Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

He cast two bronze pillars, each eighteen cubits high and twelve cubits in circumference. He also made two capitals of cast bronze to set on the tops of the pillars; each capital was five cubits high. A network of interwoven chains adorned the capitals on top of the pillars, seven for each capital. He made pomegranates in two rows encircling each network to decorate the capitals on top of the pillars. He did the same for each capital. The capitals on top of the pillars in the portico were in the shape of lilies, four cubits high.

• 1 Kings 7:15-19

He made interwoven chains and put them on top of the pillars. He also made a hundred pomegranates and attached them to the chains.

• 2 Chronicles 3:16

“The lily work added nothing to the strength of the building; many would notice the strength and the majesty of the whole building, but the inspiration of it all was in the detail, in the ‘lily work’. In architecture it is not so much the massive strength that counts as the finely proportioned ornament, and that is never obtrusive. If we look at men and women who have been long at work for God and have been going through chastening, we notice that they have lost their individual harshness, lost a great deal of their apparent go-aheadness for God; but they have acquired something else, viz., the most exquisite ’lily work’ in their lives, and this after all is the thing most like Jesus Christ. It is the quiet, undisturbable Divinity that is characteristic of Jesus, not aggressiveness, and the same is true of God’s children.”

• Oswald Chambers, Daily Thoughts for Disciples (April 22, from The Ministry of the Unnoticed)

Whether lilies or pomegranates, whether flowers or fruit, we can read the instructions in the Scripture and visualize what it looked like.  As an engineer, I can agree with Rev. Chambers to some extent.  Maybe the top of the column, shaped like a lily, increased the area that provides support, that also decreases the free-standing span to the next support, but they did not have to look like lilies or pomegranates.

In John’s vision, did the gates have to have a foundation of precious stones?  Did the gates have to be giant pearls?

But that is in something that Is a structure.  What about the lilies themselves?  God created everything.  An anteater looks like a weirdly designed creature until you see it eating ants.  God put utility into the design.  Birds with outlandish plumage are trying to attract a mate.  I could have used some of that back in the day.  Then again, my late wife was attracted to odd ducks, and I definitely qualified.

Rev. Chambers is also correct in why modern architects throw those artistic things into their design.  I have been through many huge government buildings with half the walls some type of marble, and the striking things that I remember were the colors of the stones, something carved into the wall, or the shape of the columns.  And I do not think the last one is because I can still remember classes from sixty years ago where we had to distinguish between Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian Greek Columns.

God is whimsical.  Who knows what we will see once we get to Heaven, but one of the reasons God has lily work in His designs on earth is to prepare us, to get us to wonder.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.