An Infinite Artist

To an infinite artist, a Creator in love with His craft, there is no unimportant corner, there is no thrown-away image, no tattered thread in the novel left untied.

N.D. Wilson; Notes From the Tilt-A-Whirl

Beautiful Book

First, by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God: his eternal power and his divinity, as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20.

~ Belgic Confession, Article 2: The Means by Which We Know God

The Pinnacle of Beauty

The pinnacle of beauty, the beauty toward which all creatures point, is God. He is supreme being, supreme truth, supreme goodness, and also the apex of unchanging beauty. ~ 

~ Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 2:254

My God, How Wonderful Thou Art

My God, how wonderful Thou art,

Thy majesty how bright,

How beautiful Thy mercy-seat,

In depths of burning light!

How dread are Thine eternal years,

O everlasting Lord;

By prostrate spirits day and night

Incessantly adored!

How wonderful, how beautiful,

The sight of Thee must be,

Thine endless wisdom, boundless power

And awful purity!

O how I fear Thee, living God,

With deepest, tenderest fears,

And worship Thee with trembling hope,

And penitential tears!

Yet I may love Thee too, O Lord,

Almighty as Thou art,

For Thou hast stooped to ask of me

The love of my poor heart. Amen.

~ Frederick W. Faber

He Himself is the Only Beautiful

Some think that God also, whom they measure with the measure of their own feelings, judges the same thing that wicked and foolish men judge to be subjects of praise and blame, and that He uses the opinions of men as His rule and measure, not taking into account the fact that, by reason of the ignorance that is in them, every creature falls short of the beauty of God. For He draws all things to life by His Word, from their universal substance and nature. For whether He would have good, He Himself is the Very Good, and remains in Himself; or, whether the beautiful is pleasing to Him, since He Himself is the Only Beautiful, He beholds Himself, holding in no estimation the things which move the admiration of men. That, verily, is to be accounted as in reality the most beautiful and praiseworthy, which God Himself esteems to be beautiful, even though it be contemned and despised by all else—not that which men fancy to be beautiful.

~ Methodius; to Those Who are Ashamed of the Cross of Christ

The Beautiful Ensemble

By the Trinity, thus supremely and equally and unchangeably good, all things were created; and these are not supremely and equally and unchangeably good, but yet they are good, even taken separately. Taken as a whole, however, they are very good, because their ensemble constitutes the universe in all its wonderful order and beauty.

~ Augustine, On the Holy Trinity

O Light Serene of Heavenly Birth

No dawn Thy glory knew;

O Light Serene of Heavenly Birth

No night shall chase 

Thy beams from earth,

Nor clouds pursue.

Eternal day, where Thou dost shine

Illumes the hallowed place,

And souls reflect Thy light divine,

O Lord of Grace.

O, from Thy dazzling throne come down,

To gild our darkness here,

And rend the clouds that threatening frown,

And chase our fear.

Unfading in our souls abide,

To give more beauties rare,

Than paint the earth in Summer time

When flowers are there.

O Christ, our Lord, here clouds obscure,

And beauty fades from sight;

But bring us where Thy joys endure,

In lasting light.

~ from Russian Church Hymns by John Brownlie

Adore the Being Who Gave its Harmony

Beautiful without doubt is the world, excelling, as well in its magnitude as in the arrangement of its parts, both those in the oblique circle and those about the north, and also in its spherical form. Yet it is not this, but its Artificer, that we must worship. For when any of your subjects come to you, they do not neglect to pay their homage to you, their rulers and lords, from whom they will obtain whatever they need, and address themselves to the magnificence of your palace; but, if they chance to come upon the royal residence, they bestow a passing glance of admiration on its beautiful structure: but it is to you yourselves that they show honour, as being "all in all." You sovereigns, indeed, rear and adorn your palaces for yourselves; but the world was not created because God needed it; for God is Himself everything to Himself,--light unapproachable, a perfect world, spirit, power, reason. If, therefore, the world is an instrument in tune, and moving in well-measured time, I adore the Being who gave its harmony, and strikes its notes, and sings the accordant strain, and not the instrument. 

