Today I will be speaking about how objective beauty points us to the Creator God. We’ll be looking at Psalm 27:4 and Psalm 96:6.
One thing I have asked from the LORD, that I shall seek: That I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, To behold the beauty of the LORD and to meditate in His temple (Psalm 27:4).
Splendor and majesty are before Him; strength and beauty fill His sanctuary (Psalm 96:6).
There are three things we are going to look at today:
1. Objective Beauty
2. The Pursuit of Beauty
3. The Source of Beauty
Let’s look at the first point:
1. Objective Beauty
Aesthetics involves the study of beauty, taste, and art. It asks questions like: What defines beauty? Is it only subjective or is there an objective basis for determining what is beautiful? Sean McDowell contends:
To deny the objectivity of beauty is to deny that we have the ability to perceive anything as beautiful. In other words, the recognition of beauty may be in the eye of the beholder but not beauty itself. Objective beauty is beauty that exists outside of ourselves, independent of what we think.
Why do you think we place so much value on beauty? I think we all agree about the reality of what is and isn’t beautiful and that we are naturally drawn to beauty. The question is: Where does beauty come from and why are we attracted to it? Why do we as human beings desire to make beautiful creations? The best possible explanation for the origin of beauty is God. God was the originator of beauty in the account of creation in Genesis and delivers the final act of beauty in Revelation 21 (when God restores everything back to its original state of beauty). The existence of objective beauty points to a God of beauty who loves His creation and desires to give us joy and pleasure. Anthony O'Hear wrote:
In experiencing beauty, we feel ourselves to be in contact with a deeper reality than the everyday.
In the Old Testament, “beautiful” is, first of all, a visual term - usually referring to something that we can see. For example, the word is used to describe Job’s daughters as the best-looking women in the country (Job 42:15). In time, however, the word took on a wider range of meaning where beauty is further defined as something good; right, perfect, pleasing, and appropriate. Beauty goes way beyond what we see. In the OT – The Hebrew word kabod or glory is used to describe the personal beauty of the Lord.
The Psalmist said:
The heavens are telling of the glory of God; And their expanse is declaring the work of His hands (Ps. 19:1).
David was saying that the heavens reflect the personal beauty of God. And because of His personal beauty, everything He made in the heavens is beautiful.
The Christian worldview affirms that God is the source of all beauty either through direct creative acts or through men and women, created as divine image bearers (Latin: imago Dei). So God, as the Creator, is not only a Designer and Engineer of the world’s intelligibility but He’s also a creative and skillful Artist.
What are some of the things that the Bible defines as beautiful? God Himself is beautiful, why? Because everything about God is infinitely good and perfect and right including His love, mercy, grace, wisdom, and kindness. His ways and plans are perfect and past finding out. The psalmist talked about the beauty of God’s holiness, the beauty of His dwelling place (Psalm 27:4). Jonathan Edwards wrote that God is: “...the foundation and fountain of all being and all beauty.” Gregory of Nyssa, just like a poet, sings praises to God for how He shows His own beauty in the wonders of the created order. He describes the beauties of both: (1) the natural realm, and (2) those of the human person, all of which reflect the splendor of the triune God.
The beauty of His creation includes you and me. When He made us He said it was very good! Yet the beauty that Adam and Eve shared with God in the garden was short-lived as they were deceived by the beauty of the serpent and by the beauty of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It was the introduction of sin that brought death and devastation into the world (cf. Gen. 3 and Rom. 5:12-21), which caused the marring of humankind’s original beauty both within and without.
But the good news is that this disintegration and decay of the beauty of God’s creation will one day be reversed. One day all of God’s redeemed and all of His creation will be restored (Rom 8:21). Creation looks forward to the day when it will be freed from death and decay (v. 21). Even though creation has been marred by the ugliness of sin, Jonathan Edwards believed that both bodily beauty and beauty of soul within humanity still reflected something of the perfections of Christ. And one day we will experience our adoption as sons and daughters of God and the transformation of our bodies into perfect resurrected bodies (Rom 8:23). We look forward to that day because we were created by God to enjoy Him and to appreciate His beauty and the beauty of creation. We see this appreciation of beauty in our...
2. Pursuit of Beauty
There are various forms of art throughout the ages that have reflected the beauty of creation and the Creator. Christians view artistic pursuits, such as music and art, dance as practical tools that, given the right formula, can directly communicate the sacred. N. T. Wright said:
The arts are not the pretty but irrelevant bits around the border of reality. They are the highways into the center of a reality which cannot be glimpsed, let alone grasped, any other way.”
Wright was saying that the arts reflect the core of what society worships and true art always glorifies God and gives us a healthy appreciation and affection for beauty.
Though we appreciate natural beauty, the danger is to make natural beauty an end in itself and instead of letting it point us to the Creator of beauty, we seek what is beautiful in our own eyes, as if our taste, our perception of beauty is the standard. Because of the way beauty moves us, the way that it brings immediate satisfaction, we cannot get enough of looking and listening.
A study done on the effects of beauty found that the benefits of beholding beauty include improvement of memory, lower stress levels, and increased social connection. For instance, most aesthetic perceptions of landscapes, natural scenes like sunrises, and sunsets tend to produce positive feelings of peacefulness, relaxation, and harmony. That is why society many times exalts beauty and longs for it more than God Himself. People today miss the mark in their pursuit of beauty - whether it is a beautiful person or an experience or the splendors found in nature, in music, or in the arts. But they miss the One who created it all - God, who is the very foundation and fountain of all being and all beauty.
