The Glory of the Mundane

God thinks the mundane tasks in life are glorious.

We know this because he has chosen to reveal the greatest story of all time through the mundane things of life.

God declares himself to be the Father (Malachi 1:6). An awful lot of men are fathers. God does not decide to call himself the Father because he is taking a human name to himself that he thinks might help us understand him. Instead, God is The Father and he chooses to honour human men by naming them after himself – fathers.

God says that the love he has for his people is a marriage (Ephesians 5:32, Revelation 19:6-9). As Paul is speaking about marriage in Ephesians 5, he writes that the real marriage is that of Christ and the church – our human marriages, real as they are, should be pictures and reflections of The Marriage.

The list is never-ending. Jesus is the bread of life (John 6:35), the light of the world (John 8:12), the door (John 10:9), the vine (John 15:1-5). God adopts his people as sons (Galatians 4:5-6), washes his people clean (Psalm 51:7, Leviticus 16:30), clothes us in clean clothes (Zechariah 3:4-5) and gives us living water to drink (John 4:10-14).

God created the world with a plan. He never changed that plan. He ordained the fall of Adam, the coming of Christ, and the salvation that would be necessary because of Adam and accomplished by Christ. God planned what that salvation would look like, exactly what benefits he would give his people through the work of Christ.

In other words, when God made bread, he made it knowing that Jesus would be the bread of life and that we would use bread to remind us of Christ in the Lord’s Supper for millennia. Bread wasn’t a mistake.

When God invented the idea of husbands and wives, sons and daughters, he invented them knowing that he is The Father, that Jesus is The Son. He wove family into creation knowing that man would fall and need to be adopted into God’s eternal family as sons. He created the desires, passions and difficulties of marriage with the marriage supper of the Lamb to the church in the front of his mind.

These mundane, everyday objects, activities and relationships are not used to describe the gospel because they just happened to be around. They are the gospel woven into creation from before the dawn of time.

This makes them glorious.

Stunningly glorious.

This means that when you change a dirty nappy, wash your child, scrub the stains of food and dirt (and worse!) from their clothes and dress them once more in fresh outfits you are painting a picture of the gospel. You are doing something glorious! God does this sort of stuff for his people and he has honoured you with acting out something of the gospel by giving you these tasks.

This means that when you provide food for someone, you are acting out the gospel. When you love your wife, you are demonstrating to the world how God loves his elect. When you discipline and train your children in the ways of the Lord, dealing with their sin and their weaknesses time and time again, you are showing them what God is like.

The mundane is glorious because the gospel is full of the mundane.