Written by David A. Covington |
Sunday, April 16, 2023
We skim now on the surface tension between two cultural impulses: our inclination to rely on facts, doctrines and arguments to ballast and direct wandering affections; and our inclination to rely on aesthetic impulses toward beauty to move us and others toward God. Each inclination is half right, but each hides a lie we treasure: that we are naturally qualified, without regeneration, to recognize God’s truth or his beauty.

Something attracted us today—a suggestive scent, a lovely turn of a phrase, a surprising smile, a generous deed, an elegant idea. Do you remember yours? For me, it was a sip of wine-in-the-making, sweet as the juice, and sparkling as champagne, like the “new wine” in Jesus’s parable. We answered with a smile; its delight reminded us of a similar one just last week. Again, we are attracted; we move closer.
If attraction to beauty leads us toward God, then we can follow our attractions and let our neighbors follow theirs, confident that when beauty stirs us, our responses move us in the same God-ward direction.
A painter friend asked me last week what I was writing. When I explained, she wondered aloud, “If beauty could lead us to God, why isn’t everyone a Christian?” There must be more going on here.
In a media rich age, we are readier than ever to look to beauty as a lever of cultural influence, particularly in discipleship, evangelism, and apologetics. Many are setting aside the levers of evidence, facts, doctrine, and reason, and looking around for a new tool. An old friend, the power of beauty and our attraction to it seems to pull us even before truth’s persuasion kicks in. Beauty’s compelling power, especially when paired with emotionally rich liturgies, music, and devotional habits, marks a path to God that promises to out-perform hobbled doctrines and closely reasoned arguments. Stories stir us. Narrative, literary approaches, and the arts enjoy a surge of interest, while catechisms and systematic theology hobble at the rear.
And why not? God, the creator and source of all beauty, is himself beautiful. His creation stirs admiration for itself and its maker. “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps. 19:1). People, too, can make the beautiful—a wine (I can hope), an algorithm, a hymn. God, who everywhere reveals his glory in created beauty, attracts people through this beauty. Some will see and turn to him. Does beauty lead us to God?
Leads Where?
Beauty is everywhere, even in its conspicuous absence. It always leads people. Where? It can lead anywhere. Differing tastes can account for some of this diversity. Individual senses of beauty differ, as do cultures, regions, and eras. Even an individual’s tastes fluctuate day by day, even hour by hour, and develop with years. How can we account for subjective tastes without denying beauty’s obvious solidity? And how can we account for objective beauties while respecting diverse and dynamic tastes? Neither objectivity nor subjectivity alone can finally explain beauty and give us confidence to follow its pull. Beauty may lead us toward God, but at least as often away from God. Even our attractions to beauty draw us to other gods.
Beauty appears often in Scripture: sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes mysterious. People’s taste for beauty figures even larger. The Old Testament frequently says, “in your eyes,” or “in his eyes” to highlight different assessments of honor, justice, truth and beauty, between person and person, and between people and God. Subjective and contradictory human differences, though inescapable now, might find growing agreement if our senses of beauty agreed more closely with God’s. Three obstructions, though, hamper us from sharing God’s taste for beauty.
Three Beauty Blockades
“Stolen Water is Sweet”— Our Taste is Twisted
Eve saw the beauty—“delight to the eyes”—of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil twice: once, before her disobedience, she saw it through God’s eyes, sharing his enjoyment of it, his law about it, and his purpose for it. Then, believing the Serpent, she saw the beautiful fruit alone, excluding God’s vision—the first private indulgence. The beauty that Eve and Adam saw and shared with God one day, the next led them away from God. We follow in their footsteps, seeking the beautiful in our own eyes, as if our tastes, our perception of beauty, were reliable, undamaged by their rebellion, or our own; as if redemption, while needed to restore our sin-twisted sense of truth, were not really needed to restore our sense of beauty.
“He Had…No Beauty”— God Hides His Beauty
Some biblical beauty cameos look deliberately obscure. If we relied on our natural sense of beauty to draw us to God, what must we make of Lot’s nearly-fatal choice of the sumptuous Jordan Valley, leaving dusty Canaan to Abraham? A puzzling preference for the aesthetically inferior pops up often in the OT: Jacob opts for livestock that is streaked or spotted; Leah the plain-looking bears Jacob more children than beautiful Rachel; God preferred David the punk kid to Saul the tall, dark and handsome, and even to David’s showy older brother, Eliab. “The Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.”
God even hides the beauty of his chosen Servant: “…he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, no beauty that we should desire him.” And so it proved; people who saw the Son of God in the flesh noted how unimpressive he looked. Paul, too, looked unimpressive, and knew it: “…his bodily presence is weak, and his speech of no account.”  Sin has twisted our taste for beauty, and God seems to prefer the ugly, even hides his beauty deliberately. Could beauty’s pull on us meet any worse troubles?
“A Fragrance From Death to Death”— Satanic Blinding
The Enemy “has blinded the minds of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”
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Pilate would gladly be free from the blood of the innocent Christ, so not only does he wash his hands, but he says of himself, “I am free.” But a basin of water from the local spring can do nothing to free us from the stain of sin. The only effectual cleansing for a heart racked by sin is the washing of water by the word (Eph. 5:26). We must personally partake of the Water of Life if we desire to be thoroughly clean and truly free.   