Romans 1 confirms this - describing the reality of people who choose to worship the beauties or perfections of creation to fulfill their natural longings over worshiping the Creator who owns the world and everyone in it (Psalm 24:1). Pascal described how people try, though unsuccessfully, to fill the void inside of them with everything that surrounds them. We pursue things that are incapable of fulfilling the void in our hearts. He said:
This infinite abyss can only be filled with an infinite…object… that is God himself.
Richard Dawkins admits, “The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful it appears” and yet at the same time Dawkins denies that God had any part in it. However, this still begs the question: why do we even perceive anything as beautiful in the first place? Why does looking at a sunrise, a waterfall, an ocean, a beautiful smile, or at the face of a newborn baby give us such pleasure? Even if a beautiful trait could accidentally evolve in one creature, why do we even have an appreciation of that beauty? Even if natural selection could adequately explain why something beautiful tends to survive, it doesn’t explain why we would see that thing as beautiful in the first place. For example, a man and woman could be physically attracted to each other which leads to them falling in love, getting married, starting a family, and thus our species lives on. But what is the survival benefit of creating art or admiring a sunset?
Though “beauty may be in the eye of the beholder” and everyone differs somewhat on what constitutes “beauty,” everyone possesses the inbuilt faculty that causes them to conceptualize the characteristic of beauty.
William C. Davis (Christian philosopher) observed:
Values like these [artistic beauty] are what we would expect if humans (and the human environment) were created by a personal, loving, and beauty-valuing God.
People look for fulfillment in the beautiful, the pleasurable, desirable things, hoping that these things will satisfy a deeper longing of the heart. C.S. Lewis wrote:
We want something else which can hardly be put into words - to be united with the beauty we see. . . to receive it into ourselves. . . to become part of it.
Many recognize the existence of a restless, unfulfilled desire for something more in life. Augustine, who led a wild life before he came to know the Lord confessed:
My sin was this, that I looked for pleasure, beauty, and truth not in him but in myself and his other creatures, and the search led me instead to pain, confusion, and error.
Katharine Tait the daughter of the famous atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell said:
Somewhere at the back of my father's mind, at the bottom of his heart, in the depth of his soul, there was an empty space that had once been filled by God and he never found anything else to put in it.
Russell himself acknowledged:
In the centre of me is always an eternally and terrible pain, a curious, wild pain, a searching for something beyond what the world contains. Something transfigured and infinite.
In other words beauty, as fleeting as it may be, makes us long for something deeper, greater, something eternal that doesn’t fade, something that we can experience beyond our five senses. CS Lewis said: “The sweetest thing in all my life...has been the longing . . . to find the place where all the beauty came from.” I believe all of us are searching for something beyond what we see naturally speaking. How do we find it?
We were with a family recently who had a book with autostereograms. It is a 3 D picture within a 2 D picture. When you look at an autostereogram, your brain initially sees repeating 2D patterns with both eyes. When you are able to focus your eyes behind or beyond the 2D pattern your brain begins to construct the 3D image at a depth different to that of the 2D pattern. Once you find the image behind the picture, the picture never looks the same again. This is the same concept when we look at beauty- the key to enjoying beauty is when you see the face of God behind it all, when this happens your view of the world will be forever transformed. Which brings us to our last point:
2. The Source of Beauty
This solar system in which we live is one of 3,916 systems just within our Milky Way. There are billions, possibly trillions of galaxies in the universe - they are too numerous to count. Have you ever looked through a telescope and seen the splendor of the Milky Way? Yet if we only gaze at our galaxy, if that is all we see, even if we enjoy it and are astounded by its beauty and magnificence, we miss the deeper purpose for beauty. In Psalm 90:17 and in Exodus 33:18, Moses wanted to know God on a more personal level and expressed the desire to see the kabod – the glory or personal beauty of the Lord. After hiding Moses in a cleft of the rock, and covering him with His hand, the Lord let’s Moses behold only a bit of His goodness. Can we imagine what that must have been like? What made Moses want to see God’s beauty, God’s goodness? Have you experienced the goodness of God, the love of God, the forgiveness and mercy of God? The power of God? There is such beauty in that, because God’s beauty goes deeper than what we perceive with our eyes. How about when you express the beauty of God to others?
When God draws us to Himself and we respond to Christ’s gracious invitation to accept His way of salvation and redemption, He is the one who opens our eyes to behold His beauty and glory. Only then are we able to see the meaning of life, and the beauty of its pleasures, and the eternal significance of everything we do, including enjoying the ordinary things in life. Only then can we discover why everything matters.
God wants us to experience His personal beauty, the beauty of His salvation, the transformation of the old, sinful life into a new creation with a new identity as His own child with all the rights and privileges of His son or daughter. Not only that, He is continuously conforming us into the beautiful image of His perfect Son, Jesus Christ who laid down His life so that we could live. He allows us to behold His glory (personal beauty) through His Son Jesus.
For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’ (2 Cor. 4:6).
It is in our pursuit of God that we find the source of real beauty, we get to know the one behind it all. David desired to dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of His life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to inquire in his temple.” David wanted to look on God’s beauty, meaning he wanted to meditate on God’s goodness. What did He see? He wanted to meditate on God’s faithfulness, His Character, on the perfections of God. To think about the beauty of His perfect love and compassion. When we see Him, we see all other beauties, created and crafted, brightened and enlarged.
God created us to enjoy the objective beauty of His world with all its pleasures, but not to make a god out of it. There is beauty in spending time with your family and friends, enjoying a good meal, laughter, sailing, hiking in the mountains. There is beauty in worshiping the Lord together in His house. But even more so, there is beauty in getting to know God and His goodness, faithfulness and His sovereignty through His word and His Spirit. And even in our times of joy and sorrow, laughter and mourning, we recognize that He is the one who gives life meaning in every season. He is the one Eccl 3:11 who makes all things beautiful in its time. He is the source of beauty.
