In the August 2024 edition of Evangelical Times, I wrote about ‘the beauty of God’ from Psalm 27:4, where David expresses his desire to ‘behold the beauty of the Lord’. He tells us that it is the ‘one thing’ that he longed for. I likened such desire to the ‘seeking’ of the merchant in the Lord’s parable in Matthew 13:45-46 and the determination of the Apostle Paul in Philippians 3:7-9.
We will know little of the beauty of God unless (like David, the merchant, and the apostle Paul) we are wholehearted in our desire to know him more fully. The ultimate fulfilment of the desire of David in Psalm 27 is clearly the heavenly view that we will have of the Lord eternally. But is there a ‘beholding’ that the Christian may enjoy before then? I think that there certainly is!
Let me suggest one theological truth that we can easily pass by; the fact that God is beautiful in his being. God is beautiful by virtue of his ‘being God’! God is the archetype of beauty. All other beauty flows from his own beauty alone. Nothing else can be beautiful unless God had been eternally beautiful in himself.
