“The wing of the ostrich wave proudly…” (Job 39:13)
God did not create anything that was not beautiful. He “saw everything he has made and behold it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). His creation of the heavens and the earth was good. His fashioning of the firmament, light and darkness was good. His bringing forth of living creatures was good and his moulding of man was exceedingly good.
God proved that He is a good God that all the works of his hand, both great and small, were made to be bright and beautiful. But God desired that all his creation must be subject to him. He gave them freedom to roam the earth, but he called them to be obedient. He demanded humility and instructed against the pride of life. But the ostrich, one of his creations did not heed this instruction; and the reason for this lies in its physical attributes and character.
The ostrich is the biggest bird in the world. It belongs to the Big-bird family. It has an imposing figure and stands tall with the majestic gaits of a pompous creature. Its strides are cocky, and its poise is arrogant though sometimes graceful. Some cultures refer to it as “the queen of birds”. Others call it “the King of Kings”.
The ostrich is exceedingly beautiful. It belongs to the same family of birds as the peacock. Its wings are beautiful with different floral patterns. Its plumage is rich and it spread them to attract attention and receive recognition. The Bible itself says that the “wings of the ostrich wave proudly…” (Job 39:13).
As the biggest and one of the most beautiful birds, the ostrich exemplifies the Lucifer in the Kingdom of birds. God created Lucifer as “the signet of perfection” and made “perfect in beauty” (Ezekiel 28:12). He fashioned him with “every (known) precious stone… wrought in gold” and placed him “in Eden, the garden of God” (Ezekiel 28:13).
God originally made him wise, even “wiser than Daniel,” so much that “no secret was hidden from him” (Ezekiel 28:3). He remained a paragon of wisdom and understanding until his “heart was proud because of his beauty (Ezekiel 28:17). And from the day he corrupted his wisdom he was driven out of his domain.
The story of Lucifer is the story of the ostrich: beautiful in physique, proud at heart. It is the story of man out of fellowship with God. Man was created beautiful. He was made out of a seemingly useless substance – the dust – and given dominion over the earth. He was bestowed with intelligence to “till the Garden of Eden and tend it” (Genesis2:15). He was given wisdom to give “names to all the cattle and to the birds of the air and to every beast of the field…” (Genesis 2:20).
It was God who gave all these powers, but man gloried in his intelligence as if it were of his own making. Today, the advances in sciences have been used to glorify man. He has been called a creator, an inventor, a genius, and even a god. These appellations though true to some extent do not describe man’s full potentials as God had originally intended.
Think for a minute about the state of man’s progress now if he not rebelled against God. Think about his life in the Garden of Eden, when God’s will was man’s will, when man appropriated all the promises of the creator without sweat. Think about this for a minute and you will see that the pride in our achievements and the glory of our contemporary civilisation is only a minor fraction of God’s original purpose for us. The rest has been lost through sin or disobedience.
The truth is that the beauty of man was spoilt by the pride of life. The Bible says that pride goes before fall. This is the message of the ostrich even in the house of God.
Today, many see the beauty of the Christian faith, many tap from the source of life and use the keys of the kingdom of God to work miracles. But they forget that these keys were not created by them. They forget that it is only by the grace of God that they use them to unlock the gates of Satan and open the store-house of heaven. And so their wings fly beyond the realm of discretion, wings that challenge the creations of God, wing that are not meek, wings that carry the message of Satan rather than the gospel of Jesus. They develop wings that portray arrogance, self-interest, avarice, greed and carelessness.
Many Christians are beautiful outside but rotten inside. They accord recognition to only those who, like them, are handsome, pretty and wealthy and neglect “the wretched of the earth”. Truly, like the Pharisees of old they are whited sepulchres. Yet outward beauty is not a measure of godliness. Lucifer was beautiful but he was not godly.
Beauty is an internal spiritual quality. It radiates from the inside and overshadows the mangled features of the outward view. The Bible says that Jesus did not have outward beauty at the point of bearing our sins. Don’t be deceived by the supposedly beautiful, but distorted images of Him we have today in our living rooms.
In the words of Isaiah “…He grew…up like a young plant and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or comeliness that we should look at him and no beauty that we should desire him” (Isaiah 53:2). Jesus was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief on the cross. He was a man “from whom men did their faces, he was despised, and we esteemed him not” (Isaiah 53:3).
That was Jesus the perfect Lamb of God who took away the sins of the world. He was an epitome of love, a paragon of commitment and contentment. He exemplified faithfulness shared in joy and pain. He is the “author and finisher of our faith”, who bore our own grief’s “…carried our sorrows and was afflicted and bruised for our iniquities” (Isaiah 53:4-5).
Man’s view of beauty is different from God’s view. God sees beauty in the spiritual; man sees it in the physical. God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, neither are his ways our ways. For as the heavens are higher than the earth so are God’s ways higher than our ways and his thoughts higher than our thoughts (Isaiah 55:9).
