The Beauty of God
“One thing have I asked of the LORD,
that will I seek after:
that I may dwell in the house of the LORD
all the days of my life,
to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD
and to inquire in His temple.”
—Psalm 27:4
Beauty. We are a culture obsessed with it. From magazines of airbrushed and Photoshopped models to plastic surgeons inundated with requests for nose jobs, tummy tucks, and the like, we long for beauty. As men seek to be strong (Proverbs 20:29), so women seek to be beautiful, spending billions of dollars each year to conform to some sort of mythical standard of beauty. The desire to be beautiful is something that God has placed in women. As Tony Evans said, “Man was made from dirt, but woman was fashioned from man.” Men don’t generally desire to be beautiful, but women do. And it is not only men who notice a beautiful woman; women notice just as much, if not more. There is a reason why advertising agencies have beautiful women sell their products. Women can be acutely aware of other women and how beautiful another woman is. As it has been said whenever a beautiful woman walks into a room full of people, “Men stop and stare and all of the women compare.”
What we must understand, however, is that while beauty is something that we all have an innate desire to behold, appreciate, admire, and possess—it, like anything in our world, can become an idol. All of our desires have been marred by the Fall, even our desire for beauty. Some women will do everything in their power to be beautiful, sacrificing their integrity, purity, and souls to achieve it. And while beauty is a gift given by God, and something that we long for, we must be careful in our desire for and understanding of beauty.
Beauty is a gift given by God, and God in His wisdom has made “everything beautiful in its time”—Ecclesiastes 3:11. And while we do long for beauty, we must make sure that we are cultivating the right kind of beauty. Beauty, as women know all too well, fades. That’s why the book of Proverbs says, “Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised”—Proverbs 31:30. While women have a desire to be beautiful outwardly (which is good and part of creation), the most important desire should be to be beautiful inwardly. As the apostle Peter wrote, “Do not let your adorning be external—the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold jewelry, or the clothing you wear—but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God’s sight is very precious”—1 Peter 3:3-4.
Some have taken this to mean that women should not be concerned with being beautiful, but that is to miss the point and to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. It’s not that a woman should not seek to be beautiful, but rather to realize that there is a beauty that doesn’t fade, the “imperishable beauty” of the inner person that women are to most aspire to. We are to make sure we are beautiful inwardly before we are beautiful outwardly, all the while making sure that our outer beauty is a gift meant to point people to the beauty of God. This may seem like a giant leap for some, but when we pause to ponder the concept of beauty, we find that while some conceptions of beauty are culturally conditioned, there is still, however, an intrinsic desire within us to know and to have beauty. And if we desire what is beautiful, then we must have a standard that in some way defines what beauty is and isn’t. For one who has grown up around farmland all of his life, the fields at harvest time are absolutely beautiful, but for the person who has grown up in an urban environment it looks like nothing more than dead plants. They both have conceptions of beauty, but their standards to measure what is beautiful differ. Or, as it has been said, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
There is a conception of beauty that the world possesses that is antithetical to the understanding of the beauty of God. The world has a certain template that it goes back to which defines what makes a woman beautiful, thus trying to create its own template independent of God. Remember, the desire to see beauty and be beautiful are intrinsic to creation, but the Fall marred that image and distorted the conception of what it means to be beautiful. Imagine trying to build a car. The only template you have is another car that has been through a horrendous wreck. Now, if we were to look to that car to create another one, the car we made would be marred. The only way to create a truly functional car would be to try and go back to the original blueprints in an effort to understand what it was like before the accident. Looking at the car beat up and dented would make no sense, but that is exactly what we do. We take the broken template that has been through the sin accident rather than the blueprints of beauty given by God.
If we are to recover the template of beauty that existed before the Fall, we must begin with God Himself. He is the most beautiful Being. That’s what David wrote about in our passage for today. He wanted to behold the beauty of God. But what exactly is the beauty of God? It is the summation of His attributes seen in moral perfection, wholly amazing, and desirable to behold and know, satisfying the true longing to see, know, and possess beauty. He is the definition of beauty; because beauty is created, our capacity to see and admire beauty can only come from Him. We cannot know what beauty is until we know what the perfect standard of beauty is, just like we can’t understand what is false until we understand what is true.
God is the most beautiful Being, and since He is also the Creator of beauty, so then, He must be the standard by which all beauty is understood and measured. The beauty of God is found in the summation of who He is, so the beauty that we are to possess inwardly is the culmination and summation of who we are in Christ. Christ has made us beautiful by His Spirit, and it is through submission to His Spirit that we are conformed to His image and made like Him. It is as Paul wrote, “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit”—2 Corinthians 3:18.
It is by the Spirit of God that we are made like God, with our character being honed and transformed, as we continually seek to be like Christ. May we seek to behold the beauty of the Lord like David did, knowing that as we do so, we are transformed and made truly beautiful. Amen.
that will I seek after:
that I may dwell in the house of the LORD
all the days of my life,
to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD
and to inquire in His temple.”
