Photo: Loch Coruisk – k b – Unsplash

Most of us have a complicated relationship with beauty. We love beauty; we love things that are beautiful. We are grateful for them – sometimes we stop to thank God for them.

And yet – if we’re honest we can also misuse beauty. We can find ourselves admiring a beautiful thing too much – wanting it, wanting to possess it for ourselves. We lust after or covet things or people that are not ours. We worship and idolise beautiful things. But as we do, we also find that they don’t satisfy us. They promise much, but they don’t deliver. To use an image of the prophet Jeremiah, we try to draw living water from them; but we find that they are broken cisterns (containers) that cannot hold water (Jeremiah 2:13).

How are we to think about our complicated relationship with beauty? And how can we begin to relate appropriately to the things we find beautiful?

This is the third of a series of posts considering ‘Beauty.’ In the first post I suggested that we all love and long for beauty. As the author CS Lewis put it,

We do not want merely to see beauty… We want something else, to be united to the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.

CS Lewis, Weight of Glory

We saw that all beauty comes from and points to God. Think of a sunbeam, shining through the branches of a tree on a spring morning. The sunbeam is beautiful and we’re drawn to it; but it also draws us along itself to the source – the sun. And in the same way the things we find beautiful point us to the source – God. God is the supremely beautiful one. In the second post we asked the question ‘What is beauty?’ and began to consider the contours of what it is that makes something beautiful. And briefly at the end we saw that there is a

Cycle of beauty that begins with the Lord, extends to creation, takes personal bodily form in Christ, is displayed corporately by the Church, culminates in heaven.

Strachan and Sweeney, Jonathan Edwards on Beauty

In this post we begin to consider this cycle, starting with God’s creation.

God made a beautiful creation: It’s right to worship, praise and thank him

The beautiful creation

It’s not hard to see that the universe God made is beautiful and wonderful. I recently watched the Planet Earth II series. And like many others I was overwhelmed by the beauty, the complexity, the magnificence of the world we live in. Of course like most TV documentaries in Planet Earth II it’s not presented as material for worship of anything other than ‘Mother Nature’, but as I watched I found myself worshipping and praising the Creator.

And we see this response in Psalm 104:

Praise the Lord, my soul. Lord my God, you are very great; you are clothed with splendor and majesty.

Psalm 104:1

I will sing to the Lord all my life; I will sing praise to my God as long as I live.

Psalm 104:33

In Psalm 104 the writer goes through different aspects of the creation – in many ways the Psalm is a meditation on the six days of creation in Genesis 1:

  • v2a – Light (Day 1)
  • v2b-4 – Firmament dividing the waters (Day 2)
  • v5-13 – Land and water distinct (Day 3)
  • v14-17 – Vegetation and trees (Day 3)
  • v19-23 – Sun and moon as timekeepers (Day 4)
  • v25-26 – Creatures of sea and air (Day 5)
  • v21-24 – Animals and man (Day 6)
  • v27-28 – Food appointed for all creatures (Day 6)
Derek Kidner, Tyndale OT Commentary, Psalms

Again and again we are pointed to the beauty of creation, and God’s authorship of it:

The Lord wraps himself in light as with a garment; he stretches out the heavens like a tent… He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.

Psalm 103:2, 5

He makes springs pour water into the ravines; it flows between the mountains. They give water to all the beasts of the field; the wild donkeys quench their thirst

Psalm 103:10-11

And verse 23 reminds us that we humans are also created, made in God’s image. And that means we are especially beautiful (see Genesis 1:26-28).

Showing God’s eternal power and divine nature

What more can we say about how God’s beautiful creation show us God’s beauty? The apostle Paul writes:

Since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

Romans 1:20

We should be able to see God’s eternal power and his divine nature from the world around us. Jonathan Edwards considers a variety of parts of God’s creation that point us to God. Chapter 2 of Sweeney and Strachan’s book would be a good place to start.

