It has been a favorite project that teachers have given to elementary students—a shoebox diorama. A hole is cut in the top of the box to let in light and another hole in the end for viewing. Then the child is intended to use his creativity (aided usually by those shoebox veterans, Mom and Dad) to create a Lilliputian world in the box. Twigs become trees, pebbles become boulders, and cotton makes do for snow. A few figures—not always in proportion—complete the scene.
One week long ago God did the project Himself.* He also made a little world within the circumscribed walls of time and space, and populated it with creatures. He covered it up with a lid of blue. Here and there in the top the light shone through.
But something happened in God’s box-world that never happened in our little boxes. Even though the creatures were very small, they began to think themselves entirely out of proportion to what they really were. They were convinced that, if only they exerted their independence from the Box Maker, they would be as He was! What madness! Yet today, many tear-stained millennia later, the majority of box-dwellers not only seek to live independent of their Creator, they wish to convince us that there is no one outside the box at all. Not surprisingly, the box and its contents are in terrible shape.
Enter the Box Maker’s Son. Full of compassion for the silly creatures, He willingly offered Himself for a mission so radical, so stupendous, that only God would have thought of it (see Rom. 11:33-34). He would enter the box! Enter it, not as the mighty Heir of Everything but as a baby box-dweller! O the wonder of it—that the box could survive His entering it—and then, a greater wonder still—that He would let the box-dwellers hurl Him out of the box, rejecting His claims to the box and His offer to help. However, the wonder of all wonders is this—that He not only forgave us for such defiance, but used it as the basis to provide a way for the box-dwellers to leave the little box some day and live with Him in the Land Beyond the Blue.
The sky’s the limit? Not anymore. In fact, every believer is treated as a pilgrim just passing through this Land of Little Things, a stranger who doesn’t fit in here. The Box Maker’s Son declared (just before He left the box), “…the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. I pray not that Thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that Thou shouldest keep them from the evil. They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.…As Thou hast sent Me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world” (Jn. 17:14-18). Not belonging to the box? Sent into the box? Were we not always here? Not according to the Lord Jesus. We were “born from above,” the meaning of the Greek word ano-then, and translated “born again” in John 3. That’s why our citizenship “is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ” (Phil. 3:20).
So when you’re feeling boxed in, remember you’re only here temporarily. We’re heaven’s agents, here on a mission of everlasting significance. We need to get the job done, the way heaven wants it done. Then we’re out of here. Goodbye, little box. The Land Beyond the Blue is waiting.
* This illustration is not entirely without biblical connection. Rather than a shoebox, the Lord calls the earth His footstool (Isa. 66:1). If the stellar heavens are His throne and earth His footstool, what will the palace be like?
Written by J. B. Nicholson Jr