Over the past few weeks we’ve been thinking about beauty, and we’ve argued two very important things—that all beauty finds its source in the God who created all things and that all human beings made in his image reflect a portion of that beauty regardless of age, ability, or circumstance. If these things are in fact true, they go a long way toward helping us understand something that we all experience and know intuitively—that all human beings have a deep inner longing for beauty.
We were made to be in relationship and harmony with our Creator who is the source of all beauty, and so it should come as no surprise that all human beings, regardless of personality and regardless of character, can be easily captivated by that which we find beautiful. Whether something in nature like a sunset, canyon, waterfall, or any number of the amazing natural elements of our world, or whether that would be a person that we find beautiful, we all feel a longing for beauty within our hearts that is often felt even more strongly in contrast to all of the brokenness we see around us in a fallen world. The well-known christian theologian N. T. Wright has said that our world is at once achingly beautiful and awesomely ugly, and the ugliness that often surrounds us only makes us long for beauty even more strongly. We often see that longing expressed in various ways—whether though visual art, music, architecture, or any number of other artistic expressions that seek to communicate something of beauty we all long for.
We live in a culture that idolizes beauty—especially human beauty—and often distorts it for selfish and sinful purposes. The sinful human heart wants to control and dominate beauty according to its own selfish desires. Rather than valuing beauty and seeking to lovingly and respectfully preserve and cultivate it, the human heart selfishly consumes and destroys beauty without giving any thought to the consequences.
In the end, we know that worldly beauty is temporary and fleeting, and even the most beautiful things face the ultimate ugliness of death. In the face of this, we find our hearts longing for a beauty from outside our own existence that can never fully be satisfied. C.S. Lewis has been famously quoted as saying, “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world,” and perhaps nothing reflects this more than our longing for beauty. In the book of Ecclesiastes, God tells us that “He has put eternity into man’s heart,” and as we continue to long for beauty in the midst of a broken world, we look forward to a day when beauty will be finally and fully restored through God’s great plan of redemption in Christ Jesus our Lord and we all live with him in a world of restored beauty for all eternity. May that day come soon!
All the best,
Luke Burrow
