When an artist paints a pastoral scene on canvas, perhaps of a prairie with rolling hills and a solitary tree, and we all admire the painting and the painter, what are we really admiring?
The tree, grasses, hills, small flowers, and the sky above are all depictions - renderings of things that are real, not abstract concepts. They are only depicted because they are real, or at least put us in mind of those things, and they are only appreciated because such things are beautiful to us.
But the artist has not invented anything original. The things depicted existed before the artist painted them, the paints rendered from the resins and oils already found in the earth, every last fiber of canvas and every last bristle in the brush was previously found in some form in the nature represented in the painting now produced. There is beauty in this fact alone, but even more beautiful is the mind that can conceive beauty. The mind's eye that was made capable of the concept of beauty and creative enough to promote it through art was made by the same Hands that made the things which the artist represents in his painting.
It is all a massive cycle of unimaginable intricacy that can only ultimately bring glory to God.
Why would anyone glorify the things that were made instead the Creator? There is beauty that should be admired, but how can the glory be given to the creation?
Every poet and author; every orator and singer; every sculptor and photographer; all of them and their media are only what God made them to be. Every great mind, theologian or statesman, is not an inventor of the reason or logic or doctrine he promotes unless it is flawed, because if they indeed promote the Truth, that Truth has been in existence for untold ages before they were ever even born.
There can be no legitimate praise but to God. No real glory but His. No name to be taken, no word to be believed, and no beauty to be admired but that which He created.
Love that which glorifies Him.
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