Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon: On Beauty

Uh, to equip us for the battle this week. Sermon text is found in the Song of Songs, chapter 1, verses 15 through chapter 2:4. Song of Songs 1:15-2:4. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

Behold, you are beautiful, my love. Behold, you are beautiful. Your eyes are doves. Behold, you are beautiful, my beloved, truly delightful. Our couch is green. The beams of our house are cedar. Our rafters are pine. I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys.

As a lily among brambles, so is my love among the young women. As an apple tree among the trees of the forest, so is my beloved among the young men. With great delight, I sat in his shadow, and his fruit was sweet to my taste. He brought me to the banqueting house and his banner over me was love.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for calling us here to come here today to meet with you. And we thank you for your words declaring that we are beautiful. And we acknowledge and respond to that, Father, by asserting your beauty, your loveliness. Help us now to take your word, which is beauty, to open it up and to understand from it more about the beauty of the Lord, the beauty of holiness, and what we’re to do in response to that word. Bless us, Lord God, as we consider beauty today in your word. In Jesus name, amen.

Amen. Please be seated.

I guess you could say we live in a time of liquid beauty as well as liquid everything else where beauty and the definition of beauty changes tremendously. In the modern world, beauty was seen in relationship to some abstract principles and concepts, but there were these various standards. And in the postmodern world the standards have been called into question, and so beauty now is completely—so to speak—in the eye of the beholder. At least that’s the way our culture looks at it.

I want us today to look at what God’s word tells us about beauty. This is a daunting task from one perspective. That’s all the scriptures tell us about his beauty. As we said last week, God is a beautifier. The whole purpose of history is the creation and development of beauty. So it’s way too big a task, but we’ll attend to it in small little chunks and hopefully glean some truths for us as we seek to understand what the scriptures say about beauty.

And so the first thing it says is that—no—there beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. There are objective standards to what beauty is. And I think it says that because Psalm 27:4, among other scriptures that we’ll look at, says this: “One thing I ask of the Lord, this is what I seek, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord.”

So the scriptures here declare that God is beautiful, and the one thing we should desire is to gaze upon his beauty. Now, we can take this in—you know—a tabernacle of David’s sense, we can take it as going to the temple, we can take it as going to church—but there’s a sense in which these things are all microcosms of the entire created order, and the entire created order reflects the beauty of God. And so God himself—we can say I think very definitively—is beauty. Our standard for beauty is God.

Let me read a few other scriptures. Psalm 90:17: “Let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us.” So God has beauty and we pray that it would be upon us and establish the work of our hands upon us. Yes, establish the work of our hands. So our hands and the work of our hands is related to the beauty of the Lord being upon us.

Psalm 96:6: “Splendor and majesty are before him. Strength and beauty are in his sanctuary.” So God’s sanctuary demonstrates certain things about him—in the tabernacle, in the temple, and in the church as well. It’s reflecting his splendor, his majesty, his strength, and his beauty. So God is beauty. He is the source of all beauty.

Isaiah 33:17: “Your eyes will behold the king and his beauty. They will see a land that stretches afar.” And whether that’s a direct reference to the coming Messiah or to kings who bear the beauty of the Messiah, ultimately we see behind this verse the beauty of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Ezekiel 16:14: “And your renown went forth among the nations because of your beauty, for it was perfect through the splendor that I had bestowed on you, declares the Lord God.” So now he’s talking about a particular king, and the king has beauty because God has bestowed this beauty. He has given the king his beauty, so to speak, and so his beauty has been beheld in other nations.

And that—as I said—Psalm 27:4, that this is what the psalmist wants to do all the days of his life: to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord. So the Lord is beautiful. The Lord is the bright shining glory of all that he is.

John Calvin wrote extensively about beauty—not very well known these days—but to Calvin, beauty was nothing more than the shining forth of the majesty and glory of this God. So the shining forth of God. This was declared by Calvin to be the glory of God. So God is beautiful, and God is beautiful in relationship to his other attributes.

Isaiah 64:11 lists this about our holy and beautiful house where our fathers praised you. So the temple was seen as a beautiful house but a holy house. So beauty is set in the context of holiness.

Isaiah 63:15: “Look down from heaven and see from your holy and beautiful habitation.” Again, a link between beauty and God’s attribute of holiness.

Again in Isaiah 52:1: “Awake, awake. Put on your strength, O Zion. Put on your beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city.” So now it’s our beauty. We’re adorned in God’s beauty. And that beauty comes forth from the holy city. So this connection between beauty and other attributes of God—holiness in this case.

Exodus 28:2 is a central text for understanding beauty: “You shall make holy garments for Aaron your brother for glory and for beauty.” So the priestly garb were holy. They were glorious, and they were beautiful. So beauty is set in the context of glory and holiness. So the glory of God, the holiness of God shines forth in imagery with the high priest, and related to that is beauty. So beauty is this reflection, this shining forth of these various attributes of God.

Exodus 28:40: “Aaron’s sons—you shall make coats and sashes and caps. You shall make them for glory and for beauty.” Glory now being related directly to beauty.

