Bible Gateway Blog

This is the one-hundred-tenth lesson in author and pastor Mel Lawrenz’ How to Live the Bible series. If you know someone or a group who would like to follow along on this journey through Scripture, they can get more info and sign up to receive these essays via email here.

Mel is the author of A Chronicle of Grief: Finding Life After Traumatic Loss. See his newest message about world changing events now and in the book of Acts here.

The promise of spiritual transformation, and with it, the restoration of human dignity, is powerfully at work in the world. Writing to the believers in worldly Corinth, the apostle Paul described it this way:

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit (2 Cor. 3:17-18, italics added).

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This is the one-hundred-ninth lesson in author and pastor Mel Lawrenz’ How to Live the Bible series. If you know someone or a group who would like to follow along on this journey through Scripture, they can get more info and sign up to receive these essays via email here.

Mel is the author of the forthcoming A Chronicle of Grief: Finding Life After Traumatic Loss. See his newest message about world changing events now and in the book of Acts here.

Art restoration is the attempt to return a work of art to its original or near-original appearance. The task of art restoration is difficult and controversial. Today’s art experts look back on the attempts in past generations to restore sculptures and paintings—including using hydrochloric acid to clean up Michelangelo’s David—as arbitrary preferences that may not restore the original form and ignore historical development.

But there is perhaps no greater disaster in art restoration than the job 80-year-old Cecilia Giménez did on a 1930 painting of Jesus on a pillar in a church in Broja, Spain, in 2012. Meaning well, this amateur ended up imposing on the painting her own brushstrokes, ending up with a Jesus who looked like a pale-faced ape ringed in fuzzy hair and a half-beard with a crooked mouth and hollow eyes. It would have been taken for vandalism, if it were not known that the woman really thought she was improving the representation of Jesus.

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