Oh, to See God’s Beauty and Live in Eternity’s Sunrise
What difference does it make to know that beauty is our destiny? As believers in a beautiful Savior, we should have a heightened awareness of the beauty of creation, of the brokenness of beauty in a fallen world, and of the beauty God is bringing in our redemption. The world is more beautiful for us and also more painful. But we are not without hope because by his beautiful life and death and resurrection, Jesus has the power to bring beauty out of ashes. “In Jesus Christ,” writes Jeremy Begbie, “divine beauty has, so to speak, got to grips with the wounded and deformed beauty of the world; in the incarnate Son, crucified, risen and now exalted, we witness God’s re-creation of the world’s beauty.”[1]
Redemptive beauty is for now as well as later. Even as we await our final beautification, we catch present glimpses of God’s redeeming beauty. These previews of the beatific vision give us rising hope that one day we will see the face of God.
As president of Wheaton College, I see God’s beauty on our campus every day. I see it in ardent student worship. I see it when summer turns to fall and the trees show the colors from their autumn collection. I see it in the love that caregivers in our Community School of the Arts show to children with special needs as they share the gift of music. I see it too when roommates have a conflict and then reconcile.
I also see beauty across the subjects we study in our Christ-centered liberal arts curriculum. It is in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, in all their literary variety. It is in cultures and communities and in the mysteries of the human heart and soul. It is in the beauty of words—how they are written and spoken in English and other languages. It is also in the austere beauty of numbers and equations. Edna St. Vincent Millay rightly declared, in the title to one of her poems, “Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare.”[2]
Scientists also see beauty everywhere as they study the natural world. To give just one example, a team of lab physicists thrilled the world in 2021 by exposing the inner workings of the aurora borealis, or northern lights. Working in UCLA’s plasma labs under the leadership of Jim Schroeder, these scientists demonstrated for the first time that when electrons shooting out from solar winds collide with earth’s upper atmosphere, they surf electromagnetic Alfvén waves to reach speeds up to forty million miles per hour, thus producing the spectacular colors of the polar lights.[3] This discovery adds more wonder and awe to our experience of beauty, as science often does. When we keep our eyes wide open, we see the beauty of God everywhere we look, from earth to sky.
Our loving Lord gives us these varied glimpses of intrinsic beauty to awaken in us a transcendent, expectant desire that will be fully and finally satisfied when we gaze into the face of Jesus Christ. In the meantime, seeing the grandeur that God brings everywhere into the world helps us “live in eternity’s sunrise,” as the poet William Blake once expressed it.[4] Such experiences awaken our aesthetic appreciation, sharpen our spiritual sensibilities, and produce in us a deep longing to go beyond these earthly glimpses and get to the place where we can gaze.
The Bible makes it clear that “no one has ever seen God” (John 1:18), “who dwells in unapproachable light” (1 Tim. 6:16), because no sinful mortal can behold the glory of God’s unmediated holiness—and then live to tell about it (Ex. 33:20). But the Bible also promises that one day we will see God’s glory for ourselves, in the face of our beautiful Savior.
I will never forget the moment when my daughter Kathryn was baptized. Since we are faithful Presbyterians, this was infant baptism, and I was holding my baby girl in my arms. The minister reminded us that the name Kathryn comes from the Greek word for pure. Then he quoted a blessed promise that includes her precious name—a promise Jesus gave in his Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matt. 5:8). The whole spinning world stopped in that moment as I looked down into the face of my beautiful Kathryn—blessed and pure—and knew how her story would end: one day my beloved would look into her Beloved’s face.
This promise is for all God’s pure ones—his precious sons and daughters. If you are a child of God, made pure by the righteous blood of your Savior, then beauty is your destiny too—the eternal, shining beauty you will behold and become forever when you see your crucified, risen Lord Jesus face-to-face.
Content taken from Excerpt from Beauty Is Your Destiny: How the Promise of Splendor Changes Everything by Philip Ryken, ©2023. Used by permission of Crossway.
Philip Graham Ryken (DPhil, University of Oxford) is the eighth president of Wheaton College. He preached at Philadelphia’s Tenth Presbyterian Church from 1995 until his appointment at Wheaton in 2010. Ryken has published more than 50 books, including When Trouble Comes and expository commentaries on Exodus, Ecclesiastes, and Jeremiah. He serves as a board member for the Gospel Coalition, the Lausanne Movement, and the National Association of Evangelicals.
[1] Jeremy S. Begbie, “Created Beauty: The Witness of J. S. Bach,” in Treier, Husbands, and Lundin, The Beauty of God: Theology and the Arts, 27.
[2] Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare,” Poetry Foundation, accessed December 19, 2022, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/.
[3] Tiara Walters, “Making Heaven in a Lab: Scientists Solve the Mystery of the Aurora,” Daily Maverick, June 12–18, 2021, 168.
[4] William Blake, “Eternity,” Academy of American Poets, accessed December 19, 2022, https://www.poets.org/. Public domain.