Esther 1:4: “When he showed the riches of his royal glory and the splendor and pomp of the beauty of the greatness for many days—180 days.” This is referring to King Ahasuerus, and again they’re—his beauty—and kings reflect the beauty of God in relationship to his glory.

Specifically, Isaiah 4:2: that ultimately all these things are portrayals of the coming king, Jesus. “In that day,” God says, “the branch of the Lord—that is, Jesus—shall be beautiful and glorious, and the fruit of the land shall be the pride and honor of the survivors of Israel.” So Jesus will come. He is beauty, and he is glorious.

So to begin with, to think about beauty in the Bible: God is beautiful. We can make that statement very categorically, and ultimately it’s reflected in the person of Jesus Christ.

Hebrews 1:3 talks about Jesus, and there’s a beautiful chiastic structure in these first opening verses of Hebrews. And right at the very middle of a sevenfold chiasm—where the sun, moon, and stars would go in a relationship to the creation week—we have this statement about Jesus. Jesus is the sun. Rather, the sun is the radiance of God’s glory, the exact representation of his being. The radiance of God’s glory—the shining forth of the glory of God—and the exact representation of his being. Jesus is beautiful. And he’s beautiful because he shines forth with all the glory of God.

Now, you know, it immediately sort of reminds us of the other verse about Jesus, that he had no beauty that men should desire him. And so the Bible makes these statements and expects us to be able to put them together. And I think as we go through some of these texts on beauty in the scriptures, we’ll see how that works.

I read an article this last week on the application of beauty and aesthetics to music and worship music. And this man cited several other authors, and they said it pretty well. A man named Harding said this: “God’s beauty is inherently connected to his character, name, excellency, and majesty. The whole of God’s unchanging attributes forms the objective standard and truth deposit by which all things claiming to be beautiful can be evaluated.”

Okay, excellent statement. And I think that based on the smattering of verses we looked at as well as a great many others, we see the truth of that statement: that beauty has an objective standard in the person of God himself.

Harding went on to say that a God-centered view of beauty locates beauty within certain objective qualities that are real and not just imagined. Another writer said this: “Believers have the biblical responsibility to pursue what is objectively beautiful.”

Okay. If God is the standard—and he is—of beauty, and we’re to know God and to express God in the world, beauty is not some kind of optional subject for us as Christians. It’s central to who we are. If we’re to shine forth from this worship facility as we go into the world, we’re to shine forth in beauty the same way God shines forth in beauty. If we’re little Christians—little anointed ones—we should have some of that radiance, that beauty of Jesus, and have that reflected in who we are.

It’s not an option for us since God is beauty. He’s called us to be as image bearers in the world. Beauty is not something optional to us. And beauty, for us, unlike people that reject the Christian faith and the word of God, has an objective standard behind it. What is it? That’s hard to know. That’s difficult.

We’ve been having a discussion in Matt D.’s excellent Sunday school class on beauty, which he’s going to tell us the right answer to next week. But why is it that we don’t really talk much about beauty in Reformed circles? What’s the problem? Why don’t we do more about beauty? We talk a lot about justice and mercy, right? But we’ve said those are to be put in the context of beauty.

Well, you know, it’s interesting because justice is kind of—you know—written out. We have a lot of definition from God’s law about justice, and we have a lot of statements about who we’re to be merciful toward and how that mercy is to be exhibited. We don’t have a lot of stuff on beauty. Now, we probably have more than we realize, as you’ll understand by the end of today’s sermon, but it’s a hard task—but it’s a task we must take up. Okay? We must take up this task.

Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. There are objective standards to beauty. There is this standard, and this standard is the Lord God himself. And so it has an objectiveness to it based upon God’s character and how he has created the world.

Beauty is God’s beauty. It’s to be our—we have to engage in beauty as image bearers of God. Everybody does engage in beauty, right? I mean, nobody goes through life eschewing beauty. They grab onto some form of it. They may twist it. They may try to make their own beauty. But you know, as people, one of the things that distinguishes us from animals is we like to get dressed in an attractive way. They don’t get dressed.

We like to do things. We like to take the music of the spheres, so to speak, and produce music in our culture. We like to take the beauty of trees and architectural forms around us that are somewhat natural and create beautiful buildings that somehow reflect some of that. So, you know, we are beautifiers. God is a beautifier. That’s—from one perspective—that’s what creation is. God is bringing beauty into existence, and—well—not into existence, but in a visible manifestation.

And he’s made us to be his caretakers, his dominion stewards of the earth. And that means we’re supposed to beautify it because that’s what he’s doing. He took the created order and developed it and beautified it. We take that created order and we’re to beautify it. And we’re to beautify it according to the standards we find in his word and by his spirit. So there is a standard, and as I said, that means that the postmodern view—that beauty is, you know, if modernism said there were these extracted principles and things that define beauty but didn’t have reference to God, that’s idolatry and it’s foolishness—and so God brings along postmodernism to say, “Well, that’s ridiculous. We’ll all just decide what beauty is, and maybe there isn’t any beauty, and ugly is beautiful, and beautiful is ugly, and who knows what it’s all about.”

