Whose Signature?

A number of years ago New York papers were splashed with headlines concerning the exhibition of fury Salvador Dali displayed one fine morning on Fifth Avenue. A famous Fifth Avenue store had engaged him to design a window. He overlooked no details, and as far as he was concerned the window, which he finished late one night, was ready for his signature. The next day he found that someone had changed his work. Dali made a running start and jumped right through the plate glass window in front of startled passersby and window gazers. He destroyed the display. A melange of his work that included someone else’s ideas was not going to have his signature on it.

Dali jumped through a plate glass window of a fashionable Fifth Avenue department store. Every artist has his own way of displaying displeasure when his creation is changed.

Any creative person would react if his work were changed, whether it was an inferior painting with the signature of Rembrandt, or an architect’s plans turned into something he would never have made and even dislikes, whether it was a reflavored Chinese Wong Bok attributed to a cook who would never have made it that way or a film edited into something quite different from the original version. There is no work of art that can have a signature of one person when it’s been changed by another.

Most artists would not react as violently as Salvador Dali did. But there is nothing wrong with gently letting it be known that “This isn’t the way I did it. This isn’t the effect I wanted. This doesn’t communicate what I wanted it to.”

Art experts spend a lot of time determining the authenticity of certain paintings. Counterfeit paintings, an underground business, make money. A forged creative work is really a worse crime than a forged check, which only involves money.

We may get upset when people change our work, or when a counterfeit painting is passed off as genuine, but it is nothing to what the enemies of God do with his signature. When God finished the creation we are told that “God saw everything that he had made, and behold it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.” We have God’s declaration that everything he made was good. His creation was perfect. Yet day after day we have people blaming our imperfect world on God. But the perfect creation was changed, vandalized, and spoiled by human beings.

Through the centuries many people have used God’s signature fraudulently. An outstanding example of this happened when Moses was receiving the Law, and Aaron was making a golden calf. Aaron claimed that this molten calf was the work of God. After the calf was made these words were said: “These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.” And according to Jewish tradition, the holiest name of God was actually stamped upon the statue. The name of God, his signature, was placed upon a false representation of him. This adulterous worship substituted an idol for the living God as if there were no difference at all. No wonder the wrath of God was stirred up against them.

Falsifying a signature can take two forms: first, replacing the real signature for a more important one, and second, the placing of a signature of someone who did not make the creation upon the work of the one who did the work. Both of these have been done to the original creation of God and to the Word that he has given us.

Human beings without fear twist and change the Word of God, either adding to it and keeping his signature there, or removing his signature altogether and putting other signatures in his place. We should think about this as we read, “And the Word of the LORD came unto me saying …” or “the Word of the LORD came unto Elijah in the third year saying.…” We need to have the right kind of fear and awe concerning his Word. “Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish ought from it, that ye may keep the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you” (Deut. 4:2) and “For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, if any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book” (Rev. 22:18, 19). There is an awesome seriousness in reading the Word of God and then tampering with it in some way. We can’t fail to tremble as we pray, “Lord give me your strength and your help hour by hour and day by day to not only not misrepresent what you have said, but to live as closely as possible in my weakness to what you have told me I am to be and to do.”

People have often claimed that God made something of which he had no part. Aaron and the golden calf is a prime example.

We need to reread Luke 16:19–31. The rich man wanted someone to go tell his brothers the truth, but Abraham replied, “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.” In John 5:39,46, 47 Jesus says to the Pharisees who had added so much to God’s Word that they did not even recognize him, nor his words of truth as he stood before them. “Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me.… For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me: for he wrote of me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words?” Changing works of art and leaving the signature is distressing enough, but the signature of the living God is everlasting, and can brook no substitute in content or in claim to authorship.

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