~ Athenagoras: A Plea for the Christians

A Celestial Audience

Beauty was not a concept one could abstract from God, but was the very essence of God. Thus the realm God created displayed His beauty. Creation derived not from pragmatics, from a mere desire of the Creator to create. Creation existed because God desired to put His glory, His beauty, before a celestial audience. 

~Jonathan Edwards

Light and High Beauty

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tower high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.

~ J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

Trinitarian Beauty on Display

After this I looked, and behold, a door standing open in heaven! And the first voice, which I had heard speaking to me like a trumpet, said, “Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this.” At once I was in the Spirit, and behold, a throne stood in heaven, with one seated on the throne. And he who sat there had the appearance of jasper and carnelian, and around the throne was a rainbow that had the appearance of an emerald. Around the throne were twenty-four thrones, and seated on the thrones were twenty-four elders, clothed in white garments, with golden crowns on their heads. From the throne came flashes of lightning, and rumblings and peals of thunder, and before the throne were burning seven torches of fire, which are the seven spirits of God, and before the throne there was as it were a sea of glass, like crystal...

And between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders I saw a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain, with seven horns and with seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth. And he went and took the scroll from the right hand of him who was seated on the throne. 

Revelation 4:1-6; 5:6-7

United With the Beauty

We do not want merely to see beauty... we want something else which can hardly be put into words- to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses, and nymphs and elves." 

~ C.S. Lewis

God's Beautiful Extravagance

As far as divine beauty is concerned, if the "measure" of beauty is outgoing love for the sake of the other, it will not be long before we are forced to come to terms with excess or uncontainability, the intratrinitarian life being one of a ceaseless overflow of self-giving. There is still proportion and integrity, but it is the proportion and integrity of abundant love.

Creation, by grace, is given to share in this "excess" - indeed, creation's very existence is the result of the overflow of divine love - albeit in its own creaturely ways. So God's beautiful extravagance takes creaturely form in the oversupply of wine at Cana, the welcome Jesus shows to outcasts and sinners, the undeserved forgiveness in the first light of Easter Day. This is how creation's deformed beauty is remade, not by repair or "return to normality" but by a re-creation exceeding all balance, by a love that is absurdly lavish and profligate, surplus to all "requirement", overflowing beyond anything demanded or expected, generous beyond measure.

~ Jeremy S. Begbie, in The Beauty of God: Theology and the Arts

Imago Dei

God created us for this: to live our lives in a way that makes him look more like the greatness and the beauty and the infinite worth that he really is. This is what it means to be created in the image of God.

~ John Piper

The Basis and Standard

God is not beautiful in the sense that He shares in an idea of beauty superior to Him, so that to know it is to know Him as God. On the contrary, it is as He is God that He is also beautiful, so that He is the basis and standard of everything that is beautiful and of all ideas of the beautiful. 

~ Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics

Jesus, and Only Jesus

Jesus, and only Jesus, says Edwards, has true excellency, and so great excellency, that when [weary souls] come to see it they look no further, but the mind rests there. It sees a transcendent glory and an ineffable sweetness in Him; it sees that till now it has been pursuing shadows, but that now it has found the substance; that before it had been seeking happiness in the stream, but that now it has found the ocean. The excellency of Christ is an object adequate to the natural cravings of the soul, and is sufficient to fill the capacity. It is an infinite excellency, such a one as the mind desires, in which it can find no bounds.… Every new discovery makes this beauty appear more ravishing, and the mind sees no end; here is room enough for the mind to go deeper and deeper, and never come to the bottom. The soul is exceedingly ravished when it first looks on this beauty, and it is never weary of it. The mind never has any satiety, but Christ’s excellency is always fresh and new, and tends as much to delight, after it has seen a thousand or ten thousand years, as when it was seen the first moment.

