Uncovering What Was Always There

In 1980, restorer Gianluigi Colalucci climbed the scaffolding inside the Sistine Chapel and pressed a small solvent-soaked sponge against Michelangelo's ceiling. Beneath five centuries of candle soot, lamp smoke, and yellowed animal glue, a patch of startling sapphire blue emerged. No one alive had seen that color.

Over the next fourteen years, Colalucci's team carefully stripped away layer after layer of accumulated grime. What emerged stunned the world — vivid pinks, electric greens, luminous flesh tones that overturned everything scholars thought they knew about the master's palette. Art critics protested loudly. They had grown so accustomed to the dark, somber ceiling that the brightness felt wrong. The familiar grime had come to pass for the original.

Malachi writes that the Lord will come to His temple like a refiner's fire and a fuller's soap. The prophet's audience must have flinched at the image. Refining burns. Lye soap stings. But God's purpose is not destruction — it is restoration. He strips away the accumulated residue of compromise, self-reliance, and empty ritual not to leave us bare, but to uncover the image He painted in us from the beginning. The process is uncomfortable, even painful. But what emerges is brilliant, vivid, and unmistakably His handiwork.