormous—bigger than life-sized.

As I thought about that, I thought the only real way to truly appreciate a masterpiece of that size is by standing back far enough to take in the whole painting. While there is value, no doubt, in getting up close and studying the brush stokes and how the paints are layered on, if you want to catch the full impact of what the artist was trying to capture, you need to take in the whole.

I’ve begun thinking of Scripture in that way. Reading and studying isolated texts has value. It is important and should not be neglected. We need to dig into the syntax and linguistics of the text. But at the same time we cannot neglect the discipline of standing back far enough to take in the whole—tracing the broad brush strokes of important Biblical themes from OT to NT… from Genesis to Revelation.

It seems to me that we’ve spent too much time with the pieces that we’ve neglected the whole. That’s something the Biblical writers never did. That’s something the early Christians never would have done. See the whole was what enabled them to understand the pieces. Our post-enlightenment mind set has turned that around: we seek to understand the whole by dissecting and studying the pieces.

The problem is, we’ve been standing so close to the painting for so long that we’ve forgotten what the painting is about. Maybe we need to remind ourselves to step back every once and a while and take in the whole.