~ Sam Storms, Pleasures Evermore

Pleasing to Him

God’s children are pleasing and lovable to him, since he sees in them the marks and features of his own countenance. For we have elsewhere taught that regeneration is a renewal of the divine image in us. Since, therefore, wherever God contemplates his own face, he both rightly loves it and holds it in honor, it is said with good reason that the lives of believers, framed to holiness and righteousness, are pleasing to him. 

~ John Calvin; Institutes, 3.17.5

Satisfied With the Fruit of Your Work

Bless the Lord, O my soul!

    O Lord my God, you are very great!

You are clothed with splendor and majesty,

covering yourself with light as with a garment,

    stretching out the heavens like a tent.

He lays the beams of his chambers on the waters;

he makes the clouds his chariot;

    he rides on the wings of the wind;

he makes his messengers winds,

    his ministers a flaming fire.

He set the earth on its foundations,

    so that it should never be moved.

You covered it with the deep as with a garment;

    the waters stood above the mountains.

At your rebuke they fled;

    at the sound of your thunder they took to flight.

The mountains rose, the valleys sank down

    to the place that you appointed for them.

You set a boundary that they may not pass,

    so that they might not again cover the earth.

You make springs gush forth in the valleys;

    they flow between the hills;

they give drink to every beast of the field;

    the wild donkeys quench their thirst.

Beside them the birds of the heavens dwell;

    they sing among the branches.

From your lofty abode you water the mountains;

    the earth is satisfied with the fruit of your work.

~ Psalm 104:1-13

Seek Higher

But what do I love, when I love Thee? not beauty of bodies, nor the fair harmony of time, nor the brightness of the light, so gladsome to our eyes, nor sweet melodies of varied songs, nor the fragrant smell of flowers, and ointments, and spices, not manna and honey, not limbs acceptable to embracements of flesh. None of these I love, when I love my God; and yet I love a kind of light, and  melody, and fragrance, and meat, and embracement when I love my God, the light, melody, fragrance, meat, embracement of my inner man: where there shineth unto my soul what space cannot contain, and there  soundeth what time beareth not away, and there smelleth what breathing disperseth not, and there tasteth what eating diminisheth not, and  there clingeth what satiety divorceth not. This is it which I love  when I love my God.

And what is this? I asked the earth, and it answered me, “I am not He”; and whatsoever are in it confessed the same. I asked the sea and the deeps, and the living creeping things, and they answered, “We are not thy God, seek higher” ... And I replied unto all the things which encompass the door of my flesh: “Ye have told me of my God, that ye are not He; tell me something of Him.” And they cried out with a loud voice, “He made us."

 ~ Augustine; Confessions

We Are From The Future

We are from the future. We are persuaded that the future belongs to beauty. Beauty will save the world. The beauty of Christ will save the world from the ugliness of greed, violence, domination, idolatry, and immorality. We believe this. So we seek to “behold the beauty of the Lord” (Psalm 27:4) and reflect that beauty back into our broken world. We do this in the hope that broken humanity will catch a glimpse of the beauty that is to be, believe in that beauty, and call upon our beautiful Savior. 

~ Brian Zahnd,  Beauty Will Save the World

The First Foundation

The first foundation of the delight a true saint has in God, is his own perfection; and the first foundation of the delight he has in Christ, is his own beauty; he appears in himself the chief among ten thousand, and altogether lovely. The way of salvation by Christ is a delightful way to him, for the sweet and admirable manifestations of the divine perfections in it: the holy doctrines of the gospel, by which God is exalted and man abased, holiness honored and promoted, and sin greatly disgraced and discouraged, and free and sovereign love manifested, are glorious doctrines in his eyes, and sweet to his taste, prior to any conception of his interest in these things.

Indeed the saints rejoice in their interest in God, and that Christ is theirs: and so they have great reason, but this is not the first spring of their joy. They first rejoice in God as glorious and excellent in himself, and then secondarily rejoice in it, that so glorious a God is theirs.—They first have their hearts filled with sweetness, from the view of Christ’s excellency, and the excellency of his grace and the beauty of the way of salvation by him, and then they have a secondary joy in that so excellent a Savior, and such excellent grace are theirs.

~ Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections

Wild

As the tokers and stoners used to say in the sixties, “He is wild, man! Wild!” They were right and still are. He was wild with Moses and Pharaoh, and He’s still wild today. He is fierce, and He acts like He owns the entire planet. No, make that the universe. He really believes that He is the most worthy, most majestic, magnificent, glorious, stunningly beautiful being in the universe. And He is fixated on the certainty that only He deserves worship—that to Him alone belong honor, glory, and praise forever and forever. With red-rimmed, stinging eyes and burning hair, all we can say is—He is right. He is astonishingly beautiful, utterly majestic and perfect in the symmetries of justice and righteousness, knowledge and wisdom. He is as hypnotically compelling as a surging forest fire and ten times as dangerous. He is out of control—ours, not His.

~ Timothy J. Stoner, The God Who Smokes: Scandalous Meditations on Faith

We Become What We Behold

For those who set their mind on things above, God promises that they will become like the Lord whom they cherish (2 Cor. 3:18). Those who think on what is excellent and praiseworthy will be beautified. We become what we behold. And as we behold our warrior King, the One who died for us in order to be eternally with us, it gives us reason to say no to false suitors and yes to Him.

Just the same, those who behold their bridegroom are literally “captivated” by Him—and that is a wonderful promise. Perseverance of the saints is secured by the beatific vision of Christ, mediated by God’s Word. Thus, through this gracious gift of seeing and savoring the all glorious Son of God, Christ’s beauty becomes a means of purification and preservation.

And it is for this reason that aesthetics is not just a peripheral subject. It is a matter of life and death. Only those who delight in the beauty of the Lord in this life will spend eternity with God in the next life. Accordingly, we who teach, lead, counsel, and witness must not only proclaim the realities of heaven and hell, we must glory in their respective beauties. Only when we do that will we and those who hear our message have a sense of what heaven and hell are really like.

May we go and see the beauty of the risen Christ in the pages of Scripture, and then may we go and tell the world of His unsurpassed value, glory, and beauty. But to do the latter, we must first do the former—and thus we must begin with a conscious, prayerful pursuit of God’s beauty. We have been given the invitation; now let us, with the psalmist, say:

“You have said, ‘Seek my face.’ My heart says to you, ‘Your face, LORD, do I seek.’ Hide not your face from me.” 

~ David Schrock

Beauty is the Showing of What is

God's pleasure--the beauty creation possesses in his regard--underlies the distinct being of creation, and so beauty is the first and truest word concerning all that appears within being; beauty is the showing of what is; God looked upon what he had wrought and saw that it was good.

— David Bentley Hart (The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth)

God Thunders Wondrously

At this also my heart trembles

    and leaps out of its place.

Keep listening to the thunder of his voice

    and the rumbling that comes from his mouth.

Under the whole heaven he lets it go,

    and his lightning to the corners of the earth.

After it his voice roars;

    he thunders with his majestic voice,

    and he does not restrain the lightnings when his voice is heard.

God thunders wondrously with his voice;

    he does great things that we cannot comprehend.

For to the snow he says, ‘Fall on the earth,’

    likewise to the downpour, his mighty downpour.

He seals up the hand of every man,

    that all men whom he made may know it.

Then the beasts go into their lairs,

    and remain in their dens.

From its chamber comes the whirlwind,

    and cold from the scattering winds.

By the breath of God ice is given,

    and the broad waters are frozen fast.

He loads the thick cloud with moisture;

    the clouds scatter his lightning.

They turn around and around by his guidance,

    to accomplish all that he commands them

    on the face of the habitable world.

Whether for correction or for his land

    or for love, he causes it to happen.

Hear this, O Job; stop and consider the wondrous works of God.

Do you know how God lays his command upon them

    and causes the lightning of his cloud to shine?

Do you know the balancings of the clouds,

    the wondrous works of him who is perfect in knowledge,

you whose garments are hot

    when the earth is still because of the south wind?

Can you, like him, spread out the skies,

    hard as a cast metal mirror?