Well, that’s God’s judgment against an attempt to talk about beauty and to work in the context of beauty abstracted from the person of God.

Creation declares the glory of God. Creation declares the power of God. Creation declares the beauty of God, and thus creation renders mankind without excuse. We’re to take his beauty, recognize it as his beauty, and then we’re to implement that and beautify the world yet more.

Beauty is important to our apologetic. Romans 1 says that men rejected the Creator and instead clung to the creature. Men are attracted to things. They have a desire for beauty, and in unthankfulness they reject the source of beauty, and they end up beautifying other things. But men have a God-given propensity to be drawn toward beauty. Our job is to create beauty in the context of our world as part of the way that men are called away from their deception, their self-deception of ugliness and called to approach God. Beauty is an important part of our apologetic.

Matt’s talked about it. I don’t know—I get confused sometimes talking to the philosophy stuff—but I guess he’s talking about the rhetoric of the gospel being really important. I think that’s what Matt means by that.

Quoting from David Bentley Hart, there’s a beauty to what we do, how the gospel impacts our lives, how we’re presenting Christ in the world, and that is very much a part of our apologetic work in the context of the world. You know, we can either take beauty—the things that God has given us for beauty—ultimatize them and make them idolatrous by disconnecting them from the source of God, or we can say that the created order itself is kind of dangerous and have nothing, want nothing to do with beauty.

Okay. And God wants us to avoid both of those two steps. Modern man is idolatrous primarily in terms of beauty. And probably a lot of us, if we’re not thinking about what we do in terms of beauty in relationship to God and the standard of his word, you know, we tend toward idolatry as well. We don’t want to extract out our concern and desire to produce beauty from the word of God and from the character of God.

So God is beautiful. God tells us that we have an obligation as his image bearers to be beautiful, and we have to then proceed in the context of trying to figure out what that means. If our job is to be beautiful, how are we supposed to be related to that beauty?

There was a story on NPR yesterday about the time of the Reformation, the 1500s in France. They dug up the corpse of a mistress of one of the French kings. And you know, they did an analysis of her hair sample, her hair, and it turns out she died of gold poisoning. What was going on was at that time gold was beautiful. And so gold must have this beautiful result. It must give us—it must be the fountain of life. And so people would drink gold elixir to try to find youth and to stop aging. Well, and you do stop aging. You die. It’s the opposite of life to be incorrectly related to beauty. You know, it can be deadly. It can be absolutely deadly.

And so what we want to be careful of is not doing that. We want to make sure we can talk about beauty from a scriptural perspective. So it’s not optional—it’s what we are from one sense, and it’s what we’re to do in the context of our world. It can’t be dismissed. It’s something we have to attend to.

And yet it is this exceedingly difficult task because the Bible—you know—if God likes to hide things, it’s the glory of God to hide a thing, and it’s the glory of kings to search a matter out. Well, there’s a sense in which I think that beauty, the objective standards for beauty, and how to apply it in a culture are some of those hidden sorts of things. And in a way, that’s kind of cool. It’s cool that justice is fairly upfront. Mercy, yeah, we know how to do that. But beauty—it’s kind of beautiful that God somewhat hides how we do it and causes us to mature in our knowledge of it through a careful study of his word, through prayer, and a reliance upon the Holy Spirit.

So we have beauty. We don’t want to be—BB beauties, beautiful BB’s. We don’t want to be BB’s in isolation from everyone else, in isolation from God. Our beauty is related to our relationship to God, which has a corporate dimension to it as well.

Man, we talked about this in Sunday school class today. Matt was talking about Alexander Schmemann, and Schmemann says that man is homo adorans. Man is not first and foremost a maker. He’s not first and foremost a thinker. Man is first and foremost a worshipper. Or we might say that homo adorans means that man is first and foremost an adorer of beauty. What we adore sort of determines what we then produce. And for man, our first calling is to adore, to give thanks to God for the world in which he’s placed us, for the beauty of his character as it shines forth in his word and in the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ.

This is the essence of who we are as people. And so we can take homo adorans out of the strict liturgical approach of what happens on the Lord’s day and say really that’s who we are all week long. This is Schmemann’s point: our whole life is to be worship. Well, what does that mean? We relate it too much to formal worship. What it means is our whole life is to be this response, this adoration of the person of God and the reflection of that person that we see around us in the created order.

And that adoration will cause us then to be beautifiers of the world for him, to keep it going, to do the task that God has placed us on earth to do—to go about making beautiful things in the context of our life.

So from a few scriptures that describe that, that talk about God as beauty, and then secondly relate beauty to various other of God’s attributes, we begin to have a substantial good ground floor for whatever it is we do in the pursuit and development of beauty.

Philippians 4—while not using the word beauty specifically—implies this command: “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”

We are commanded to think about beauty. That’s one way to wrap up this long description of things, or at least certain elements of them. And I find that, you know, when I kind of step back from thinking and listen to music or observe beauty, it is inspiring to me and it helps me to do the rest of my tasks when I do that. I’m sure that many of you have the same reaction.

