A Second Suggestive Fact: The Bible and God’s Opinions
There was no excuse for my stupid mistake about beauty. I should have known that beauty was not unimportant or “just an add on.”
God did not leave me without a clue . . . despite the errors of the age. The Bible made it clear if I had just read it with care. What did the Bible say?
First, I discovered that God lives in beauty. To cite just one example, Psalm 96: 5-6 says:
For all the gods of the peoples are worthless idols,
but the LORD made the heavens.
Splendor and majesty are before him;
strength and beauty are in his sanctuary.
As a young woman my Nana was proud and stubborn. She refused to accept Christ until she had a dream in which Christ returned. She saw her baby boy taken to Heaven and the beautiful city lowering down to Earth. The terror of the moment mixed with a deep desire to go that glorious place. The City of God was beautiful and life here on earth without the hope of God was not. Life without God was draining all beauty out of the world. The beauty of God’s court is not a matter of opinion, but of reality. That beauty helped save my Nana.
But that was not all, for Exodus 28: 1-3 was better:
Then bring near to you Aaron your brother, and his sons with him, from among the people of Israel, to serve me as priests–Aaron and Aaron’s sons, Nadab and Abihu, Eleazar and Ithamar. And you shall make holy garments for Aaron your brother, for glory and for beauty. You shall speak to all the skillful, whom I have filled with a spirit of skill, that they make Aaron’s garments to consecrate him for my priesthood.
God commanded something to be done for the sake of beauty! When great wealth was spent on the priestly garments of Aaron, God wanted it done for the sake of beauty. God believed there was skill to art . . . and that it mattered for its own sake. Nana understood and lived this. She had written the first Christmas programs to ever be performed at her little church. Up-tight members opposed it, but she prevailed. Years later she could still warm to the memory of the young man (who married a daughter and became my father!) playing the part of aged Simeon.
These were simple amateur performances, but the best that the church could do. The natural and unaffected beauty in them moved many people as the Holy Spirit honored their efforts at beauty with His presence. After all, the first Christmas was in a rough stable made stunning by a star, angels, the blessed Virgin, and the Holy Child.
I realized that my family and my childhood was wiser than my education! God had placed me on the earth to flourish, to be happy, and to know beauty. Just as I did not want to make up my own morality, so I realized that I did not want to be stuck with my own limited sense of beauty.
Too often our vision of God’s divine plan for us is too small! God wants each of his children to flourish as His children here on Earth as a preparation for an eternity of flourishing in the New Earth. Our future home is not “heaven,” if by that we mean some non-physical place utterly unlike this Earth. In the future, mankind will live on a new Earth much like this one only purged of sin. God’s loved children will live in a City and He will come down and dwell with men.
The great Greek poet Homer saw this truth when he pictured his hero Odysseus unable to find happiness in “heaven” or in “hell.” Homer could see that mankind was designed to be happy here on this Earth. What Homer could not see is how such happiness could be obtained since both man and Earth seemed broken.
Christianity finished this insight by providing for the reconciliation of man to his natural environment. A redeemed man or woman has the chance to live a full human life, to fully flourish. This life can imperfectly begin now as both our souls and our work are brought into something like right order. This life should and can be a foretaste of the New Earth.
I longed for beauty greater than my own desires, ached for it. Where was it? The culture is busy stamping it out. In West Virginia, strip mining and then strip malls covered the green hills . . . the Satanic chemical factories, which destroyed my grandfather’s lungs, poisoned the air . . . and the lights of the city obscured the stars. This was not the world God had designed for me, but this was no excuse. The Bible shouted my true destiny to me (Psalm 27:4):
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.
My desire could find rest in God! He was beautiful!
That is how Nana knew: the Bible told her so . . . that and the beautiful West Virginia hills . . . “almost heaven” . . . “so majestic and so grand” . . . but ultimately because her visionary eyes kept seeing God in the person of Jesus Christ who is beauty.