—Psalm 27:4
Beauty. We are a culture obsessed with it. From magazines of airbrushed and Photoshopped models to plastic surgeons inundated with requests for nose jobs, tummy tucks, and the like, we long for beauty. As men seek to be strong (Proverbs 20:29), so women seek to be beautiful, spending billions of dollars each year to conform to some sort of mythical standard of beauty. The desire to be beautiful is something that God has placed in women. As Tony Evans said, “Man was made from dirt, but woman was fashioned from man.” Men don’t generally desire to be beautiful, but women do. And it is not only men who notice a beautiful woman; women notice just as much, if not more. There is a reason why advertising agencies have beautiful women sell their products. Women can be acutely aware of other women and how beautiful another woman is. As it has been said whenever a beautiful woman walks into a room full of people, “Men stop and stare and all of the women compare.”
What we must understand, however, is that while beauty is something that we all have an innate desire to behold, appreciate, admire, and possess—it, like anything in our world, can become an idol. All of our desires have been marred by the Fall, even our desire for beauty. Some women will do everything in their power to be beautiful, sacrificing their integrity, purity, and souls to achieve it. And while beauty is a gift given by God, and something that we long for, we must be careful in our desire for and understanding of beauty.
Beauty is a gift given by God, and God in His wisdom has made “everything beautiful in its time”—Ecclesiastes 3:11. And while we do long for beauty, we must make sure that we are cultivating the right kind of beauty. Beauty, as women know all too well, fades. That’s why the book of Proverbs says, “Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised”—Proverbs 31:30. While women have a desire to be beautiful outwardly (which is good and part of creation), the most important desire should be to be beautiful inwardly. As the apostle Peter wrote, “Do not let your adorning be external—the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold jewelry, or the clothing you wear—but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God’s sight is very precious”—1 Peter 3:3-4.
Some have taken this to mean that women should not be concerned with being beautiful, but that is to miss the point and to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. It’s not that a woman should not seek to be beautiful, but rather to realize that there is a beauty that doesn’t fade, the “imperishable beauty” of the inner person that women are to most aspire to. We are to make sure we are beautiful inwardly before we are beautiful outwardly, all the while making sure that our outer beauty is a gift meant to point people to the beauty of God. This may seem like a giant leap for some, but when we pause to ponder the concept of beauty, we find that while some conceptions of beauty are culturally conditioned, there is still, however, an intrinsic desire within us to know and to have beauty. And if we desire what is beautiful, then we must have a standard that in some way defines what beauty is and isn’t. For one who has grown up around farmland all of his life, the fields at harvest time are absolutely beautiful, but for the person who has grown up in an urban environment it looks like nothing more than dead plants. They both have conceptions of beauty, but their standards to measure what is beautiful differ. Or, as it has been said, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
There is a conception of beauty that the world possesses that is antithetical to the understanding of the beauty of God. The world has a certain template that it goes back to which defines what makes a woman beautiful, thus trying to create its own template independent of God. Remember, the desire to see beauty and be beautiful are intrinsic to creation, but the Fall marred that image and distorted the conception of what it means to be beautiful. Imagine trying to build a car. The only template you have is another car that has been through a horrendous wreck. Now, if we were to look to that car to create another one, the car we made would be marred. The only way to create a truly functional car would be to try and go back to the original blueprints in an effort to understand what it was like before the accident. Looking at the car beat up and dented would make no sense, but that is exactly what we do. We take the broken template that has been through the sin accident rather than the blueprints of beauty given by God.
If we are to recover the template of beauty that existed before the Fall, we must begin with God Himself. He is the most beautiful Being. That’s what David wrote about in our passage for today. He wanted to behold the beauty of God. But what exactly is the beauty of God? It is the summation of His attributes seen in moral perfection, wholly amazing, and desirable to behold and know, satisfying the true longing to see, know, and possess beauty. He is the definition of beauty; because beauty is created, our capacity to see and admire beauty can only come from Him. We cannot know what beauty is until we know what the perfect standard of beauty is, just like we can’t understand what is false until we understand what is true.
God is the most beautiful Being, and since He is also the Creator of beauty, so then, He must be the standard by which all beauty is understood and measured. The beauty of God is found in the summation of who He is, so the beauty that we are to possess inwardly is the culmination and summation of who we are in Christ. Christ has made us beautiful by His Spirit, and it is through submission to His Spirit that we are conformed to His image and made like Him. It is as Paul wrote, “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit”—2 Corinthians 3:18.
It is by the Spirit of God that we are made like God, with our character being honed and transformed, as we continually seek to be like Christ. May we seek to behold the beauty of the Lord like David did, knowing that as we do so, we are transformed and made truly beautiful. Amen.
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