Here are just a few examples that have affected me recently: I referred in the first post to the thunderstorm and how it reveals God’s power. Or consider the stars in the night sky that reveal his power, wisdom and infinity. (And note that in recent years many astrophysicists have come to Christian faith as they have admired the universe in more and more detail.)

How do we see the connectedness of God the Trinity – the relational nature of all things that we’ll think about more in the next post? We see it in birdsong – the constant background chatter that you might hear in your garden on a spring morning. We even see it at the atomic level. I’ve forgotten most of the A level chemistry I ever learned but as I understand it at the very core of physical being is connection and attraction: between atoms, and within atoms.

Creation the overflow of God’s beauty

Notice as well that creation is itself an overflow of God’s beauty. Many people have thought long and hard about the question: why did God create anything at all? If the Father and the Son were complete, perfectly happy in the bond of the Holy Spirit – why did they need to create? Jonathan Edwards and others help us to see that it’s because God’s love and God’s beauty overflows like a fountain. It is always spilling over, giving out life and love and beauty, and that’s why God created a universe to enjoy and spiritual beings to enjoy him. (see for example Psalm 87:7; John 4:13-14). And this gives creation value, dignity, and worth – for creation reflects something of God.

Our response

It is right that our response to this is worship, praise and thankfulness. Following his words quoted above in Romans 1, the apostle Paul highlights how we should respond to God:

For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.

Romans 1:21

We should glorify God – praise and worship him – and we should thank him. We should also value and steward God’s creation appropriately, as set out in Genesis 1:26-28. And as God is creative, it’s good that we are creative, continuing the cycle or fountain of beauty that began with him and is flowing into his creation.

We naturally worship creation rather than God: We should confess and repent

But tragically, we very easily get stuck on God’s creation:

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.

Romans 1:20-23

God has revealed his power and divine nature in creation; we should have responded by giving him glory and thanking him. But instead, humanity exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images. To return to the image of the sun and the sunbeam – the sunbeam’s purpose is for us to look along it to its source the sun. But instead we get fixated on the sunbeam. We desire it, we long for it, we want to own it, we want to possess it, we want to be united to it. 

In Romans the apostle Paul uses the language of idolatry – worshipping a created thing rather than the creator:

They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.

Romans 1:25

We worship something when we put it first in our lives, before God; and when we look to that thing for our satisfaction and fulfilment. It can be a thing that is good in itself – like a garden, or our family, or an experience or feeling. Or it can be a bad thing.

But even bad things are good things distorted. Take lust towards another human being for example. When we lust we see beauty – but we want more than to see the beauty and look beyond it to the God who made the person. Rather lust expresses a desire to possess the beauty and to use it in a way that is inappropriate and harmful.

And so we find that we use people as objects. We use objects, part of God’s glorious creation, as things for our selfish use rather than God’s glory (which, by the way, is where most of our world’s environmental problems have come from). Above all we put ourselves first, and we see the purpose of everything else as being to serve us.

And tragically, as a culture this is increasingly seen as a good thing. We’re told that to find true beauty we should ‘look inside’ ourselves. We’re told that there’s no ultimate meaning or purpose –  that we’re in a closed system, and there’s nothing beyond what we can see with our eyes.

If this is true, it’s a tragedy for a number of reasons: It’s a tragedy because when I look inside I don’t see beauty, I see ugliness; because if we’re in a closed system – if this world is all there is – we’ve lost the source of the beauty, the sun who sent out the sunbeams; and because it means there is an end to experiencing the beauty we do see because we will all die. And it’s a tragedy because when the beauty turns to ugliness – as it often d0es – there’s no hope, there’s nothing outside the system to rescue us, or to restore our vision of the truly beautiful. We are discovering as a culture that those tragic words of Jeremiah are indeed true:

My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.

Jeremiah 2:13

Response

Whether or not you consider yourself a Christian, these things are true of you and I whether we like it or not. We need the Holy Spirit to bring us to our senses; and we need our loving God to help us to repent: to turn our gaze back to him, the sun, and to trust him to forgive our past failures.

