Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream has gone back on display in the Munch Museum in Oslo.  One of Norway’s most iconic national treasures, it was stolen in broad daylight from the museum in August 2004.  The painting was recovered two years later, and since then has been undergoing significant restoration – though it still bears the scars of the robbery, having been damaged as it was ripped from its frame.

Would you compare yourself to a stolen artwork like The Scream?  You have been created painstakingly and lovingly by God as an amazing work of art, fearfully and wonderfully knitted together in your mother’s womb (Psalm 139:13-16).  And not just created by God, but treasured – put in a wonderful place and looked after.  But then came the robbery.  The human race was deceived by the forces of evil, tempted by sin.  As we chose to disobey God and go our own way, so it was as if we were that painting: ripped off the wall, damaged and taken away from the presence of God – with no power to help ourselves.

But then God recovered us, just as The Scream was recovered.  Not by luck, but in God’s case by the greatest rescue plan the world has ever seen.  No ransom was paid to recover The Scream, but God sent his only Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, to be a ransom for us.  Christ paid the greatest price imaginable as he gave up his life for us, dying on the Cross for us, taking the punishment for our sin.  God did that because we are a treasure in his sight – he loves us so much.

And because of Christ, as we trust in him, we can be restored to that place of honour in a relationship with God – adopted into his family and given an inheritance in glory that can never perish, spoil or fade.  The Holy Spirit does a better job of transforming us than any art experts can do to restore a damaged painting.  Interestingly, just as the painting still shows some damage from the robbery, so in this life we continue to carry the effects of human sin and rebellion.  We age and fall ill, and until Christ returns we still carry in our bodies the mortality that sin brought into the world.  Praise God that in heaven with God we will be completely restored.

There’s one final parallel between us and The Scream.  The painting is a modern icon of human anxiety.  It shouts in utter despair from the heart at the meaninglessness of life.  It screams that the human situation is hopeless.  Nothing can be changed.  All we can do is protest and lament.  And without faith, and the hope given us in the Lord Jesus Christ, that is right.  Paul wrote to the Ephesians that before they came to faith they lived in the world without God and without hope.  But in Jesus we have been offered the hope of everlasting life, the hope of glory.  And so the scream of despair painted so memorably by Munch becomes, for Christians, by faith a cry of joy, faith and confidence.  We may go through the valley of the shadow of death.  All of us will know hard times, but the hope God has given us does not disappoint us, for God has poured out his love into our hearts by means of the Holy Spirit, who is God's gift to us.  (Romans 5:5)