Gordon MacKenzie spent thirty years at Hallmark Cards, and along the way he often visited elementary schools and asked the kids a simple question: How many artists are in the room? [1] In first grade, every hand shot up. With each grade, fewer hands went up. By sixth grade, only one or two kids raised a hand, slowly, glancing around to see if anyone would laugh. Nothing about those kids’ capacity changed between first grade and sixth. What changed is whether they’d raise their hands.
Most of us have been sitting in that sixth-grade classroom for a long time. We even have a phrase for it: “I’m not the creative type.” But for a human being, that’s a little like saying, “I’m not the breathing type.”
It’s fitting that MacKenzie’s question was answered with hands. Hands are where imagination takes shape: they’re how we draw, build, cook, and fix. Scripture even speaks of God’s own creative work this way: David called the night sky “the work of Your fingers” (Ps. 8:3). So, let’s follow those sixth graders’ hands: where they came from, why they came down, and how they can rise again.
Made by a Creator
The first thing the Bible tells us about God is that He creates: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). He didn’t gather materials that already existed and rearrange them. He spoke, and what wasn’t, was (Heb. 11:3). The crown of that work is humanity, created “in His own image” (Gen. 1:27).
The image of God is richer than any one trait, but creativity is surely one of the ways it shows. Dorothy Sayers noticed that by Genesis 1:27, the only thing we’ve been told about God is that He creates. So, she reasoned, what we share with Him is “the desire and the ability to make things.”[2] George MacDonald drew a careful line here. He reserved the word creation for God’s calling things out of nothing, yet he insisted that “the imagination of man is made in the image of the imagination of God.”[3] We can’t create from scratch. We make from what He’s already created. But we exercise creativity and make things because our God is both Creator and creative.
And our making starts before our hands ever move. First, we imagine what could be. Then we give that idea a form. Scripture shows both steps early. God formed the animals and brought them to Adam “to see what he would call them” (Gen. 2:19). God supplied the creatures; Adam supplied the names. Later, when God told Israel to build the tabernacle, the first person Scripture describes as filled with the Spirit of God wasn’t a prophet or a priest. It was Bezalel, a craftsman given “ability and intelligence … to devise artistic designs” (Exod. 31:3–4).[4] From this passage, John Calvin was convinced that “no one excels even in the most despised and humble handicraft, except in so far as God’s Spirit works in him.”[5]
That same image still shows up everywhere. Sometimes our hands are literally at work: a mechanic rigging a fix nobody taught him, or a grandmother piecing a quilt from old shirts. Sometimes the work happens in words and ideas: a mom inventing a bedtime story on the spot, or a Sunday school teacher finding a new way to explain the lesson to fourth graders. Different forms. Same creative image.
Why Our Hands Come Down
So why do so many of us lower our hands? Part of the answer is old. A teacher graded the drawing instead of delighting in it. Or we compared ourselves to the most gifted person in the room and quietly decided we were out. In Jesus’ parable, the servant who buried what his master entrusted to him explained himself in one line: “I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground” (Matt. 25:25). Fear still works that way. We’re afraid of looking foolish or falling short, so we put our creativity away before anyone can enjoy it.
But our moment adds pressures earlier generations didn’t face, and to see them clearly, we need a distinction. Capacity and ability aren’t the same thing. Our capacity as image bearers is set by God, and nothing in our culture can shrink it. Our ability, our practiced skill at observing, imagining, and making, absolutely can. Think about a piano that has sat untouched for twenty years. Every string is still there, but the person who took lessons as a kid can only plunk out the first line of a hymn. The capacity is in the room. The ability has faded.
We live in an age that’s overstimulated and desensitized at the same time, so quiet beauty barely registers. Now we can generate an image, an essay, or a song in seconds, and the internet is filling up with AI slop: content with no maker behind it and no process inside it. But the problem doesn’t seem to primarily be the tools. Bezalel used tools to cut stone and carve wood (Exod. 31:5). The problem is what we give up for speed. Creativity grows through slow, attentive work: drafting, failing, and trying again. A shortcut that skips the process also skips the place where creativity is formed.
Psalm 115 describes idols that have “eyes, but do not see” and “hands, but do not feel,” and then warns, “Those who make them become like them” (Ps. 115:5, 7–8). G. K. Beale summed up the principle this way: “What people revere, they resemble, either for ruin or restoration.”[6] If we spend our days staring at what’s shallow, fast, and imitative, our creativity will start to look the same.
Eyes Up Before Hands Up
But Beale’s principle also works in the other direction. If beholding what’s empty can ruin us, beholding the Lord can restore us. That’s how Paul describes sanctification: “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:18). We don’t become holy by staring at our sin and trying harder. And a passing glance at Jesus isn’t enough either. The Spirit transforms us as we gaze at Him, like David, whose “one thing” was “to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD” (Ps. 27:4). And the new self “is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its Creator” (Col. 3:10).
