Nine-year-olds tell it straight. A boy in my morning class once asked me, “Miss, why do you look like you just woke up?” Another day he walked in sighing and clutching his chest. “I’m just so glad you aren’t wearing a wig again today!” The wig? My new bangs, hidden behind a headband.

Unlike adults, most kids don’t have a category for off-limit topics regarding appearance. While most adults would cry conversational foul play, bad haircuts, weight gain, and receding hairlines are all fair game for fourth graders. Why do kids feel free to describe beauty in both its presence and its absence?

At least in part, kids talk about appearance because, in their eyes, it’s just that. When students tell me how I look, that’s exactly what they’re doing — telling me how I look. They make no claims about who I am. If my ponytail looks “super weird today,” they say so — because my hairstyle does not undermine my identity as their beloved teacher.

Too often, however, we invest physical beauty with far more significance. We treat beauty as a means to self-worth: how we look is who we are. But if we would only gaze upon God’s word with the eyes of a child, we might unlatch beauty from its worldly contortions and fasten it instead to the God who is Beauty himself.

Beauty by the World

Left to our own devices, we define beauty a lot like the Evil Queen. We stand enraptured before the mirror, waiting for it to tell us how our appearance measures up to others across the land. In sin-twisted kingdoms, to be beautiful is to be attractive to as many human eyes as possible.

“We age, and lose it. Generations pass, and alter it. Staying beautiful is flat-out exhausting (and expensive).”

But beneath those eyes lie hearts whose visual appetite is insatiable. They flit from post to post, screen to screen, trend to trend — idol to idol — waiting to be satisfied. Nothing will do. That’s why an attractive-and-therefore-beautiful appearance, both as a personal possession and cultural definition, expires. We age, and lose it. Generations pass, and alter it. Staying beautiful is flat-out exhausting (and expensive).

While describing my teenage years to a group of girls, I mentioned how “thin and lanky” I was. They looked at me in horror. Cutting me off, one student exclaimed, “Miss, you are not thin! You’re perfect.” The other girls agreed. “Yeah, miss! Don’t say that. You are not thin. You’re beautiful.” Their words struck me silent. The teenage me had lived in a world where beauty required thinness; in their world, beauty required not thinness. I heard in their words not a compliment, but a truth claim: worldly beauty is fickle.

God warned us. Thousands of years ago, he said, “Beauty is vain” (Proverbs 31:30) — or according to some translations, “fleeting” (NIV). The adjective’s literal meaning packs the greatest punch, as the Hebrew word heḇel denotes “breath.” From the perspective of an eternal God, beauty vanishes with the rise and fall of a chest. If we put our hope in beauty, it will betray us — and quickly.

Does that mean God wants Christian women to toss out the mascara and throw in the washcloth? No makeup, no dyed hair, no new clothes, no gym membership — nothing? Shall we consign ourselves to a life of bedhead, wigs, and super weird ponytails? These aren’t bad questions, but they are the wrong ones. Instead we should ask, How does God’s definition of beauty change our pursuit of beauty?

Beauty from God

In God’s economy, beauty does not fret over itself, or talk about itself, or make purchases for itself, or dawdle over pictures of itself. For God-defined beauty cannot be seen in a mirror. Rather, it pulses: “Man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). Beauty flows from a heart that beats with moral goodness — love for, delight in, and submission to God (Acts 13:22).

Unlike our pursuit of physical beauty, we cannot fret, talk, purchase, or edit our way to heart-level beauty. The Beauty — with a capital B — for which we ought to exert the most energy, the Beauty on which we ought to spend the most time and resources, is one we cannot powder onto our faces. It is a Person we must pursue.

This Person is Jesus, the only man whose heart sought God perfectly for a lifetime. In him we find, and from him we receive, true Beauty. And it is not the beauty of appearance:

He had no form or majesty that we should look at him,     and no beauty that we should desire him.He was despised and rejected by men,     a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;and as one from whom men hide their faces     he was despised, and we esteemed him not. (Isaiah 53:2–3)

Rather, it is the Beauty that loves and sacrifices itself for others, in which God delights:

He was pierced for our transgressions;     he was crushed for our iniquities;upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,     and with his wounds we are healed. (Isaiah 53:5)

This is the Beauty that does not perish upon makeup removal or spoil from one trend to the next. It is the Beauty that endures with laughter the aging process and the innocent comments of children (Proverbs 31:25). For regardless of appearance, its identity is secure: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17).

Beauty as Possession and Pursuit

Dear women: If we call the beloved Son “Savior” and “Lord” (Romans 10:9), we possess this Beauty forevermore. For in God’s sight we have been clothed for all time with Christ’s sacrificial love (Galatians 2:20). There is no need to fuss over becoming and staying beautiful on this earth. Christ is eternal Beauty Himself — and our lives are hidden in him (Colossians 3:3).

