“This thing called beauty!”
by thebaileydrink
Merry Monday with Parris
Ps.19:1 – “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech, night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech where their voice is not heard”
When we see Christ face to face we will be without excuse in regard to his voice. For creation speaks everyday to us to look up and join in the great worship! What is so amazing to me is that even as a child I truly think God was calling out to me as I played in bubbly brooks, walked among green forests and swam in his mighty oceans. Beauty opened my eyes to his love! When Jonathan Edwards studied beauty he found the person of God. In other words, whatever he saw around him, he glanced microscopically into a world too great to fully comprehend. The pursuit of beauty leads us straight into God. Edwards made it a practice to ride his horse for hours or walk alone singing songs and it was there he found rich and perpetual treasuries for his soul. He discovered nothing less than the purpose of his life and the meaning of his existence. I pray you too will dive so deep into his beauty that you will never come out!
I feel like the Trinity set in motion such a love for each other that it spilled out into the world as we know it. They are intent to make their glory known and incite us to their beauty. Creating such a circle of love so compelling that began with Christ speaking creation into being, then Christ being made man, moving onto the church ending at the marriage supper of the Lamb. It is this dance of love that creates this beauty all around us beckoning us to join in. God is not careless of the world for it is the end for which God created the earth.
It is interesting to me that the Reformers drank deeply of the beauty of God and expressed their views passionately. Edwards says; “How soon do earthly lovers come to an end of their discoveries of each other’s beauty; how soon do they see all that is to be seen! . . . And how happy is that love, in which there is an eternal progress in all these things; wherein new beauties are continually discovered, and more and more loveliness, and in which we shall forever increase in beauty ourselves; where we shall be made capable of finding out and giving, and shall receive, more and more endearing expressions of love forever: our union will become more close, and communication more intimate.” Luther believed that all created things are really masks of God (larvae Dei). They are media through which God can speak to us. John Calvin regarded nature as a most beautiful theatre of God’s work. The important theme for Calvin is that the orderliness of nature shows us the wisdom and the goodness of God and natural beauty exhibits the glory of the Creator.
To many, they cannot see the glory of the Lord in natural beauty because they do not look at the world with the right spectacles, using the word of God and reading the world through redemption. Nature though beautiful to them never speaks the mysteries of Christ nor draws them to holiness.
I pray you are touched by his beauty in such a way that you will ever be thirsty for more!