So it shouldn’t surprise us that our creativity is renewed the same way. It recovers as our eyes are lifted to Him. After years of chasing lesser beauties, Augustine confessed, “Late have I loved You, beauty so old and so new.”[7]
That means our best creative work doesn’t start at the whiteboard. It starts in worship, in the Word, and in slowing down long enough to observe what God has created. Jesus told us to “consider the lilies of the field, how they grow” (Matt. 6:28). That’s not a glance; it’s a long look. The person who’s been considering lilies has something to say about beauty. The person who’s been scrolling for several hours mostly has anxiety to process.
Johann Sebastian Bach understood this. He often wrote “J.J.” at the top of a blank score, Jesu juva, “Jesus, help.” At the end he wrote “S.D.G.,” Soli Deo gloria, “to God alone be the glory.”[8] Before his hand touched the page, his eyes went up to Jesus.
The Carpenter’s Hands
If we want to see what human creativity was meant to be, we look at Jesus. He doesn’t merely bear God’s image; He is “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15). The One through whom “all things were made” (John 1:3) took on flesh and worked as a carpenter (Mark 6:3). He reached for seeds, coins, yeast, and lost sheep, and “He said nothing to them without a parable” (Matt. 13:34). His hands were pierced and His body laid in a tomb. And though He “increased in wisdom and in stature” (Luke 2:52), sin never dulled His creativity. In Him, human ability fully matched human capacity.
And God has kept equipping His people with skill to serve His church. Around AD 715, on an island off England’s northeast coast, a monk, most likely Bishop Eadfrith, spent years copying and painting the Gospels by hand. He mixed his own pigments and filled calfskin pages with intricate patterns.[9] Like Bezalel’s work on the tabernacle, Eadfrith’s artistry didn’t compete with God’s Word. It served it, inviting readers to slow down and linger over the story of Jesus.
Putting Our Creativity Back to Work
So what does it look like for our creativity to rise again? It starts with grace, not talent. Because Christ has already done the work that saves us, our creativity doesn’t have to prove anything. That frees us for three steps.
- Pick it up. Most of us set something down along the way: a sketchbook, a guitar, a garden. But the God who gave us that capacity hasn’t taken it back. Picking it up again may be as simple as giving it an hour on a Saturday. “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might” (Eccl. 9:10).
- Practice it. A neglected piano doesn’t come back in tune by wishing. Creative ability returns slowly, through ordinary faithfulness, much like holiness does. “Do you see a man skillful in his work? He will stand before kings” (Prov. 22:29).
- Pass it on. God didn’t only fill Bezalel and Oholiab with skill; He also inspired them “to teach” (Exod. 35:34). Peter tells us to use whatever gift we’ve received “to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace” (1 Pet. 4:10). That might mean lettering a verse for a grieving friend, teaching a teenager to cook, or designing the banner for VBS. Creativity offered to serve the body and point to Christ isn’t decoration; it’s Kingdom work.
Every Hand in the Room
God created us in His image, and we marred it. Sin didn’t erase our creativity, but it broke it. Our hands started making idols instead of offerings and building towers to “make a name for ourselves” (Gen. 11:4). But God didn’t abandon His work. He sent His Son. The hands that shaped wood in Nazareth were nailed to wood outside Jerusalem, and He died the death we deserved. Three days later He walked out of the grave, the scars still in His hands (John 20:27). Everyone who turns from sin and trusts in Him is made new: “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17). And God is still at work in us: “we are the clay, and You are our potter; we are all the work of Your hand” (Isa. 64:8).
So imagine someone walked into our church this Sunday and asked, “How many artists are in the room?” The honest answer is every hand. Not because we’re all gifted the same way, but because we’re all the created type, and that’s exactly what makes us the creative type. The One whose hands formed us isn’t finished: “He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Phil. 1:6).
[1] Gordon MacKenzie, Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace (New York: Viking, 1998), 19–20.
[2] Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (London: Methuen, 1941), chap. 2, “The Image of God.”
[3] George MacDonald, “The Imagination: Its Functions and Its Culture” (1867), in A Dish of Orts (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1893).
[4] The Hebrew word the ESV renders “ability” in Exod. 31:3 is ḥokmâ, the ordinary Old Testament word for wisdom, which is why the KJV and NASB read “wisdom” there. The same word describes the craftsmen’s skill in Exod. 28:3 and 35:31, 35. Scripture treats Bezalel’s artistry as Spirit-given wisdom.
[5] John Calvin, Commentaries on the Four Last Books of Moses Arranged in the Form of a Harmony, trans. Charles William Bingham, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1854), on Exod. 31:2.
[6] G. K. Beale, We Become What We Worship: A Biblical Theology of Idolatry (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2008), 16.
[7] Augustine, Confessions 10.27.38, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
[8] Patrick Kavanaugh, The Spiritual Lives of Great Composers (Nashville: Sparrow Press, 1992), 13.
[9] Michelle P. Brown, The Lindisfarne Gospels and the Early Medieval World (London: British Library, 2011).