We’re to bring every thought captive, right, to the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s what the New Testament tells us. Everything we think about, everything is to be subjected to the Lord Jesus Christ. How—you know—from that alone we know that our thoughts of beauty must be subject to him. But how much more so when the one we’re subjecting those thoughts to is himself the bright shining—refulgent—old language—the radiance, the beauty of the glory of God shining forth?

And so one thing that we do when we read the gospels is to see the beauty and radiance of Jesus Christ. And as I said earlier, that isn’t seen in an external beauty in that case. So those things are important for us to consider.

Okay. One other point generally speaking before we get to some specific verses: you know, in the Bible, man was to bring the best ox, the best sheep—a beautiful thing. The Bible says Absalom was beautiful, the most beautiful man in the countryside. And he had no blemishes on him. I got lots of blemishes. Not too beautiful. He was beautiful. No blemishes. Well, that tells us something about beauty.

And so we can say that these blemish-free sacrificial animals were to be brought to God as what men offered to him in worship. Now, God is training men in beauty in that system because that means you’ve got to take a whole bunch of cows. I was at the fair yesterday. This is what they do. In fact, I saw they were judging something, a sheep or a goat or a cow or something, and my wife told the grandkids, “Yeah, they’re seeing if there’s any blemishes on it.” I think she told them that they’re judging it. That’s what they do.

God—everybody had to have a sacrificial animal to bring, and everybody had to look at that thing and see if it was beautiful or not. God trained people to think in terms of beauty, and he trained them to think in terms of blemishes as things that brought it not quite as beautiful. Now, there are many beautiful cows. All cows have a certain beauty to them. They’re the creation of God. God said his creation was good. Beauty involves a hierarchy of value. You have to be able to discern the most beautiful cow. David’s beautiful. Absalom is more beautiful. You see, so you have to—beauty has the context of a hierarchy of value.

It’s interesting that the word for aesthetics that we use comes from a Greek word that’s translated judgment. Aesthetics is the ability to discern what’s beautiful as opposed to what’s ugly, what’s good as opposed to what’s evil, or even better yet what’s beautiful compared to things that are a little less beautiful. That’s aesthetics.

And so God trains his people. One way to think about the sacrificial system is it was training in beauty. And he wanted his people to be able to think about beauty and to take every thought captive about beauty according to the way he described it that it should be.

Now, we take all that stuff together, and here’s another thing Calvin said about beauty. Calvin said that one main principle to be observed is that art must submit itself, in the artist, to the word and to the spirit. This is an absolute principle in Calvin’s aesthetics. Okay.

So if we take all this together: God’s beautiful. He creates beautiful things. He creates us as beautifiers. He trains us in how to discern things. The artist isn’t some sort of isolated guy who’s going to decide for himself what’s beautiful or not. The Christian artist must submit himself to the word of God, which would mean a study of what God says in the word about beauty, and to the spirit of God, who enables him to do particularly beautiful things. Okay.

Now, what I want to do next is just go through some verses about beauty. And so don’t turn to these verses. You won’t be able to keep up with me. But, you know, I know this is sort of obvious stuff, but hopefully I’ve got your attention: you have to do beauty. And in order to do beauty, you have to understand God’s truth about beauty. And if we’re going to think on the lovely, that means we got to figure out from the Bible what that lovely is.

It’s not natural to us. I mean, it was, but now since the fall, man is in rebellion to God. Man tends to suppress the truth of God in unrighteousness. Another way to say that is man suppresses the beauty of God in unrighteousness. Our sinful tendency, without the aid of the Spirit, will be to exalt in things that are beautiful that are in point of fact ugly. We want to suppress the truth of God, the beauty of God.

And so it’s not easy for us to break—to learn to throw off the old man with his approach toward beauty, which was ugliness—and to put on the new man. And the way we do that, as Calvin said, is to submit ourselves to the word and to the spirit. Okay.

Let’s go through some of these quickly.

Genesis 12:11: “When Abraham came close to entering Egypt, it came to pass that he said to Sarai his wife, ‘Indeed, I know that you are a woman of beautiful countenance.’” Here we got Abraham declaring his wife to be beautiful. And it’s not—you know—it’s beautiful countenance. Sight. In other words, what she looked like. Now, she probably didn’t look like much. Probably veils involved. I mean, I don’t know how much people could see of her, but she was beautiful, and Abraham understood this. And he understood that beauty would produce desire on the part of the person observing her beauty. And so he was frightened that their desire for her would make him kill him.

Genesis 29:17: “Leah’s eyes were delicate, but Rachel was beautiful of form and appearance.” So there’s a development of what the Bible tells us about beauty. It has to do with, you know, appearance, how she looks, her face looks, but it also has to do with her form. Yeah, that’s what the Bible says. And in fact, this is repeated quite a bit in the Bible. And this word form means kind of the outline, the shape of somebody. So it’s referring to her bodily form. And Rachel is beautiful.

