Photo: Pixabel – Pexels
How can we actually see the beauty of God today?
This is the fifth post in a series on Beauty. So far we’ve seen that in the midst of suffering and hardship, we need to see the beauty of God. We’ve seen that all other beauty points towards the beauty of God; and that we are only truly satisfied by the beauty of God. We’ve considered the beauty of creation, and seen how the beauty of creation points beyond itself to the beauty of relationship – and in particular the relationship of love in the life of the Trinity.
But if you’re like me it’s quite hard to grasp and appreciate the love within the Trinity. We haven’t seen it; we haven’t fully experienced it. It’s so wonderful and mysterious that we won’t really experience it until eternity. At that level we’re still left asking the question “how we can see the beauty of God today, to sustain us in the midst of suffering and hardship?”
Wonderfully, God has provided us with the best possible means of beholding and appreciating and being transformed into his beauty: Beauty has come to earth in the flesh, in the person of Jesus Christ. The love and beauty of the Trinity is personified in Jesus Christ. So that as we look at Christ, we see beauty; as we grow in relationship to Christ, we enter into beauty.
John Owen wrote that ‘One of the greatest privileges and advancements of believers, both in this world and into eternity consists in their beholding the glory of Christ’ (The Glory of Christ). The glory of Christ is the beauty of Christ made public. It is our privilege and joy now and for eternity to have the opportunity to behold the glory and the beauty of Christ. And so we cannot consider the beauty of Christ purely from an intellectual perspective. We do it in an attitude of praise and worship; and we do it intending to keep doing it day by day for the rest of our lives and into eternity.
How we see God’s beauty in Christ
God reveals himself in the Incarnation
For us to know anything about God he needs to reveal himself. And he has graciously chosen to do so: he spoke through prophets in the Old Testament; but supremely he has revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ who is revealed to us in the pages of the New Testament. Think of those well used Christmas verses from John 1:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning… The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth… No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.
John 1:1-2, 14, 18
God the Son is God, the image of God, and God made flesh revealing God to us. (See also Colossians 1:15; Hebrews 1:2-3.) Jonathan Edwards writes: ‘Christ was the manifestation of true beauty in the created world.’
Given God came to earth in the flesh, as a person, we might expect him to be physically handsome and impressive – as depicted in many paintings over the years. In fact the only physical description we have in the whole Bible is this, speaking of the suffering servant:
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
Isaiah 53:2
So physical beauty is the wrong place to look. Where do we see beauty in Christ? We need to look for inner beauty, and the relational beauty we considered in the last post. In particular, we’re looking for love, which we have seen is the supreme manifestation of beauty.
Love revealed in Christ
Here are 4 ways in which the love of the Trinity is revealed through Jesus Christ:
1, God’s love for the world revealed in sending Jesus
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
John 3:16
John tells us that the love of God is revealed to humanity in sending Jesus. In particular, it’s the love of God for the world – the world which in John’s gospel is usually portrayed as being in active rebellion against God. What love! And we wouldn’t have seen that love if God the Son had not come to earth in Jesus Christ.
2, Jesus is love – his life was a life of love
Jesus’s life on earth was a life of perfect love lived out. As we have seen previously Paul’s greatest exposition of the nature of love is 1 Corinthians 13; and only one human being has ever fulfilled it – Jesus Christ. As you read through the gospels and notice how Jesus relates to those around him – you see love in action; you see beauty in action. And this is one of the best ways we can see beauty today, by observing Jesus in the pages of the New Testament.
3, God’s love is supremely revealed in Jesus’s death
The Bible tells us in a number of places that the supreme revelation of love is the death of Jesus on the cross:
This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
1 John 4:10
But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Romans 5:8
If we want to see love, and if we want to see God’s love for us proved beyond doubt, the cross is the place to look.
4, The love of Father and Son for each other in the bond of the Spirit is revealed through Jesus
How do we know about the love of the Father and the Son for each other? Through the life and teaching of Jesus. See for example John 3:35, 5:20, 10:17, 14:31, 15:9, 15:10, 17:23-26.
Lion and Lamb – Complex and intensified beauty
But there’s still more that can be said. I wonder if you’ve ever asked the question ‘How can the death of Christ be beautiful?’ The very thought seems like a contradiction: Death is terrible, and so are pain and suffering.
The apostle John begins to answer this question in Revelation 5. Like a comic book, the book of Revelation uses vivid images to communicate profound truths. And in Revelation 5:5-6 Jesus Christ is described as both a Lion and a Lamb:
Then one of the elders said to me, “Do not weep! See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed. He is able to open the scroll and its seven seals.” Then I saw a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain, standing at the centre of the throne, encircled by the four living creatures and the elders. The Lamb had seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth.
Revelation 5:5-6
John is depicting characteristics of Christ: he is both lion-like and lamb-like. And he’s not lamb-like in that he’s cuddly, but in that he was slain as a sacrificial lamb like the true Passover lamb of Exodus. And in verse 12 he is worshipped for being the Lamb who was slain. The worshippers gathered around the throne find him beautiful – his lamb-like nature is beautiful. In Revelation he’s also worshipped for being a Lion – who roars and wins and destroys. And of course we see the same idea in John’s gospel. Jesus talks about himself being glorified at the cross (John 12:28, 13:32, 17:1). How can he be glorified at the cross? How is the cross beautiful? Clearly there’s something deeper going on –our natural understanding of beauty is inadequate.
