Tag Archives: Beauty

Beauty, The Kingdom

Cosmic Beautification

Leave a comment

I’ve long been drawn to the winsome promise of Ecclesiastes 3:3, “He makes all things beautiful in its time.”  For most of my life that scripture has floated unmoored above reality like a cloud drifting in the wind. “In His time”… might indeed be a VERY long time.

Until recently – when my mental circuit board lit up with fresh understanding. Solomon’s declaration is a restatement of the ancient promise of the Kingdom: “The wolf will lie down with the lamb, the nations will beat their swords into plowshares, and the glory of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. And all things will be made beautiful in His time.” Like springtime in Narnia, the promise of the Kingdom means that all things will blossom into beauty. Evil and ugliness will be composted into the topsoil of a glorious Kingdom of goodness and grace, and the sin soaked snow of Winter will melt into rivulets of mercy.

“…behold, I am making all things new” is spoken in the present tense, Right now, as you are reading this post, Jesus is at work fulfilling His promise: Eden restored, and “the summing up of all things in Christ, of things in the heavens and things on the earth.*”

The roads of America didn’t always look like this. It took Ladybird Johnson and the American Highway Beautification Act

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson’s wife, Ladybird, launched the “National Beautification Project.” Litter was collected from the roadsides, trashy billboards were razed, and flowers were seeded in the median strips of highways across America.  In time, the roadsides of our nation began to bloom with color and glory. That’s exactly what the Kingdom looks like. God makes ALL things beautiful in his time. And we have a part in it: We are God’s coworkers* – to plant flowers, show kindness, heal the sick, and create beautiful music, art, stories, homes, communities and gardens. “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.*” Today is the time to labor with God for the beautification of all things.

Scripture references
Revelation 21:5
Ephesians 1:10
1 Corinthians 3:9
Genesis 2:15

Beauty, Grace, Worldview & Truth

Beauty: The Divine Embrace

2 Comments

“Whatever things are… lovely… think on these things.”
Philippians 4:8

During the three and a half year siege of Sarajevo, as buildings smoldered, and graveyards swelled, one sensitive soul diagnosed the despair, and scattered seeds of healing across the traumatized city.  Vedran Smailović, principal cellist of the Sarajevo Symphony, carried his  instrument into places of death and destruction, gifting the city with beautiful music among the ruins.      

As the maestro wove his melodies through the streets, root hairs of hope sprouted in the hearts of the people.  God’s gift of beauty opens the heavens, chases away the ugliness, and pours healing into the soul.  It is what theologians might call a “prevenient grace” that flows – like rain – upon the righteous and the unrighteous alike. It is a gravitational force that draws us towards the Creator.

Beauty is a rose on the doorstep of humanity.  The Lover-God has visited our tenement and left His calling card.  The rose is not Him, but it is an expression of Him that declares His intention: “I love you.” “I see you.” “You have captured my heart.” “I am extravagant in my resolve towards you.”

Tragically, many of Adam’s race have become jaded and blind.  We’ve traded beauty for novelty, shock, and adrenaline. Beauty has become maligned, twisted, distorted, cheapened and commercialized to the point where we shuffle past the flaming bush with nary a glance.  But Moses – he turned aside to see this marvelous sight that burned, yet was never consumed. And God met him there with grace.

Those of us who have encountered the Lover will recognize the gift, remove our sandals, and cherish the unmistakable invitation. “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

The Kingdom

Beauty gone missing

5 Comments

Theologians and philosophers in the West have hosted a thousand-year discussion on the absolutes of Goodness, Truth and Beauty. This Trinity of virtues has suffered a severe blow in today’s postmodern world, but Beauty – I believe – has suffered most.

In my lifetime the church has sponsored well-known crusades to champion absolute Goodness to our neighbors. We have mobalized over morals, vocalized over vices, and sermonized over sin. And while there’s no question absolute goodness demands warning our neighbors about transgressions, that in itself isn’t enough.

More recently we’ve begun to re-embrace absolute Truth. Thousands of websites now defend the Truth of the Faith, the Truth of our condition, and the Truth of Scriptures.  Ever since Josh McDowell published his 1972 bestseller Evidence that Demands a Verdict, the church has made a slow comeback in offering solid defenses for the One who is the Foundation of all Truth.

But our greatest failure, I believe, is in our neglect of absolute Beauty. To present a God who stoops, who humbly enters our darkness and takes our sins and sorrows upon himself, who suffers, dies and forgives … this is where we fail. Because beauty doesn’t lend itself well to words; it must become flesh and modeled among us. The tragic truth is that picketing, judging, debating, and boycotting are often more at home in today’s church than love, service, forgiveness, and humility. When a Mother Theresa occasionally enters the world of dying lepers or when a black congregation in Charleston forgives the white man who turned their Bible study into a massacre, the world sits up and catches it’s breath. But sadly these scenes are mostly rare, exceptional glimpses of Christian beauty.

The Gospel of the Kingdom is not only Good and True, but it is also Beautiful. Yet any Gospel presented apart from the beauty of a humble, dying God is incomplete and stunted.  In a world of offense, judgment, and fragmentation perhaps it’s time we began asking, “Are my Facebook posts beautiful?” “Are my protests and boycots beautiful?” “Are my political opinions beautiful?” If they are not, then maybe it’s time we backed away and examined our hearts, because our first and most powerful mission to the world is to reflect the beauty of our King.

“You will… be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God.”
Isaiah 62:3