For the Beauty of the Earth

For the beauty of the earth,For the glory of the skies,
For the love which from our birth
Over and around us lies.

Refrain: Lord of all to Thee we raise
This our hymn of grateful praise.

For the wonder of each hour,
Of the day and of the night,
Hill and vale, and tree and flower,
Sun and moon, and stars of light.
(Refrain)

For the joy of human love,
Brother, sister, parent, child,
Friends on earth and friends above,
For all gentle thoughts and mild.
(Refrain)

 

For the church, that evermore
Lifteth holy hands above,
Offering up on every shore
Her pure sacrifice of love.
(Refrain)

For Thyself, best Gift Divine.
To our race so freely given,
For that great, great love of Thine,
Peace on earth and joy in Heaven.(Refrain)

The Mystical Task of Art

“If you confess that the world once was beautiful, but by the curse has become undone, and by a final catastrophe is to pass to its full state of glory, excelling even the beautiful of paradise, then art has the mystical task of reminding us in its productions of the beautiful that was lost and of anticipating its perfect coming luster.”

- Abraham Kuyper

God is the True Beauty Behind Every Created Beauty

God is the true beauty behind every created beauty. They are there to tell us what God is like, not us.


Take art as an example. The degree to which human art expresses God’s beauty is the degree to which God delights in it (and so should we). This is why God the Father rejoices over Jesus with “This is My beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” Jesus is the exact representation of God’s being, the perfect mirror eternally showing who is the fairest of them all. God’s kind of beauty is His beauty. 

The world, the Word, and His Son are the only perfect reflections. Since we only see His beauty “imperfectly as in a cloudy mirror” (1 Cor. 13:12, NLT), our artistic expressions and interpretations lack clarity and precision. Yet we can express, appreciate, and enjoy what we know about God.


Beautiful art will reflect the excellence, goodness, harmonies, virtue, and redemptive glory of God. In this, beauty is in the eye of the Beholder as long as we recognize God as the Beholder of all beauty.

~Steve DeWitt; Interview With Trevin Wax (2012) on Eyes Wide Open

God... The Foundation and Fountain of all Being and all Beauty

"As God is infinitely the greatest being, so He is allowed to be infinitely the most beautiful and excellent. And all the beauty to be found throughout the whole creation is but the reflection of the diffused beams of that Being who hath an infinite fullness of brightness and glory.

God’s beauty is infinitely more valuable than that of all other beings upon both those accounts mentioned, that is to say, the degree of his virtue and the greatness of the being possessed of this virtue. And God has sufficiently exhibited Himself, in His being, His infinite greatness and excellency.

And He has given us faculties, whereby we are capable of plainly discovering immense superiority to all other beings in these respects. Therefore He that has true virtue, consisting in benevolence to Being in general, and in that complacence in virtue, or moral beauty, and benevolence to virtuous being, must necessarily have a supreme love to God, both of benevolence and complacence.

And all true virtue must radically and essentially, and as it were summarily, consist in this. Because God is not only infinitely greater and more excellent than all other being, but He is the head of the universal system of existence; the foundation and fountain of all being and all beauty; from whom all is perfectly derived, and on whom all is most absolutely and perfectly dependent; of whom, and through whom, and to whom is all being and all perfection; and whose being and beauty is as it were the sum and comprehension of all existence and excellence: much more than the sun is the fountain and summary comprehension of all the light and brightness of the day.”

–Jonathan Edwards, “The Nature of True Virtue,” Ethical Writings, Ed. Paul Ramsey, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 8 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 550-551.