In my weekly Works & Wonders column, I combine a brief devotional with other interesting and uplifting bits and pieces I gleaned throughout the week. I hope you enjoy this week’s collection! It includes:
- The Right Use of Knowledge
- Restoring Rembrandt
- The Last Museum
- Tyndale
- Inventing the Fire Department
- Hymns of Grace, Season 7
1.
The Right Use of Knowledge
Wisdom depends upon knowledge because wisdom is nothing less than the right use of knowledge. Of course, not all knowledge is used rightly, which is why there are many people in this world who are extremely well-informed but also extremely foolish. Here’s how Spurgeon once said it: “To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.” Wisdom is displayed in applying knowledge to plans and purposes, to challenges and circumstances, so that they advance the best and highest goals. A person who has no knowledge can only ever act in ways that are unwise. A person who has limited knowledge will sometimes act in ways that are wise and sometimes in ways that are unwise. But a God who has all knowledge can always be relied upon to act in ways that are truly and fully wise. “To know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom,” and God displays his wisdom in having perfect knowledge and then deploying it in the wisest ways and toward the wisest purposes.
2.
Restoring Rembrandt
In 2014, an art dealer stumbled upon “Let the Little Children Come Unto Me” at an auction. He spotted something unexpected: A background figure associated with the works of Rembrandt. He surmised that this painting, attributed to a different artist, was actually by Rembrandt, so he bought it (for the tidy sum of $1.7 million). Experts soon verified his hunch and set about restoring it. You can read the story and see the results at Smithsonian magazine. Here’s the painting as that dealer first saw it:
3.
The Last Museum
Speaking of Rembrandt, if you wanted to explore his works in greater detail, you might want to use The Last Museum. It is an ambitious project that is attempting to give everyone in the world (or everyone who has an internet connection, at least) access to all of the world’s great art.
The Last Museum is the largest search engine for museum art. It uses semantic search, allowing you to search for artworks by theme, style, subject, vibes, or any description you can imagine.
We currently have around 5 million artworks indexed, and strive to eventually index all museum art in the world.
You can find the works of Rembrandt by just searching for his name.
4.
Tyndale
The Trinitarian Bible Society has released a new documentary on William Tyndale, and it’s entirely free to watch online or download. It does a good job of capturing his life and impact. In terms of its information, the documentary doesn’t break any new ground when compared to other documentaries about Tyndale. If it does break new ground, it’s in the use of AI to add some historical footage that would otherwise require a massive budget. I’ll leave it to you to decide if that adds to or detracts from the presentation.
5.
Inventing the Fire Department
The Dutch have always been an especially ingenious group of people, and you’ll find a long list of innovations attached to Dutch inventors. I didn’t know, though, that the modern fire department is among them.
Works in Progress explains how the fire department was essentially created by two brothers who wanted to find a solution to the fires that could so easily ravage the wood-built cities of old.
If its homes were vulnerable, Amsterdam’s factories, workshops, and piers were in even greater peril. Maintaining all those ships required stores of highly combustible pitch, tar, turpentine, and hemp. Soap makers, bakeries, sail makers, saw mills, cloth printers, picture frame makers, and the occasional alchemist contributed their own fire hazards. So did the burgeoning industries of brewing, printing, resin making, and sugar refining.
Yet Amsterdam avoided the disastrous equivalent of London’s Great Fire of 1666. In the last three decades of the century, in fact, the toll from fires dropped dramatically. Behind this improvement lay a culture of inventiveness and, just as important, what we today might call state capacity.
It’s a neat story, and is well illustrated.
6.
Hymns of Grace, Season 7
Hymns of Grace, a project of Grace Community Church, continues to sing its way through the great hymns of the Christian faith. It recently released season 7, which features 12 songs, all of which are sung, performed, and produced at professional quality. Songs in this season include “The Power of the Cross,” “There Is a Fountain,” “The Old Rugged Cross,” and “Like a River Glorious,” among others.