Now it’s contrasted to Leah. So you know what does—Chris W. say? Rachel was hot, and Leah was not, or something. I don’t know. But what was wrong with Leah? We don’t know really. Delicate eyes. What does it mean? She was nearsighted? It seems like the best we have today in terms of Hebrew scholarship suggests that it meant her eyes were maybe kind of a dull—they didn’t have much sparkle there.

Which is interesting because we talked in the last two weeks about the stones of the temple, the foundation of the city being set in mascara-type materials, materials used for mascara. And it’s like your eyes, right? Your eyes are shiny and bright. And you know, women paint mascara around them—some men do. God puts a little bit of color around them for contrast and makes them more beautiful. Okay. And Leah’s eyes tended to be not shiny. I think they didn’t look like gemstones. There was no fire in there. I think that’s what it is.

But in any event, there’s this beauty of form in addition to appearance.

Genesis 39: before we go one side or the other, it tells us that Joseph was handsome in form and appearance. So Joseph’s form was handsome, and his appearance—he was good to look upon. So men are beautiful also. Although we usually use the word handsome, but the same word is used in the Bible about men and women. They’re both beautiful. They’re both handsome. It’s not sex-dependent, that particular word.

Genesis 41:2: here’s the one I like. I’m starting to get worried when I read about the form and the appearance and my own personal form and appearance. But this is a good verse for some of you that are worried.

Genesis 41:2: “There came up out of the Nile seven cows, attractive and beautiful, and plump.” Yeah. Not only that, but it also says they fed in the reed grass, and behold, seven other cows, ugly and thin, came up and ate them. Ugly. There actually is a word raw, which just means generally evil or bad. It doesn’t really have to do with their appearance. It probably has to do with the fact that they were going to eat other cows. They were zombie cows or something. Cannibal cows. But you know, fat may be—but or thin may be in, but that fat is where it’s at. The Bible says some plumpness—some plumpness is described as beautiful. Okay.

So going on, 1 Samuel 16:12: David is described as a youth, ruddy and handsome in appearance. So physical beauty is described here. But the description is interesting because it’s talking about a Philistine looking at him, seeing his handsomeness of appearance and hating him, disdaining him. He disdains David. Beauty, true beauty, breeds envy and contempt. You know, if you can’t be beautiful like the other person, the physical beauty is all you’re ever thinking about, and you can’t stand that person. You could, you know—like you could, you know—rip their face up or something.

You know, people see beautiful cars that they’ll never be able to own and they key them. Well, that’s what’s going on here. So beauty produces envy. So you have to be careful about being real beautiful. It can put you in danger.

Now, 1 Samuel 25:3 talks about Abigail and Nabal. And it says the woman was discerning and beautiful. So Abigail is beautiful, and in relationship to that, she’s discerning as well.

“Absalom had a beautiful sister whose name was Tamar. And after a time, Amnon, David’s son, loved her.” Well, Amnon had a desire for her beauty, but he didn’t really love her. He forced her into a sexual relationship. So that’s what his love was like. It wasn’t. So there are bad responses to physical beauty, which we all know about, of course, but the Bible talks about that.

We talked about Absalom. He was handsome in appearance. He had no blemishes. So there’s a sense in which blemishes are described by God’s word. Now, these—many of these statements here—are not commentators. This—it’s not telling us what people thought about people. Sometimes it is, but these are declarations from the word of God that these people were beautiful in form and appearance. So that’s kind of significant.

I think Esther was also beautiful. In Esther chapter 2, verse 7: “He was bringing up Hadassah, that is Esther, the daughter of his uncle, for she had neither father nor mother. The young woman had a beautiful figure and was lovely, good to look at. And when her father and her mother died, Mordecai took her as his own daughter.”

Now, let me just point out this tiny little chiasm, right? So it says that she’s being raised by her uncle—the daughter of the uncle—didn’t have mom or dad. She’s beautiful in figure and appearance. She didn’t have mom or dad. She was being raised by Mordecai. Uncle, mom and dad, beautiful. Mom and dad, uncle. It’s a little—you know—God changes the order of the last two—uncles and parents—to give us this kind of focus on the center. And what we want to see at the center then is the beauty of who Esther was. So godly woman, beautiful woman as well.

Job’s daughters: “There were never anybody as beautiful as Job’s daughters” (Job 42:15). Let me make a comment there, you know. So Job had some kids. They all died. And then at the end of the whole trial, Job gets back more kids. And his daughters—they are beautiful daughters. Now, you know, when God takes away things from us that are beautiful, desirable, I think what this can tell us by way of analogy or example is he’s preparing to give us something more beautiful. There were no daughters as beautiful as Job’s daughters at the end of this story. They were beautiful. So it’s a picture to us, right? It’s really hard to lose things of beauty. But God will bring them back. It seems like if we’re—if we trust God like Job did—God brings them back more beautiful.