The beautiful creation points us beyond itself: (Help others) Look beyond to the source

As we’ve already seen, one of the things that helps us is looking beyond the thing we find beautiful to the source – to God. It helps us as Christians as we seek to know, love and enjoy God.

I believe it also helps others as they discover God for themselves. Beauty is one of the greatest evidences there is for God. As we’ve already seen, many influential people in our culture say we live in a closed system; and they try to explain the beautiful universe in terms of the how it came about – which many claim is through evolution. Certainly that’s the way Planet Earth II tries to explain the beauty we see. Of course, there are lots of unanswered questions – like what caused the big bang, where did life come from in the first place, to name but two.

But even if that explanation of ‘how’ is correct, there are still unanswered questions. Why does creation exist at all? And most importantly for our current subject: What am I to do with this in-built desire for beauty? Is it a false hope – an illusion? Or is it pointing to something else? The Christian claim is that it is indeed pointing to something else – something greater, more wonderful, and that lasts forever. Because God is creator – everything we find beautiful is ultimately pointing us to God.

God can and does use beauty to draw people back to him. We’ve already observed how many astrophysicists are coming to faith as they observe the beauty in God’s universe. And we can go further: in a fallen world from which God appears absent, God uses created beauty to teach us to long for him:

The power and attraction of beauty is first learned from one’s love of the beauties of the world that are lesser. But Christians must learn to move beyond these beauties towards the one who is beautiful. This will involve repentance from focusing too much on the lesser beauties. We must learn to differentiate between primary and secondary beauty.

Matthew Capps, Reimagining beauty

Through our experience of God’s creation we learn to appreciate created beauty. And God can use that appreciation for created beauty to draw people to himself. We learn to appreciate created beauty, but we are also not satisfied by it: we see there’s something more which welong for. And so God can draw people beyond the ‘closed system’ to himself. CS Lewis put it like this:

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

CS Lewis, Weight of Glory

Over the years many people have said to me “I experience God when out in the country / on the hills.” I used to think they were wrong. I’ve come to see that they were half right – but they need to look beyond it to the source – the God who made it, and who gave them their appreciation of it.

Our response

Here are some closing thoughts as to how we might respond to what we’ve been thinking about.

1, Recognise the value of creation itself as made by God, and pointing to God.

We’ve seen that God’s creation has value and dignity; and he has created us in his image. That means that as we work – whatever our work is, as long as it’s not sinful in itself – we are bringing glory to God. We see at the start of Genesis

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

Genesis 1:28

As we rule over creation, the work we do has value and significance. As we are creative we bring glory to God: Artists, poets, musicians, homemakers, parents and so on bring glory to God. And as we care for and tend God’s creation we bring glory to God.

2, Thinking about the thing you find beautiful 

Think of a part of God’s creation that you find beautiful. It’s right to give thanks for it (including that it draws you out of yourself). It’s right to confess and repent when we’ve worshipped that thing rather than God, or when we’ve used it for our own ends. And it’s a blessing to us as we learn to look beyond them to the one who made them, and see how they reflect his beauty and bring glory to him. Why not read the second post – ‘What is beauty?’ again, and take some time to ask ‘How does that thing point you to God’s beauty?’

3, Helping others look beyond the beauty they appreciate

Finally, find ways to others to look beyond the beauty they love to the God who made it. For example, in a conversation about your garden, or a film or piece of music you love, can you say – “One of the things I like about it is how it shows this about God…”? Something that gets the other person thinking – looking beyond the closed system that is so constraining, and towards the one who is the source, object and goal of beauty.

Taking it further

Jonathan Edwards on Beauty – Owen Strachan and Doug Sweeney

Jonathan Edwards on the Experience of Beauty – Louis Mitchell.

Reimagining beauty – Matthew Capps – essay available online.

And here’s a video to savour: