‘Behold, the Lamb
of God’
ide
o amnos tou theou
College Study
60th teaching
1.20.2013
“God’s Beauty: Where
Your Treasure Lies”
Mystery
Question: As a
kid, what was something you treasured?
Project
Scriptura: the Fear of God
Review:
What was our subject last week?
What were the Five Solae? What is the meaning of life, the purpose of human
existence? Why did Jesus in John 11 allow Lazarus to die? What are two ways to
think about God’s Glory? What does intrinsic glory mean? What does expressive
glory mean? What is the greatest enemy of God’s glory?
End
of Review
We as Americans of the 21st century live in a
culture that is totally fascinated with, obsessed over and overloaded with the
concept of beauty. I mean, our culture is utterly inundated with it. Beauty and
the struggle for beauty floods and pervades our culture. You see it everywhere.
Though the details of beauty have changed over time, the
concept of beauty and attractiveness remains one of the strongest motivators in
society. Really, we’re told, in indirect ways, that we cannot be happy,
content, successful or find satisfying relationships in life unless we aim for
beauty… hair-plucking, face-masking, tummy-tucking, product-abusing, surgical
beauty.
In fact, type in the word Beauty in Google’s search engine and what do you think you’ll get?
Images, not only from Google but from all forms of media, which say Beauty
equals health, equals status, equals popularity, equals fame, equals acceptance
and wealth, youth, life, intrigue and peace.
Why is that? Does beauty actually relate to all of those
things? Can we not have youth or peace of life or acceptance or any of it all
without buying into the world’s gold-rush for physical attractiveness? What a
way to sell a kit of makeup!
And on the flip side, our culture tells us that being ugly
is far worse than just being simply unattractive. Google the word ugly and you get images that show us that
America equates ugliness with stupidity, sickness, a lack of health, age,
imbalance, obscurity, plainness and unimportance, meaninglessness, rejection
and ridicule.
Well, when you put it that way, who the heck wouldn’t want
to blow their whole paycheck on cosmetics and fashion? After all, you’ve got to be beautiful. You simply must, or
life is worthless. If you’re not beautiful, then nobody likes your pictures on
facebook and nobody likes you.
Awful, en’it? Even worse, nobody actually looks like this.
It’s all a science of photography, angles, lighting and chemicals. The sooner
you get that into your mind the better: it’s a kind of fakeness. But that’s
exactly what American culture wants from you, to buy into it.
However, in God we find a transcendent concept of beauty.
Tonight’s study is entitled: “God’s Beauty: Where your treasure lies”. We’re
going to look at God’s Beauty in three ways.
But first let’s ask:
1.
What is Beauty?
We’ve heard it said “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”,
meaning beauty has to do with the perception of the one beholding the beautiful
subject.
If you’re a Twi-hard (not Twilight, but the Twilight Zone),
if you’re a Twilight Zone aficionado you may remember the episode that was
called “the eye of the beholder”, also known by the title “the private world of
darkness”. It was about a woman who so struggled with her apparent ugliness
that she underwent procedure after procedure to make her beautiful like
everyone else. What was so amazing about the episode was that it was shot with
very minimal light and all these weird angles so you couldn’t see any faces.
The woman’s face is all bandaged up too, so you can’t see what she looks like.
The big reveal comes near the end when the doctor removes
the bandages and we as the audience see the face of a Hollywood starlet, “Gawjuss!”
But then we see the faces of everyone else! Blech…
Turns out she was living in a society we’re everyone was
ugly, the new, accepted norm, and everyone who was actually beautiful, as we
would call it, was being ostracized and separated and rejected.
So clearly, beauty has to do with perception. Beauty means
“that which is perceived pleases”. Beauty is the characteristic of something
that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure or satisfaction.
Also clearly, beauty has to do immediately with our sense
of sight. It’s easy to see why some
things are physically beautiful, but that doesn’t mean that physical appearance
is the only kind of beauty there is. There’s more kinds of perception than just
what you see with your eyes.
Aristotle said profoundly: “The aim of art is to
represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.”
Outward appearance is far from the only kind of beauty there is. Maybe that
will become clearer if we take our Project Scriptura verses now…
2.
Biblical Basis for God’s Beauty
Psalm 27:4,
Ecclesiastes 3:11, Genesis 1:1, Psalm 50:2, Isaiah 33:17, I Peter 1:19, Psalm
104:1
Psalm 29:2, “Give unto the LORD the glory due His name; worship the LORD in the
beauty of holiness.”
3.
Divine Beauty in Character
When we come to talk about God’s Beauty, we are talking
about something that is almost entirely foreign in American society. But let me
tell you at the beginning, that God’s Beauty is the real thing. It’s not smoke
and mirrors. It isn’t an illusion.
And the world already has its response to what we’re going
to talk about. Remember the Emperor’s New
Groove? When Emperor Kuzco is looking over the dames to choose his bride,
he’s like “Hate your hair… not likely… yikes, yikes, yikes… and let me guess…
you have a great personality?”
That’s it! That’s our culture’s response to any other kind
of beauty other than the purely physical. Outward beauty is paraded, inward
beauty is mocked. Inward beauty is one of those feeble trinkets left for those
ugly people who can’t get their act together.
But you can’t miss this. This is the real beauty. Why? Because this is from God Himself. So to get an
idea of God’s measurement of beauty, let’s turn to Isaiah 52. This is a measurement of character.
In the prophetic passage we’re about to read, we’re
introduced to a figure identified by three names: God’s Servant, the Man of
sorrows and the Righteous One. Let’s read the passage and then backtrack for
comments: Isaiah 52:13-53:12.
*Who is this prophetic figure which the prophet Isaiah
foresaw? Well we know now, in retrospect, that the description clearly fits the
Son of God, Jesus Christ, who came to do His Father’s will: God’s Servant… who
was a Man of sorrows, suffering the pain of the cross… who was the Righteous
One who makes many righteous.
Now in this passage we see a few comparisons and contrasts.
But what I’d like to point out is one specific contrast: the contrast of His
form versus His character. Note what the text says in 53:2. It says He wasn’t beautiful.
What? But I thought Jesus Christ was this handsome guy with
a strong chin, perfect frame, well-trimmed beard, dazzling eyes and stunning
smile! And he spoke with in English accent, right?
Wrong, mostly on the English accent. What Isaiah says is
that Jesus didn’t have this outward beauty. In fact, the prophet writes that
His visage, His countenance, His face and appearance were marred beyond
recognition. He was so beaten and tortured in the hours leading to the cross
that the swelling and the bleeding and the lacerations had removed any
resemblance to the face of a man, not to mention outward beauty.
Physical attractiveness did not die for your sins. Inner
strength and the beauty of everlasting love did.
So He wasn’t this great attractive guy, so far as we
measure attractiveness in 21st century Western society. Yet remember
how people were attracted to Him. Droves came, hundreds and hundreds to hear
from Him, attracted like moths to the light.
But look at how the prophet contrasts Christ’s physical
lack of beauty with the beauty of His character. Isaiah writes of Christ’s
innocence: “He had done no violence, nor
was any deceit in His mouth”; of Christ’s silent submission: “As a sheep before its shearers is silent, so
He opened not His mouth”; and of Christ’s self-less sacrifice for the sins
of the world: “He was wounded for our
transgressions”.
Jesus Christ, in this measurement, was the most beautiful
person to ever have walked the earth, and He did not look like the American
“Jesus”. He suffered and submitted and died a torturous death for people who
despised and rejected Him, as the prophet wrote, who hid their faces from Him,
who did not esteem Him, who went astray like sheep. Let me say: it takes a
measure of divine beauty to say to the very same people who are torturing you
“forgive them”.
The Beauty of God is clearly in the awfulness of the cross
and the crucified One. That’s why I chose the picture that I chose to represent
this attribute of God’s Beauty. It’s shallow and sad that all everyone can
think about when referencing God’s Beauty are flowers and sunsets when the
strongest declaration of His beautiful character was in the very un-beauty of
the cross!
And if Jesus Christ is as Hebrews 1 claims “the
brightness of God’s glory and the express image of His person…” …if Jesus
spoke truly in John 14:9, saying “He who has seen Me has seen the Father…”
…then we have right out of Isaiah this
crisp and profound picture of God’s Beauty and what this attribute of His is
like.
So right away we’re confronted with the Beauty of God in
His character. What we perceive God to be like in the special revelation in
Scripture is a pleasurable sight. He is beautiful. Consider all the moral
attributes that we’ve studied in the past. The whole collection of them reveal
God’s Beauty. God’s total moral perfection, His love, grace, mercy, even
justice, perfect jealousy and righteous wrath, all point to God as being the
most gloriously beautiful Being in existence.
Consider all that the next time you sing a worship song
about God’s beauty. It’s far more than a sunrise. There is a whole realm of
internal significance, of inner beauty in Christ that cannot be laughed away by
saying He merely had a great personality.
Now I’m going to resist the temptation of going in to some
longwinded discourse about how we should be moral people. I’d rather not plunge
you into a bottomless pit of legalism or an infinite regress of guilt. Let’s
recognize that our goal is to be more like Christ and that it’s a process worked
in us by the Spirit of God. And let’s leave the subject of our inward beauty
there.
There’s more…
4.
Divine Beauty in Nature
I’ve just said that God’s beauty is “more than a sunrise”.
But there’s a way in which God’s beauty is still seen in a sunrise, in nature
in general. We’ve seen how God’s beauty is seen in His special and specific
revelation in Scripture, but how is God’s beauty seen in His broad and general
revelation in Nature?
Psalm 19:1-4
says “The heavens declare the glory of
God; and firmament shows His handiwork. Day unto day utters speech, and night
unto night reveals knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice
is not heard, their line has gone out through all the earth, and their words to
the end of the world.”
Now there is an immediate danger present here. How shall we
think of God’s Beauty in nature? Well, we must never think that God is the same
thing as nature.
What we see in these verses is that Nature “talks about”,
it points to and reveals knowable things about God. Nature shows us that God is
a creative, imaginative, orderly, immaterial Genius. Nature reveals things
about God that are beautiful, but the nature is not the same thing as God.
We may thank God for sunrises and sunsets, and for the
warmth of the sunlight, but God, realize this, is none of those things. God is not a sunrise or sunset. God is not the sun in our solar system.
That’d be pretty lame, since our sun isn’t even the biggest or the hottest star
in the universe.
So let’s ensure we avoid the pitfall of pantheism (that’s
the belief that nature and God are identical). There are people who have taken
the beauty in Nature and rather than saying that the beauty in Nature is
present because the beautiful God made
it beautiful, they’ll claim that the beauty in Nature is present because God is
present in Nature. But God is not a rock or a tree or a mountain or an ocean or
a river or a planet or a star or even all the universe as a whole. God is
transcendent about Nature, though He is present
within the universe He made.
Let’s be clear, to say “I see your face in every sunrise”
can only mean that nature points to some of the attributes of God, not to a
vision of God Himself. The stars declare the glory of God but the stars are not
God themselves, rather God made the stars.
Think about it this way: Nature is beautiful because God is
beautiful. Everything that is truly beautiful is beautiful only so much as it
resembles God. Therefore, light is beautiful, giving is beautiful, loving is
beautiful, works of art are beautiful since God Himself is the ultimate Artist.
Geisler says “All beauty comes from God; hence, all beauty
is like God. All who create beauty imitate God: we only think His thoughts
after Him, and we only paint His paintings after Him. There is no work of art
that did not appear first in the infinite mind of the Creator of all things.
Human artists are at best only sub-creators imitating the Super Creator; they
merely think His thoughts after Him, form His sculptures after Him, and sing
His songs after Him, etc.”
Why do people long after beauty? Who did the ancients yearn
after the sunrise and marvel at the stars? Perhaps in some way because our
souls long for our Creator’s Beauty, which is whispered of throughout Nature.
*Now what does Nature tell us? What Nature tells us are
broad things about God. Romans 1:20
says “For since the creation of the world
His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that
are made, even His eternal power and deity…” And that’s all that Nature
does, no more, no less.
Nature reveals the invisible qualities of the invisible
God. But there are things that Nature cannot tell us about God. In the same
way, you could sculptures and paintings and things that I’ve designed and
really not know much about me. You can look at a Rembrandt or a Monet all day
and never discover just who Rembrandt and Monet really were, aside from the
fact that they were artists. You wouldn’t be able to tell whether they were
good men or bad men, whether they were adulterers, whether they smoked, whether
they laughed, if they went to church, if they were patriotic, if they loved or
if they hated. That can only come through words. You would have to hear the
voice of Rembrandt or read his writings to understand who the man was.
So too with Nature, it can tells us of God Beauty in that
it reveals certain characteristics of this Master Designer, but consider that
Nature cannot tell you the specifics that God’s Word can. Nature can’t tell you
about God’s will for your life, Nature cannot tell you whether God has a Son or
not, Nature cannot say whether God is jealous with a perfect jealousy, or if He
has any moral commands or even what His name is. Those specifics only come
through the specific revelation of God in Scripture. Thus, Nature is a limited
revelation of God; what it reveals about God is only a few things. We know so
much more about God through the Bible.
So Nature does reveal God’s Beauty in a limited way. Nature
speaks of God’s beauty and God Himself gave beauty to His creation.
Thus we’ve seen that God is beautiful in His character.
Jesus Christ has demonstrated what God is like in living among us. And we’ve
seen that God is beautiful as revealed in a limited way by Nature. Next…
5.
Divine Beauty in Essence
In Gothic architecture, light was considered to be an
important feature of the cathedral, since light was believed to be the most
beautiful revelation of God. Interesting that whenever the saints of Scripture
saw something of the form of God, they saw light.
Now beauty, remember, is the characteristic of a subject
that provides perceived satisfaction and pleasure. But what if you can’t
perceive the subject at all? How can you call something beautiful if there’s no
way to perceive the beautiful object?
For after all, Jesus said “God is a Spirit…” (John 4:24).
God is described as eternal, immortal and invisible
in I Timothy 1:17. God said to Moses
in Exodus 33:20, “You cannot see My face, for no one may see
Me and live.” And in case there
is any shadow of a doubt, John 1:18
says “No one has seen God at any time”.
But if God is invisible, how can we perceive His beauty?
Now we’re addressing something here other than the beauty
of God in understanding His character and the beauty of God in Nature declaring
His attributes. His character as revealed in Jesus and His attributes as
revealed in Nature are just a part of an incomplete picture. It is as if we
have only seen sunlight but have no idea what the sun itself looks like.
There is a further element of God’s Beauty which no one has
ever seen: the beauty of His essence, the rays of which are beams of divine
light.
The closest the disciples came to it was when they stood on
the Mount of Transfiguration. In the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke,
we have this incredible story of Jesus taking Peter, James and John up a high
mountain and there He was transfigured. The word means “transformed into something more beautiful or elevated”. It says
that Jesus’ face shone like the sun.
And on that day, those three disciples saw a tiny glimmer
of the Beauty of God’s essence peek through the veil of Christ’s flesh. Peter
himself later wrote about it. In II
Peter 1:16 says “we were eyewitnesses
of His majesty (splendor, beauty)”.
Oh for the day when we shall see God face to face. Revelation 22:3-5 says “And there shall be no more curse, but the
throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in [the city], and His servants shall serve Him. They shall see His face, and His
name shall be on their foreheads. There shall be no night there: they need no
lamp nor light of the sun, for the Lord God gives them light…”
I Corinthians 13:12
says “For now we see in a mirror, dimly,
but then face to face…”
Someday we shall see the ultimate Beauty. Beauty isn’t just
our own personal idea of what we like to see. There is real ultimate Beauty,
did you realize that? There is a real objective, absolute Beauty and it’s in
God. God is the ultimate aesthetic experience, infinite, overwhelming Beauty.
Nothing we have ever seen could ever compare to the infinite depths of God’s
Beauty. But the killer thing is, we haven’t seen the full display yet.
When I was a kid we used to enjoy watching the fireworks as
a family. Fireworks are huge in Hawaii and much more popular on New Year’s Eve
than they are here. I mean, every one of our neighbors got into it. People would
save up for months to purchase whole hoards of fireworks that would burn for
hours. Near my Grandma’s old house the neighborhood would string together all
of their Chinese red firecrackers and lay out this tremendous line of
firecrackers that would loop around and around the block, then light it just
before midnight.
But you know, all fireworks are beautiful, but there’s a
definite difference of magnitude. When we were very little, Grandma would let
us play with little sparklers that we could wave around and stick in the ground
and write our names in the air with, but Grandma Kealoha wouldn’t dream of
giving us the kind of fireworks that they launch in spectacular shows, the kind
that filled the skies with light like the day and went off with a sound that
shook your heart.
In the same way, our perception of God now is so limited by
our own senses. When we get to heaven, the difference will be even more than
going from the little sparkler to the sky-filling fireworks launched over the
ocean. There’s a difference of magnitude.
It’s been said “What makes heaven heaven is the fact that
God will be there”, and I assure you that when you get there all the things we
imagine, like seeing our loved ones again, like walking the city of God, like
experiencing the new creation, like the pearly gates and the sea of glass and
the angels and the saints will all fall utterly to the wayside as mere
peripheral visions compared to the unspeakable magnificence of the Beauty of
the Lord.
No one has seen God’s Beauty in essence, but some day we
will.
*So we’ve seen that God is beautiful in His character, as
revealed by Jesus Christ in Scripture, and we’ve seen that God is beautiful in
His attributes, as partially declared by Nature, and we’ve seen that God’s
ultimate beauty in His metaphysical light cannot be seen, not yet. A vision
beyond visions awaits us in heaven.
6.
Treasure
Since beauty is that characteristic which provides pleasure
and satisfaction, let’s make an assumption: treasure is beautiful. Treasure
pleases and to an extent provides satisfaction. Let’s link up the ideas of
treasure and beauty. Treasure is often beautiful.
In fact, can you think of such a thing as ugly treasure?
No? So we find then that treasure is beautiful. And because beauty pleases,
people treasure beauty. So not only is treasure beautiful but people also
treasure beauty, as we’ve seen. We’ve got beautiful treasure and treasuring
beauty. Two ideas.
Now turn to Matthew 6:19-21.
Treasure is beautiful and we instinctively treasure beauty,
but Who have we been talking about all this time? God is the Beautiful One. We
place so much emphasis and worth upon things that are passing away, when before
us stands the everlasting Beauty of God, and our hearts can remain cold,
closed.
Listen, all your longing for beauty in yourself and in a
relationship is really just a longing for the Beauty of God. We have the curse
of misguided interests and misguided treasure. So many things fight for your
attention and your interest, when God is the ultimate and absolute source of
Beauty and therefore value. If God is the ultimate Beauty then He ought to be
the ultimate treasure to us. He should be what we value the most!
“Unless men see a beauty and delight in the worship of God,
they will not do it willingly,” a quote by theologian John Owen.
Tonight, I have shown you that God is beautiful! So let me
ask you: do you treasure Jesus? Is God valuable to you? Do you worship Him
willingly, having seen His beauty? Or if you woke up tomorrow and there were no
more Bibles, no more churches, no more Christians and no more God would you be
in fact relieved that He disappeared?
What does Jesus Christ mean to you? How much value do you
place on your relationship with Him? How much value do you place on seeking Him
in prayer and in His Word? Jesus is known prophetically as the Desire of
nations. Ironic that entire nations
have yearned for the Savior but He finds little yearning in the hearts His own
people, the ones He died for.
Remember the words of Isaiah
when he said: “All we like sheep have
gone astray, we have turned, every one, to his own way… we hid, as it were, our
faces from Him… we esteemed Him not…” You get the idea that while Jesus
Christ was taking our sins upon Himself, suffering the agony that was our
agony, enduring the pain that was our punishment, taking the stripes upon His
back for us, that we were just off doing our own thing. “That’s cool, Jesus.
Thanks for taking my sin and all, bro. I’ll be over here when you’re done.”
Even the prophet Isaiah saw the total lack of interest, the
indifference toward Christ that can so often characterize our Christianity.
Maybe you find yourself in a place where you’ve seen some
of the beauty of God and you’re attracted to God in some way. Maybe you’ve
looked at the sunrise and thought “wow, God is pretty amazing”. Maybe you’ve
felt the stirring in your heart from this or that sermon, from this or that
song. Maybe you’ve felt the love of God through the kind words of a friend.
Maybe you’re here tonight at this study merely because you’re attracted to
Jesus, there’s a kind of attractiveness to this whole thing, talking about
heaven and peace and joy and love and all that.
But that’s not enough. Jesus Christ was not crucified to be
flirted with. He doesn’t want to be merely attractive to you. He wants all of
you.
Imagine if my relationship with my wife was based only on
me flirting with her, playing with the idea of marrying her, just finding her
attractive and that’s it. You wouldn’t call that a relationship at all. A
relationship involves going beyond the immediate attraction into deeper
territory of knowing each other better.
And you cannot say that you have any relationship with
Jesus at all if you’re only playing Christianity, if you only have the fleeting thought of getting
deeper with God and never acting on it. You cannot say that you’re there if you’re
just flirting with God, merely attracted to Him. God wants more than that. Any
desperate lover would!
C.S. Lewis pens in the words of Christ: “Give me all of
you!!! I don’t want so much of your time, so much of your talents and money,
and so much of your work. I want YOU!!! ALL OF YOU!! I have not come to torment
or frustrate the natural man or woman, but to KILL IT! No half measures will
do. I don’t want to only prune a branch here and a branch there; rather I want
the whole tree out! Hand it over to me, the whole outfit, all of your desires,
all of your wants and wishes and dreams. Turn them ALL over to me, give
yourself to me and I will make of you a new self---in my image. Give me
yourself and in exchange I will give you Myself. My will, shall become your
will. My heart, shall become your heart.”
That is one of the most powerful declarations of love I
have ever read.
God is beautiful. We treasure what is beautiful. Why don’t
you come and treasure God?
May this year be the year when you truly enter into a
relationship with Jesus such as the quote I just read described. May this year
mark the time when you stopped playing Christian, stopped playing around with Jesus
Christ and got serious about this whole thing. He is beautiful. You’re not
being forced into a blind date. He is beautiful!
Do you see God as a way to your treasure, as a way to get
what you want?
Or do you see God as in the way of your treasure, as if God
stands between you and doing what you want to do?
Or do you see God Himself as your treasure?
Only one of those questions acts upon the Beauty of God.
Only one of those questions will take what we’ve learned and apply it. I leave
you to decide which.
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