And he said unto them the third time, Why, what evil hath he done? I have found no cause of death in him: I will therefore chastise him, and let him go.(Luke 23:22).
How often are we backed into a position of choice between taking our stand alone with Christ or succumbing to the jeering crowd making a mockery of our God? At this mock trial of Christ before the people, with Pilate occupying the judge’s seat, he finds himself in a similar predicament. He must either condemn this Jew whom he believes to be innocent or identify himself as an enemy of Caesar. That is precisely the choice put to him by the religious leaders who initially brought Jesus to Pilate, “He that makes himself a king as this man does is an enemy to Caesar, and if you let him go, you are not Caesar’s friend,” (John 19:12).
Pilate is afraid of either choice and would happily spare both Jesus and Barabbas, but that choice is not an option. And so, he chooses to spare himself rather than Jesus. The religious leaders brought Christ to trial out of envy (Matt. 27:18), and Pilate delivers him over to the executioners out of fear. Pronouncing Christ’s innocence and publicly washing his hands of his blood guiltiness only serves to secure his own eternal condemnation, for innocence either absolves the prisoner or condemns the judge. To say, “Take him and crucify him,” and yet, “I find no fault in the man,” (John 19:6; Luke 23:14) turns the point of Pilate’s sword into his own heart and makes the bench the bar.
With his wife’s dream and our Savior’s confession on the one side (Matt. 27:19), and the people’s willful violence and the threat of being identified as Caesar’s enemy on the other, Pilate’s soul is bound for destruction. How soon does he discover that his own conscience is a worse enemy than Caesar? Guilt at once kindles in the heart both shame and horror (Matt. 27:24), and it is so fierce a fire that the basin of water before him cannot put it out. For what can a little water in a bowl or even Jordan’s floods do toward washing those stained hands that had the power to release innocence and yet chose not to (John 19:10)?
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It’s probably still the best plan of action to at least try to follow the Matthew 18 pattern as close as you can for as far as you can. We shouldn’t be in a rush to write someone off (1 Cor 13:7). We don’t want to assume the worst. We should long for restored relationship more than personal vindication.

Matthew 18:15-20 presumes a fair bit of openness between the people of God in a local church. “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone” (Matt 18:15). These instructions are counter-cultural to many church environments I’ve been a part of, where it seemed common for an offended person to talk to almost everybody else rather than the actual person who had wronged them.
This is particularly true when the dispute includes the church leadership. Despite Paul’s command not to “admit a charge against an elder except on the evidence of two or three witnesses” (1 Tim 5:19, cf. Matt 18:16), many church-goers apparently feel very free to broadcast their leaders’ supposed shortcomings far and wide, with little impulse to actually talk to those leaders themselves first.
How do people find their way around such clear biblical mandates? The most common excuse I’ve heard for not having a Matthew 18:15 conversation is that the offended person didn’t think the offender will listen to them. This excuse can take many forms:

“I really didn’t think that I’d be heard.”
“That person just doesn’t listen to people.”
“Last time I tried to talk to them, I didn’t feel heard.”
“I didn’t think the conversation would go anywhere.”

Sound familiar at all? If so, how should we respond to this? Here’s four reflections on this apparent Matthew 18 loop-hole:
1. Being understood is not a prerequisite for obedience
Matthew 18:15 doesn’t say, “Go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone, but only if you think he’ll listen to you.” Whether we think the other person will listen should have nothing to do with whether we’ll obey Jesus or not. Why would we think that, just because the first conversation will be unsuccessful, we’re allowed to skip the process entirely?
Ironically, verse 16 and following contain a number of follow-up steps which describe what actions to take in the event that the offender doesn’t listen—and none of them involve not having that first conversation. Jesus expects us to obey Him, regardless of what we think the outcome might be.
2. “Feeling heard” may not be the same as being heard
Apparently, “heard” is a feeling—at least given how some people talk. Phrases like “I really felt heard,” or, “I didn’t feel heard” give the impression that our emotions are a reliable guide to the effectiveness of a conversation.
Sadly, some take it even further. In my experience, some people only “feel heard” if the other person agrees with them. When they have a problem with someone else in their church, or particularly their church leadership, they don’t come with a humble attitude that seeks understanding and clarification. It doesn’t occur to them that perhaps they have misunderstood, or even that they could be in the wrong. They come to deliver a verdict, and any attempt to help them see things from a different perspective will be interpreted as “not feeling heard.”
Once again, Matthew 18 puts us back on track with its careful checks and balances. The involvement of the body of Christ, first as one or two witnesses (v. 16), and then as the entire church (v. 17), prevents one person from acting as judge, jury, and executioner. Submitting to the Matthew 18 process requires each party to accept that they might not know, see, or understand everything perfectly.
“Love…does not insist on its own way” (1 Cor 13:4-5). And once we get that, we should have no problem with the fact that some people will hear us just perfectly—and still disagree with us.
I’m pretty sure Moses didn’t “feel heard” (at least in the modern sense) when he was dialoguing with God in Exodus 3-4.
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