God Is Beautiful
For many years (a phrase which seems to introduce almost everything I say or write these days), I have thought about and preached on the subject of the beauty of God. I have never heard anyone teach on the subject, but I did through the decades come across two written sermons on the topic, “The Beauty of the Lord” by J. D. Jones and “Are There Shortcuts to the Beauty of Holiness?” (the short answer is “No!”) by A. W. Tozer. More recently, I read a review of a scholarly article about the American preacher Jonathan Edwards (of “sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” fame) that mentioned in passing that the beauty of God was one of the great themes in his preaching. I was thus encouraged that I have not headed off on an unprofitable tangent. In simple terms, beauty is that which attracts, causes a favorable interest, and creates an affinity. Such real, eternal beauty is found in our God. (I will be using this opening paragraph for each of the brief messages in this series. The following material will change daily.)
If we will not have the beauty of the Lord in our lives, then we will instead have the ugliness of the world. Ezekiel 16:8-15 is a poignant, bittersweet description of God’s love for His people Israel. Verse 12 speaks of the “beautiful crown” that God had placed upon them. However, verse 15 tells us that the people trusted in their “own beauty” and degenerated into repulsive idolatry. The result is found in verse 25: their so-called “beauty” had become “abhorred.” There are physical examples of this spiritual decline. For example, much of modern literature is tritely trashy; most contemporary music is, like swamp water, shallow and insipid; post-modernist art would be an embarrassment to a kindergartner with a box of crayons; and poetry has all but vanished. When we decide that God is unimportant or does not exist, we are rejecting everything about Him, including His beauty. It is then no surprise that the thorns destroy the rose. Of course, the spiritual implications are deadly – eternally deadly. The only solution for the ugliness of our sins is the substitutionary atonement of Jesus, God the Son. Only His infinite beauty can overcome the hideous horror of our high-handed wrong-headedness.