In the second post of this series – ‘What is beauty?’ we considered complex beauty and intensified beauty. It’s worth reading the relevant sections in that post before continuing. In his famous sermon ‘The Excellency of Christ’ Jonathan Edwards considers how Christ displays complex and intensified beauty. His text is Revelation 5, and he brings out what he calls a ‘Conjunction of excellencies’. He considers some of the apparent contradictions in Christ, and what he achieved through them. He shows how these apparent contradictions – which come together in Christ – actually make Christ more beautiful. An outline of the sermon is attached below, setting out the various contradictions Edwards considers.
An example
Let’s consider one example – Infinite worthiness of good, and the greatest patience under sufferings of evil. Edwards writes:
Christ was perfectly innocent, and deserved no suffering. He deserved nothing from God by any guilt of his own, and he deserved no ill from men. Yea, he was not only harmless and undeserving of suffering, but he was infinitely worthy; worthy of the infinite love of the Father, worthy of infinite and eternal happiness, and infinitely worthy of all possible esteem, love, and service from all men. And yet he was perfectly patient under the greatest sufferings that ever were endured in this world. Heb. 12:2. “He endured the cross, despising the shame.” He suffered not from his Father for his faults, but ours; and he suffered from men not for his faults but for those things on account of which he was infinitely worthy of their love and honor, which made his patience the more wonderful and the more glorious. [Quotes from 1 Pet. 2:20.] There is no such conjunction of innocence, worthiness, and patience under sufferings, as in the person of Christ.
Edwards, Excellency of Christ
Louis Mitchell writes:
In Edwards’ understanding, beauty becomes more intensified as more and more disparate entities, or characteristics of an entity, are harmonized into an integrated whole.
Louis Mitchell, Jonathan Edwards on the Experience of Beauty
I highly recommend savouring the sermon slowly, and having your heart and mind filled with the complex and intensified beauty of Christ.
Entering and reflecting the beauty of Christ
So far in this post we’ve seen a number of ways in which God’s beauty is revealed to us in Jesus Christ. And yet we don’t just want to see beauty. Throughout this series we’ve returned to the quote from CS Lewis:
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
Entering through faith union
Part of the glorious good news of Christianity is that we can enter the beauty of Christ, and through faith and repentance we do enter into it. The glorious reality laid out by the New Testament (and particularly the apostle Paul) is that through faith in the bond of the Spirit we have union with Christ, a bit like a marriage union. See for example Colossians 2:9-12; 3:1-4; Romans 6:1-10.
In previous posts we’ve said that it’s possible to enter the beauty of the Trinity. Now we can see how precisely that happens. By faith, in the bond of the Spirit, we are united to Christ. This faith union with Christ is the precise way in which we are able to enter God’s beauty. So we can rejoice that in Christ we are united to this beauty! And as we are united to him by the Holy Spirit, and as we gaze on the beautiful Christ – we are transformed into his likeness.
The church is drawn into God’s glorious beauty in Christ, through which she responds by reflecting that beauty into the dark world.
Matthew Capps, Reimagining beauty
Reflecting
We see Christ’s beauty; we are united to Christ’s beauty; and so we reflect Christ’s beauty:
We all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.
2 Corinthians 3:18
What does that look like? Consider these words from Philippians 3:
I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.
Philippians 3:10-11
We reflect the beauty of Christ as we are Christ to the world. As we love. And as we suffer with and for Christ and his people. Just as Christ’s suffering was part of his beauty – the intensified beauty, the ‘conjunction of excellencies’ – so the suffering of Christians for Christ and his people is beautiful.
So what: Christ the Lamb – Believe and adore; Christ the Lion – Repent
What does all this mean for you and I? Let’s return to the image of Christ the lion and the lamb. In the book of Revelation there are two responses to this image. The first is a response of trust and worship. God’s people – those who have come to Jesus in repentance and faith – have been given a vision of his beauty. They trust him through the dark paths of life; and they worship him for that beauty.
But there’s also another response. So for example:
They called to the mountains and the rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb!”
Revelation 6:16
To some, Christ is a lion-like lamb: Their beautiful Saviour to whom they turn in faith in the darkness. But to others Christ is a lamb-like lion: one whom they have rejected and now they face his wrath – his right anger against sin.
So to some people Christ is a lion-like lamb; to others he is a lamb-like lion. What makes the difference? Repentance and faith. Coming to Jesus – for the first time and daily – and saying “Lord Jesus, I have rejected you, I’ve gone my own way, I’m sorry, forgive me, help me to live for you.” That is the posture of the Christian; and as we come to him in that way he is a Lamb to us – the lamb that was slain. And by his Spirit he reveals his beauty, his glory and we worship him – we praise him that he is the lamb that we need, he is gentle and lowly, he is gracious and loving.
And if we don’t repent and believe – if we never do that, if we continue to live lives independent of Christ then Christ will not be a Lamb to us; he will be a Lion. And a day will come when we will call to the mountains and the rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb!” What a terrible day that will be. When all the opportunities to come to Christ as our Passover lamb have passed, and we face only his wrath and judgement.
Taking it further
‘Excellency of Christ’ – Jonathan Edwards (sermon)
‘Seeing and Savouring Jesus Christ’ – John Piper
Jonathan Edwards on Beauty – Owen Strachan and Doug Sweeney
Jonathan Edwards on the Experience of Beauty – Louis Mitchell
Imperfect Pastor 