Psalm 48:2 says that God’s temple is beautiful in elevation. So where God had placed his temple on this mountain, it was beautiful in elevation. I think probably because it pictures the beauty of heaven and the beauty of earth joining together in some way. And so our beauty when we do works of beauty, it has these heavenly things involved in it—perceptions perhaps, conceptions as well as others.

So on the other hand, this physical beauty is, of course, not a good thing all the time. “Like a gold ring at a pig’s snout is a beautiful woman without discretion.” So there’s this exterior beauty, but it’s really not worth much if she doesn’t have discretion. Abigail was beautiful, and she had discretion. So you know, some scriptures—brief scriptures—tell us that there are these things that are beautiful.

Here’s something that’s beautiful in the Bible. “Behold, what I have seen to be good and fitting.” And that word fitting could be translated beautiful. It’s the same word as other places translated beautiful. “Beautiful is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil which one toils with under the sun.” So mundane tasks—eating and drinking—are to be a time of beauty. This is a fitting and beautiful thing: that men come together at the end of the day and eat. And of course we always adorn our eating with some form of beauty. That’s just what we do. And here’s—there’s a relationship to beauty and to our eating and enjoying the fruit of our labor.

You know, there’s lots and lots of scriptures about beauty in the Old Testament. In the Song of Songs, repeatedly, of course, there’s a lot of statements about beauty going back and forth. And after he declares her beauty, he says this: “Your teeth are like a flock of shorn youths that have come up from the washing, all of which bear twins, and not one among them has lost its young.”

I don’t know exactly what that means, but it could mean something as simple as your teeth are all there. You know, there’s another tooth missing here. They seem to be all paired up very nicely and matched up front and bottom. They all have their twins. So we have this description of beauty involving symmetry and balance, unity, completion. This is beautiful. Okay, this is beautiful.

We can look at these texts, or we can look at half of the book of Exodus that describes the beauty of the construction of the tabernacle and then temple. We can begin to discern principles of beauty in terms of architecture, in terms of drawings, sculptures—all of these things are described, the use of colors, et cetera. So the Bible actually says a lot about beauty—far more than we can touch on today. But I wanted to bring you some of these things, aspects of beauty.

I do want to talk briefly about three aspects of the temple before we go into the New Testament. The temple, of course, is a place of beauty. And one of the things that we’re told about the temple: I’m going to talk about the robes that were to be made.

Exodus 28:2: “You shall make holy garments for Aaron, your brother, for glory and for beauty.” Okay, so here God sets up a worship temple, and he’s got these priests. And the priests have a uniform, right? But this uniform doesn’t just mark off their functionality. I mean, it—you could put a sign up “priest” or a plain uniform that was different from the baker or the policeman or the butcher, whatever it is. But the garments that God had made for those that worked in the context of the temple had beauty to them.

I think we can discern from that—if we look at the places of beauty that are described for us in the scriptures—we can begin to draw out these truths or principles by which we go about doing our beautiful work. And I think one of the truths or principles is that it is wrong to approach things in a strictly utilitarian fashion. They didn’t have to have beautiful garments to do the work in the house of the Lord, but God wanted them to go about their work and to go about their work with garments of beauty upon them.

You know, people get upset. “Well, all this money put into beautiful things.” So God says, you know, don’t worry about it. I’m going to make you more able to care for the poor in the world if you use your money in part to create beauty in the context of your life. Okay? I mean, why do these guys get all these expensive garments? Why does Solomon’s temple built when there are poor people?

Well, God says we’re not to be humanistic. Number one, we’re to focus upon the beauty of God, the expression of that beauty. And that beauty will then incite us to be beautiful when we go out and interact with the poor. We’ll bring them into our homes. We’ll give them beautiful food. We’ll have a relationship. We’ll do good and beautiful works toward them.

So utility is to be seen as not ultimately to be set aside from beauty.

Second, again, beauty is a requirement. God is bringing people close to him to see what their lives should be like. And what he’s telling them is, look at your priest and understand that your garments are going to be different, but they should be beautiful. This is a picture of me. I’m clothed in beauty of the creation. Your priest is clothed in beauty. And as we saw from Isaiah, you’re those beautiful stones. You’re the carbuncle. You’re the lapis lazuli. That’s people. So God says, you’re supposed to be beautifully attired as well. And maybe you can’t afford a diamond ring. Maybe you can. There’s nothing wrong with it if you do.

So beauty—according to the garments of Aaron and the priests—reminds us that there is more to life than utility. And it reminds us again that beauty is not optional. Okay.

It’s interesting: pomegranates are part of the construction of the two big towers in front of the temple. Pomegranates are up there on it. Pomegranates are not a necessary thing for the diet, but they’re a beautiful addition, and they have beauty to them, right? They’re beautiful. They produce liquid. They produce drink. They produce food as well. And they’re beautiful to look at. The pomegranate tree is one of the most beautiful of trees. God wants our lives adorned with beauty, not simply with utility. God expects us to do those things.

Now, one of the specific garments of glory that the priests had was a girdle. So a girdle. They had lots of different clothes. They had a thing underneath, and then a girdle around about that, and then a robe over that, and various other things that were created for them. And this girdle was one of the specific things that was given to them as well.

And in Exodus 28:39, we read: “You shall weave the coat of checker work of the linen, and you shall make a turban of the fine linen, and you shall make a sash, a girdle embroidered with needle work.”

Now, the girdle was unseen. The girdle’s purpose was utilitarian. It was to keep the under robe, you know, from being too loose—you know, you tighten up your belt, and you’re doing work and stuff. The girdle was like that. It kept him from being encumbered by the long tunic that he’s wearing. So there’s a utility to the girdle. He could gird up his loins, right, and do work. These guys were consecrated for work. And to be consecrated means to fill the hand for a work. So to fill the hand for their work, they had a utilitarian girdle that was given to them. And it was hidden. You couldn’t see it. But even there, God commanded that they make it out of fine needle work. It was to be a thing of beauty. Even in that aspect, every piece of the clothing was beautiful in some way.

And that girdle was completely unseen. It was utilitarian. And yet it had to be beautiful.

Now, I think by this we see that there is a relationship between beauty and utility, and even if something is just going to be utilitarian, we should think of the beauty of it as well. It also should remind us that beauty is not just what we display to others. We do beautiful things that only we know about. We may create beautiful works of art that we only know about for whatever reason. That’s okay. And whatever we do in public and whatever we do in private, even though it’s just utilitarian, we think—no—there should be an aspect of beauty to it.

The girdle then—in his sons—reminds us of the need to see a relationship between beauty and utility, and beauty and not just the outer beauty but the inner beauty that’s going on as well. And of course, this becomes greatly accentuated in the context of the coming of Christ and the secret beauty that we can say that Isaiah says that he had, that then became manifest in what he did.

Now, another final thing in the Old Testament that I want to mention is Exodus 31, to make these beautiful things for temple worship. To make them—what we have is spirit-filled men.

“The Lord said to Moses, ‘See, I have called by name Bezalel the son of Uri, son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah. I have filled him with the spirit of God, with ability and wisdom, with knowledge and craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for settings, and in carving wood, to work in every craft, to make all that I’ve commanded you.’”

So to make beautiful garments and beautiful things for the temple, God brings out men. And these men have been empowered by the Spirit to do that work. So beauty is the result of the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Again, as Christians, to do things beautifully means to do them in reliance upon the equipping of the Holy Spirit.

Here we’re told: how do you get the most beautiful things? The spirit of God empowers you to do things beautifully. So again, art is submissive to the authority of God, his word, and his spirit. And in fact, dependent upon those things.

Okay. Secondly, the spirit accomplishes this work of beauty through craftsmanship—through knowing how to draw a really good circle, through knowing how to cut particular things, knowing how to sculpt different kinds of clay into different ways. Technology is involved, and the technological work of creating beauty is empowered by the Holy Spirit.

Now, you know, this is a different approach. We tend to think of beauty as—yeah—spirit inspires me, and I just think of something, and it’s kind of out there, and I just do it, and it’s kind of free floating. But here God tells us, at least in this situation, the way beauty happened was men submitted themselves to God’s plan. They were going to carry out what he did. The plan was subject to his word. The plan was subject and dependent upon the Holy Spirit to complete. And the plan was not the result of his ecstatic movements and flailing around and being controlled in a way that doesn’t allow you to work.

No, the empowerment of the Holy Spirit lets you do fine needle work. See, fine needle work—little things—doing things well as craftsmen—is the result of the Holy Spirit. Now, that’s a different view of the spirit-filled life as it relates to beauty than is common in our day and age. You know, people just want to let the spirit flow somehow, and it ends up being kind of—you know—more existential, I suppose—as opposed to this description of the empowerment of the Holy Spirit here in this text.

So you see, there’s many places in scripture that talk about beauty, and specifically it talks about beauty in the context of the tabernacle. And we can begin to ferret it out—to look at principles of beauty in relationship to these things.

Now, we get around to the New Testament, and there are very few references to beauty in the New Testament. Very few. And in fact, the only significant references to beauty in the New Testament are actually translations of a word which also is translated good. Kalos is the word. Kallos. Good. For instance, in the gospels, there’s good fruit, there’s good soil, there’s good seed. “The good seed are the sons of the kingdom.” That word good could also be translated beautiful, and in some places is.

For instance, in Matthew 26:10, this is what Jesus says of the woman who anointed him for his burial with precious oil or perfume. “Jesus, aware of this, said to them, ‘Why do you trouble the woman? For she has done a beautiful thing to me.’”

He wants more. You know, humanistically, we want money being used for people. See, that can be humanistic. And Jesus says, “No, that costly stuff she did for me was a beautiful thing for her to do.”

Same word is good. So when we read the word good generally in the New Testament, very often it’s this same word that here is translated beautiful. The woman did a good thing. Well, yeah, it was more than a good thing. It’s a beautiful thing in the imagery of it, has captured the attention and imagination of Christians for two millennia now. So this is beautiful stuff. And so it’s a beautiful thing.