We still labor for beauty — but not now for the beauty of appearance. If we possess Beauty in Christ, we will pursue the Beauty of Christ. We will strive, as those who are free from the world’s fickle fashions, to emulate an everlasting Beauty — to live as if God’s glory is real, precious, and worth pursuing, now and always.

Becoming more like-hearted to God’s beloved Son will never go out of vogue. We can exhaust ourselves in the pursuit of Christ’s Beauty, sure that “we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18). When the day ends, we will not crawl into bed with less money and more products. We will drift off radiating God’s Beauty in Christ, satisfied.

Beauty as a Means

As Beauty becomes ours ever more in Christ, beauty — with a lowercase b — will take its rightful place as a God-given, God-exalting gift. God cares about visual beauty because, well, he makes and sustains its every expression. He made us in his image, to image him. For our part, we humbly, happily use what he has made to exalt him who made it (Colossians 1:16).

“If we don’t watch ourselves, we will end up only watching ourselves.”

As with any morally neutral hobby, we seek to use earthly beauty to illumine heavenly realities. As we dab at our faces in the morning hours, we can wonder at the way God paints the sky (Psalm 19:1). We can adopt new styles with hearts enthralled by the God who has provided us with an imperishable garment — the righteousness of Christ (Isaiah 61:10). We can enjoy beauty without self-obsession when we seek to enjoy its Fount.

I’m not saying we have to pair Scripture and meditation to all our beautifying. Many activities whirl past us unexamined. But we all can agree that beauty — like many other endeavors, such as athletics or a career — has great capacity to be self-centered. If we don’t watch ourselves, we will end up only watching ourselves.

As my students discover lip gloss and T-shirt dresses, I pray they learn to use beauty as a means to enjoy and exalt God rather than self. I hope they know the beauty with which God already has created them and the Beauty to which he beckons them. Even so, they cannot learn what Christian women neither understand for themselves nor model for others. Let’s see beauty for what it is, as we lay hold of Beauty for who he is.

I looked for someone among them who would build up the wall and stand before me in the gap on behalf of the land so I would not have to destroy it, but I found no one. (Ezekiel 22:30 NIV)

I do not have a “life verse,” or even a favorite Bible verse. That is not a criticism of those who enjoy such blessings; it may even be a confession that in some domains I have a short attention span. But I would find it easier to list a hundred (or a thousand!) verses that have shaped my life in some significant way than to list one that can claim exclusive influence.

Often these verses have come to me at a well-defined period of my life, and have consequently “spoken” to me with particular clarity and unction. For example, when in recent years I’ve engaged in evangelistic preaching in a hostile context, I’ve often pondered Psalm 36:1 (NIV): “I have a message from God in my heart concerning the sinfulness of the wicked: There is no fear of God before their eyes.”

From my days as a seminary student, I’ve often pondered Revelation 19:6–7 (NIV): “Hallelujah! For our Lord God Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory! For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready.” Doubtless I join millions of other believers in listing Lamentations 3:21–24 (NIV): “Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself, ‘The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.’”

Yet one verse in particular played a significant role in my calling to vocational ministry.

Will I Wish I Had Given More?

At the time I was studying chemistry at McGill University, and enjoying the work well enough. For a few months I found myself in Ottawa, in a chemistry lab operated by the Canadian federal government, focusing on air pollution. I was thoroughly enjoying my life and labor.

At the same time, I was devoting some of my energy, especially on the weekends, to helping a friend plant a new church a little farther up the Valley. It was not long before I began to wonder if I should be considering vocational ministry. I could not shake off a chorus I learned in Sunday school:

By and by when I look on his face —Beautiful face, thorn-shadowed face —By and by when I look at his face,I’ll wish I had given him more.

Of course, I understood, even then (more than fifty years ago), that some people are called to be chemists, others teachers, workers in waste management, and so forth: for them, the “more” of the chorus includes such vocations. But still, I could not erase that chorus from my mind, and the sense that “more” for me was leading somewhere else.

Standing in the Gap

In September of that year, on a Sunday evening back in my home church in Montréal, I heard a missionary to Haiti, one Richard Wilkinson, give an address on Ezekiel 22:30 (NIV), where God tells the prophet, “I looked for someone among them who would build up the wall and stand before me in the gap on behalf of the land so I would not have to destroy it, but I found no one.”

And my whole being cried out in response, “Here am I! Send me!” (see Isaiah 6:8). The context of Isaiah 6 shows that Isaiah’s volunteering was simultaneously the product of contrition and of presumption; I certainly did not escape the latter.

