Sunday, November 11, 2012


"Created things can be aesthetically beautiful (God said so when he declared them “very good”). God’s beauty, however, is more than a description; it is inherent to His eternal being. The loveliness of His character means that His beauty transcends our feeble attempts to put an aesthetic label on it. As Jonathan Edwards wrote, For 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 . . . is the foundation and fountain of all being and all beauty.5 This is what the heavens shout. This is what every good and desirable beauty in the universe declares. God is Himself beautiful and is the sum of all that is desirable. The more admirable and beautiful something is, the more blasphemous it is not to desire and delight in it. God is the object of our beauty cravings. As the beauty beyond and behind all created beauty, He is the measure of what is truly beautiful. A yardstick provides us with a simple illustration. A yardstick measures a yard and is itself a yard. God’s beauty is like that. He is beauty, and He is the measure of all beauty. But God is far more than just the measure of beauty. He’s the source and the standard of beauty. In one sense, He is like the sun. When you pick paint colors for your home, you’re often advised to look at the paint sample in the sun. Why? If you want to see the true color, you have to place the sample or chip in sunlight. The sun is the source of light, and its rays reveal the true beauty in everything else. God’s beauty is like that. He is what He measures. His beauty is essence and source, attribute and adjective. He is what all the beauties we experience flow from and reflect."

DeWitt, Steve (2012-03-01). Eyes Wide Open (pp. 17-18). Credo House Publishers. Kindle Edition.

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