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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Our hearts are so easily distracted; we are prone to wander, even from what we love. The only way to live a life of intention rather than a life of wandering is to live our days with intention, to think about what we do each day, to implement rituals that will help us grow. Above all else, as Christians we are lovers of God, for he has made us so.

If you’ve ever gone to a church service where the liturgy is done well, you’ll know what I mean when I say there is uplift at the end. You leave looking up—perhaps physically, if the architecture embodies this theology of worship. Yet most importantly, your heart has been focused on God who, metaphorically speaking, is high. Your heart has been lifted up to him by the power of the Holy Spirit and with the creaturely aid of the liturgy. The liturgy is intentionally constructed to lift your gaze to God Most High.
Likewise, the rituals of daily life direct our gaze. Our hearts naturally wander away from God. We love so many other lesser things. Thus, we must train our hearts to gaze upon God. Our lives must be lived in such a way that we leave them one day also with uplift.
Our daily life moves us toward a telos, a final endpoint that is our purpose. By seeing ourselves within our Creator’s grand narrative, we are able to remember that our story is not the story. Rather, we are part of a much greater one. In this chiasm of redemption, (beginning in Eden, centering at the cross, and ending in Paradise), we see that our telos is in enjoying and glorifying God.
United already to God in Christ, this telos is brought into our daily lives. We find that we are more than our careers, our achievements, our social media images, and, yes, even our coffee habits. We find that we are lovers, and more importantly beloved by God, the Lover.
How do we incorporate this into our lives practically? How do we live as both lover and beloved on a daily basis? By being intentional with our daily rituals. Here are a few suggestions to get you started, but feel free to build upon any of these, adding personality and creativity.
1. In Your Home
A few months ago I got married. This is the event that led to my interest in ritual in the first place. I began to think about the structure of home life and ways to shape it with intention, so that God would be enjoyed and glorified in our new home. Practices like praying together, family devotions, being in God’s word, and singing together are a few options. Other helpful ideas include memorizing Scripture together; reading a book as a family that can be discussed throughout the week; and even table talk during shared meals wherein conversation is purposefully about one another’s spiritual lives.
If you live alone, invite friends into your home, start/join a book club, or read a book of the Bible with another person and discuss it together. Home is a sacred place where God should be remembered daily; he is our only constant companion. Remember that as individual believers, we should each spend time in the word and in prayer daily on our own.
If you spend extended amounts of time at home, one ritual that can be beneficial is playing worship music in the background during your day.
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Written by Mitchell L. Chase |
Sunday, June 4, 2023
If we will spend time thinking about the intricacies of Genesis 3 and the interconnections across Scripture, we will see how pivotal this chapter is in the biblical storyline, and we will recognize the many notions that grow out of the garden ground. If we situate the fall in Scripture’s storyline effectively, an exploration of Genesis 3 will result in greater joy in the good news about Jesus. By tuning our ears to creation’s groanings, our hope will be stirred along the way.

When a floating shelf fell from our living room wall, we heard multiple sounds at the same time. The small clay pot cracked, the frame with the picture crashed, the shelf itself was especially loud, the candleholder clattered, and a short rectangular wooden sign whacked the floor. Sitting in the living room as this happened, my wife and I jumped up to intervene and deal with the mess. It turns out that one of our sons had been on the other side of the wall and banged it at the right—or wrong—spot, causing the shelf to shift and collapse under the weight of its contents.
Not every fall is the same. But the more items involved and the greater their weight, the louder the crash and more numerous the sounds.
What would a breaking world sound like? And how long would the sounds of such a fall last?
Genesis 3 gives Bible readers the explanation of what happened between Genesis 2 and 4. The middle chapter ushers us into different conditions. In Genesis 2, the man and woman are together and without shame and in covenant with each other. The garden has plentiful food, there is a commission to multiply and subdue, and there is a benevolent Creator, whose words of wisdom will be life and peace for his image bearers. Then in Genesis 4, an older brother murders his younger brother, and this tragedy happens after the elder’s sacrifice is rejected while the younger’s is accepted.
What explains the transition from peace to tragedy? What accounts for the rise of wickedness? The content of Genesis 3. It’s the scene that changes everything for everyone. It’s the part of the movie that has such explanatory power, you’re just confused if you return after leaving the room for a few minutes.
During a series of talks addressing temptation, D. A. Carson once said:
What’s the importance of Genesis 3 to our thinking? The primary importance is that it sets the stage for the entire Bible storyline. Problems and solutions must match. If you want to understand what the Gospel is about, what Jesus is about, what the cross achieves, then you must understand the nature of the problem they address.1
There are different ways to conceive of the Bible’s storyline. You can think of the Old Testament as what anticipates Jesus and the New Testament as what announces his arrival. You can view Scripture as the epic of God’s redemptive story where he promises, advances, and then fulfills his plan to raise up a Savior for sinners. You can notice how the Bible begins with the story of creation and ends with the hope of new creation.
One helpful and popular way to conceive of the Bible’s storyline is with four words: creation, fall, redemption, consummation. What would consummation mean without our understanding of what was reaching a culmination?
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