by Teri Ong
What are clouds like?
The clouds piled up heavy – like a double scoop of steaming hot mashed potatoes.
The clouds wrapped the frosty landscape in a layer of cotton wool.
The cloud looked like a tooth extracted under the influence of laughing gas.
Describe the morning glories.
The morning glories shivered in the morning air and bundled up in leaves, knotting their hoodies with vine-y laces.
The tendrils of vine hung casually over the shoulder of the fence, festive like a native girl with bright blossoms tucked in each curl and behind both ears.
The morning glories cast their eyes downwards to protect themselves from the glaring noonday sun.
What are your impressions of the sunset?
The sunset spread out like a smudge of pink chalk on a gray sidewalk.
The clouds suffused with pink like the cheeks of an embarrassed teenager.
The gray underside of the cloud looked like an untrimmed mustache on a farmer’s sunburnt face.
What about the pennants in left field?
The pennants atop the stadium flapped almost in unison, like the JV flag corps.
Isn’t that moon something!?
The crescent moon, like the finger of God, traced across the black page of the sky.
So far this semester, we have been practicing the art of description in our Chambers College writing class. It may take a thousand words to describe one picture, but there is artistry of another kind in choosing the right words to create the picture and the appropriate attendant emotions in the mind and heart of a reader.
Dorothy L. Sayers wouldn’t use “TNT” to name or describe an explosive in a story because the proper chemical name sounded too much like “toorah-loorah-loorah.” She chose instead the word “dynamite,” from the Greek word for power– “dunamos”– because it brought with it the weight of centuries of classical and Biblical allusions.
We need comparisons to be able to understand with as much clarity as possible things that we have never seen or experienced. Since our eyes haven’t seen heaven or hell or God Himself, and since it is God’s purpose for us to walk by faith without seeing spiritual actualities, He communicates about spiritual matters in the language of comparison and allusion.
Scripture teaches us through “shadows” of realities to come ( Heb 8:5, Col 2:17), through types (Rom 5:14, Heb 11:19) and through “likenesses” (Phil 2:4-9).
The most precious likeness is found in our Savior Jesus, who was willing to be made like us.
5 Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, 6 who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. 8 Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
We can only begin to appreciate what this meant for Him if we contrast the description Isaiah gave us in Isaiah 53 with the description John gave us in Revelation 1. The marvel is that Jesus came down so low to be “like us” so that we could be lifted up to be “like Him.”
What is He like? He said He was a shepherd, bread, wine, a door, the light of the world, the way, the true vine, our brother, our bridegroom. Poets and prophets said He was a rock, a fortress, a lily, a rose. He is the Word of God, the language of Heaven translated for mankind, the communication of the Father made flesh. Just as the Apostle John said of His earthly works, we could say of ways to describe Him, “And there are also many other things which Jesus did [or is], which if they were written in detail, I suppose that even the world itself would not contain the books that would be written.” (John 21:25)
Okay, so what is He really like?
I can tell you in two words– “incomparable” and “indescribable.”
So if we are to be like Him, what are we supposed to be like?
We can only begin to know now. “Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.” 1 John 3:2
Someday we will know as we are known. Praise God!