Teach us what we shall say to him;

    we cannot draw up our case because of darkness.

Shall it be told him that I would speak?

    Did a man ever wish that he would be swallowed up?

And now no one looks on the light

    when it is bright in the skies,

    when the wind has passed and cleared them.

Out of the north comes golden splendor;

    God is clothed with awesome majesty.

The Almighty—we cannot find him;

    he is great in power;

    justice and abundant righteousness he will not violate.

Therefore men fear him;

    he does not regard any who are wise in their own conceit.

~ Job 37

The Bible is Beautiful

The way the Bible talks about God’s beauty is, well, beautiful. From the holiness brought to bear in the Pentateuch narratives to the gushing of the psalmists to God’s epic reply to Job to the wonderment of the prophets to the witness of the Gospels to the epistles’ ecstatic exultations and divine doxologies to John’s bewildering apocalypse, the Bible is beautiful with God’s intrinsic and overwhelming beauty.

 ~ Jared Wilson

The Sweetest Thing

The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing ... to find the place where all the beauty came from.

~ C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: The Myth Retold

God is the God of the Beautiful

One of my greatest difficulties in consenting to think of religion was that I thought I should have to give up my beautiful thoughts and my love for the things God has made. But I find that the happiness springing from all things not in themselves sinful is much increased by religion. God is the God of the Beautiful—Religion is the love of the Beautiful, and Heaven is the Home of the Beautiful—-Nature is tenfold brighter in the Sun of Righteousness, and my love of Nature is more intense since I became a Christian—-if indeed I am one. God has not given me such thoughts and forbidden me to enjoy them.

— George MacDonald

Their Beauty is the Voice by Which They Announce God

Does God proclaim Himself in the wonders of creation? No. All things proclaim Him, all things speak. Their beauty is the voice by which they announce God, by which they sing, "It is you who made me beautiful, not me myself but you." 

— Augustine of Hippo

God on Display in the Art Gallery of the Universe

God alone is beautiful in an absolute and unqualified sense. In God alone are perfect proportion, harmony, unity, and diversity in delicate balance, stunning brilliance, and integrity. God is beautiful! If we were able to think of God as a painting, we would say that there are no random brush strokes, no clashes of colors. God is aesthetically exquisite. In God there is absolute resolution, integration, the utter absence of even one discordant element. God has, as it were, placed Himself on display in the art gallery of the universe. He beckons His people, you and me, to stand in awe as we behold the symmetry of His attributes, the harmony of His deeds, the glory of His goodness, the overwhelming and unfathomable grandeur of His greatness; in a word, His beauty. God is infinitely splendid and invites us to come and bask in His beauty that we might enjoy Him to the fullest. 

~Sam Storms, Pleasures Evermore: The Life-Changing Power of Enjoying God

The Substance of the City of God

All that is true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, and commendable in the whole of creation, in heaven and on earth, is gathered up in the future city of God– renewed, re-created, boosted to its highest glory. The substance of the city of God is present in this creation.

Just as the caterpillar becomes a butterfly, as carbon is converted into diamond, as the grain of wheat upon dying in the ground produces other grains of wheat, as all of nature revives in the spring and dresses up in celebrative clothing, as the believing community is formed out of Adam’s fallen race, as the resurrection body is raised from the body that is dead and buried in the earth, so too, by the re-creating power of Christ, the new heaven and the new earth will one day emerge from the fire-purged elements of this world, radiant in enduring glory and forever set free from the ‘bondage to decay’ (Rom. 8:21).

More glorious than this beautiful earth, more glorious than the earthly Jerusalem, more glorious even than paradise will be the glory of the new Jerusalem, whose architect and builder is God Himself. The state of glory will be no mere restoration of the state of nature, but a re-formation that, thanks to the power of Christ, transforms all matter into form, all potency into actuality, and presents the entire creation before the face of God, brilliant in unfading splendor and blossoming in a springtime of eternal youth."

–Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 4, Holy Spirit, Church, and New Creation (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008), 720.