Nevertheless, that sermon based on Ezekiel 22, where God testifies that he looked for someone to “stand in the gap” before him but found no one, was one of the providential pieces that God used that year to direct me away from chemistry and toward vocational ministry.

How Might the Verse Apply to Me?

I come from a Bible-reading home. We kids were early taught to pay attention to context. As I read God’s words in Ezekiel 22:30, it was clear to me that he was not promising wrath to sinful Canadians in the 1960s, but was threatening wrath on Judea about six centuries before Jesus: that was when no one showed up to “stand in the gap” before God so that he would not have to destroy his covenant people.

“God seeks someone to intercede with him on behalf of his sinful people today.”

To apply it to myself, I implicitly deployed an argument by analogy: just as God sought someone to intercede with him on behalf of his sinful people more than two and a half millennia ago but found no one, so too God seeks someone to intercede with him on behalf of his sinful people today.

Will he again find no one? It is a powerful appeal. I found it so as a young man, and still find it so today.

Standing Through Prayer

Many more years of Bible reading have brought me to think about a number of additional textual details.

Almost two decades later, I heard another preacher expound Ezekiel 22:30 and some related passages. This too occurred during a Sunday evening service, but the location of the church was in Cambridge, England. The preacher was Theo Donner, originally from the Netherlands. After securing a doctorate at Cambridge, he and his Scottish wife went to Medellin, Colombia, as missionaries, where they have served with distinction ever since. The sermon to which I am referring was delivered during one of his periodic sojourns back in Cambridge.

I do not remember all the points he drew from the text, but I recall how he focused our attention on several relevant passages. On the one hand, when the covenant people confess their sin to Samuel — the sin of wanting a king so as to be like the pagan nations around them — Samuel reassures them that “the Lord will not reject his people, because the Lord was pleased to make you his own.” Then Samuel adds, “As for me, far be it from me that I should sin against the Lord by failing to pray for you” (1 Samuel 12:22–23). In other words, intercessory prayer on behalf of the people of God was part of Samuel’s calling.

On the other hand, a different dynamic is disclosed in Amos. When God threatens catastrophic judgment, Amos intercedes with the words, “Sovereign Lord, forgive! How can Jacob survive? He is so small!” The biblical text goes on, “So the Lord relented. ‘This will not happen either,’ the sovereign Lord said” (Amos 7:2 NIV; cf. 7:5–6 NIV). But eventually, God declares, “I will spare them no longer” (Amos 7:8 NIV). The time for intercessory prayer has passed.

Elsewhere, we are told that Samuel is not even to mourn over Saul, once the Lord has rejected him (1 Samuel 16:1). In other words, Ezekiel 22:30 is just one passage that depicts the complex web by which God orders the lives of his people through God-mandated (or even God-forbidden!) prayer. For those drawn to meditate on the mysteries of providence, there is much grist for the mill in Ezekiel 22 and parallel passages.

Standing in the Darkness

Next, the preceding verses of Ezekiel 22:30 show that the sins and failures of the people were widely distributed.

The princes conspire together to “devour people, take treasures and precious things and make many widows within her” (Ezekiel 22:25 NIV); the priests “do violence to my law and profane my holy things” (Ezekiel 22:26 NIV); the officials “are like wolves tearing their prey; they shed blood and kill people to make unjust gain” (Ezekiel 22:27 NIV); the prophets “whitewash these deeds for them by false visions and lying divinations. They say, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says’ — when the Lord has not spoken” (Ezekiel 22:28 NIV); and the people “practice extortion and commit robbery; they oppress the poor and needy and mistreat the foreigner, denying them justice” (Ezekiel 22:29 NIV).

“The need to stand in the gap before God is as urgent now as it was six hundred years before Christ.”

That is the context of darkness in which God declares, “I looked for someone among them who would build up the wall and stand before me in the gap on behalf of the land so I would not have to destroy it, but I found no one.”

There are many biblical passages in which God seeks out and appoints prophets, priests, kings, apostles, gospel heralds. In the context of Ezekiel 22, however, God is looking for an intercessor who by God’s own appointment blocks God’s way, as it were (not unlike Moses in Exodus 32–34).

With this verse, set in the context of Ezekiel and in the context of my own life, God challenged me to think more carefully and prayerfully about what he wanted me to do with my life. And the need to stand in the gap before God is as urgent now as it was six hundred years before Christ.

What is Look at the Book?

You look at a Bible text on the screen. You listen to John Piper. You watch his pen “draw out” meaning. You see for yourself whether the meaning is really there. And (we pray!) all that God is for you in Christ explodes with faith, and joy, and love.