"We can’t help ourselves. We were made to crave. The absence of satisfaction the world over begs the question Why? What or whom are we seeking? The Craved When people think of God, they often consider His power or holiness or love or mercy. But how many people think of God as intrinsically beautiful? Yet it is God who created beauty. He is the Beauty behind every beauty. I am a pastor. I spend my life trying to persuade people that God alone is worthy of their love, dreams, passions—essentially their lives. I often find this to be a tough sell. The primary reason is that for fallen humanity God’s desirability is in competition with His created beauties. Created beauty eclipses God’s beauty in the desire factory of man’s heart. It is a case of mistaken identity. Every created beauty was created by God to lead our affections to Him. That’s why He made the pleasures of earthly beauty so fleeting—so that on the other side of the pleasure we might experience either wonder and worship and ultimate satisfaction in God or the pursuit of the pleasure that beauty provides for its own sake. If we choose the latter, we will only be disappointed again. The ancient church theologian Augustine, a man well acquainted with the fleeting pleasures of sin prior to his conversion to Christ, observed, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” Pascal wrote, “The world everywhere gives evidence of a vanished God, and man in all his actions gives evidence of a longing for that God.”3 Beauty Fulfilled I sometimes wonder how it is possible that our culture and society could have missed this truth on such a massive scale. When every popular beauty and pleasure in our culture shouts that God is beautiful, how can so many millions of people completely miss the point? How can they not hear? How can they look and listen and touch and taste and not get it?"

DeWitt, Steve (2012-03-01). Eyes Wide Open (pp. 7-8). Credo House Publishers. Kindle Edition.

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