In 1 Timothy, there’s a lot of uses of the word beautiful—the same Greek word translated good. “If you desire the office of an elder, it’s a beautiful work.” It’s another way you could translate it. And he talks about good works over and over again in the context of the scriptures. And this could be translated as beautiful works as well.

There’s a couple of other scriptures where it’s obvious that this beautiful translation is correct. In Luke 6:48, we read: “He’s like a man building a house who dug deep, laid the foundation on the rock. When a flood arose, the stream broke against the house and could not shake it because it had been well-built.”

Beautifully built is what that could be translated as well. Doesn’t just mean that it’s sound. The scriptures aren’t just utilitarian. It’s been beautifully built, and as a result of that, it is sound.

Luke 21:5: “While some were speaking of the temple, how it was adorned with noble stones”—the translation says good stones, but we would say, what do we know about those stones? They were beautiful stones. The temple was adorned with these beautiful stones.

So, but what we find this word being used for primarily in the scriptures—as I said—is the stuff that we’re supposed to be doing. The law is described as good. We could say the law is beautiful. The word of God is beautiful. Paul says that there’s a law that exists that I want to do—the right. I struggle with it. The right is this same word beautiful. And so in the Bible, the primary references to goodness and beauty are now seen in the context of ethical actions, living our lives in community with others, engaging in what has become known as the good works of the saints.

Now, Jesus was beautiful in everything that he did, in every depiction given in the gospels—not with the exterior beauty that we search for and desire and manifest. It’s not that exterior beauty is bad, but God is pointing us to the greater beauty. We could say the beauty of our actions. Almost nobody here is going to be as beautiful as Absalom, without a blemish. But everybody here can this week strive very diligently to do beautiful works for other people. Works without blemish. Works without grumbling. Works for which we give thanks to God. Beautiful works. That’s what the New Testament emphasis seems to be—these acts of relationship, one to the other, that God calls us to do.

Let’s close by going back to the very opening scripture. Song of Songs, chapter 1, verse 15.

“Behold, you are beautiful, my love. Behold, you are beautiful. Your eyes are doves.”

Now, Song of Songs—God tells us that the Song of Songs, by pointing very clearly in the New Testament to analogies to the Song of Songs and the relationship between our Savior and his bride, the church—that’s one of the big things going on. Yes, there’s descriptions of physical beauty. Yes, this might have been about the actual marriage of Solomon, but ultimately this points, of course, to the relationship of Jesus Christ and his bride.

He has called you to come away. He has called you to this place. And this is the word he speaks to you. Now, “You are beautiful, my love.”

The last point I want to make about beauty is that God says that you—the redeemed servants, as members of the bride of Christ—you again are the beautiful people that God is populating the world with. We can feel very unadorned in the world today. Lots of acknowledgments of our own blemishes—not just our physical ones, but our ethical blemishes as well. We know that our thoughts may not have been beautiful this past week. We know that we have been doing bad things.

But Jesus comes to us today, and in all this discussion of beauty, he wants you to know that he declares to you, “You, my love, are beautiful.” God declares. He speaks into existence our beauty. When we receive the assuring word of God, an acknowledgement of our beauty and his declaration of it, it then allows us to be beautiful.

Our fears create ugliness. You ever seen a marriage where the husband isn’t going out of his way to instruct his wife—his wife, rather—in her beauty? Not just in his love for her, but in her beauty. Pastor Bledsoe talked about this at camp. If that’s not going on, the wife responds with anxiety, fearfulness, abandonment. She’s got the genetic memory, we could say, of Eve, abandoned by her husband to the serpent.

Husbands must tell their wives they are beautiful. Now, if a husband doesn’t do that regularly, you know—you know—that God has been graciously working otherwise. But generally speaking, the wife has a very hard time acting beautifully because you’re not declaring that to be true. She doubts whether you have love for her and whether you see her as beauty.

But when God declares us to be beautiful, then the verse goes on. He says, “You are beautiful, my love. You are beautiful. Your eyes are doves.” And she says in response, “Behold, you are beautiful, my beloved. Truly delightful.” And then she goes on to describe their couch being green and their settings being wonderful.

When we—when our—when we hear the word of God that he says that his beauty—he is the standard of beauty. He knows what beauty is. It’s the shining forth of his characteristics. And he then declares to us, “That’s who you are now. I have set my love upon you from eternity. You are beautiful.” And this frees us then to say to him, in response, “You are beautiful.”

We’re going to do whatever we do this week in our interactions with other people, our good works, our good deeds, the art that we put our hand to—do our poetry, our sculpting, our creating of beautiful tables in our homes, food and blessing. Whatever we do is going to be a result of us acknowledging the beauty of God himself, who has declared us to be beautiful.

Says, objectively, you now have been declared beautiful by him. Our response to that is to believe it, to put off anxiety, and to then put off the blemishes in our lives that will shout at us, “No, you’re not. No, you’re not.”

May the Lord God grant us this week to walk in the confidence that we are beautiful in the sight of God.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for your scriptures. We…