This piece from Edmund Clowney was originally delivered as a lecture in 1980 titled “Living Arts: Beauty and the Bible.” In it, Clowney draws out how the beauty of God’s creation is a reflection of his own beauty. Insofar as God’s creative work is revelatory of himself, it bears the marks of his character and being, including his beauty. More than that, God’s beauty is even more explicitly made known in redemption as well as creation. This is a much deeper and broader understanding of the concept of beauty when compared to that of secular aesthetics and its worldly conception of beauty, which is often arbitrary and subjective. The following article has been adapted and edited for clarity and concision. —B. McClean Smith
I want to talk about the matter of living art, and I would like to put it in a fairly wide perspective. First, I want to point out that the way the word “beauty” is used in the Bible is much broader than its use in the history of aesthetics. I want to consider with you the matter of art in a somewhat deeper sense, in the sense of the heightening and the enriching of our human experience in fellowship with the living God. This is to be taken seriously because the religious root of all art is joy in God, our Creator, and the joy that we may also have in participation in his creation. In Psalm 90, Moses writes with great power and beauty, and he concludes with an amazing passage. Beginning with verse 13, Moses cries out,
Return, O Lord, how long? and let it repent thee concerning thy servants. O satisfy us early with thy mercy; that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. Make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us, and the years wherein we have seen evil. Let thy work appear unto thy servants, and thy glory unto their children. And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us: and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.
Evident in this passage is a theme that occurs throughout the Bible: the living God reveals his beauty. And we see that the living God calls us to live before him, participating in that revelation of his beauty.
Beauty in the Works of Creation
The living God reveals his beauty in his work of creation. God’s work of creation is sealed with God’s delight in that creation. In the book of Genesis, it is often repeated, “And God saw that it was good.” This speaks to us of God’s joy in his creation, God’s contemplating his creation and finding delight in the work of his hands.
We are reminded that there is visual beauty in God’s creation. In Genesis 2:9, we read, “And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden.” It’s not only good for food, but also a tree that’s good to look at. Now, a fruit bearing tree would not have to be good to look at. It would not have to be a pleasure and a delight to the eyes. But the Lord in his creation gives this aesthetic dimension to the trees. And even the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is described in these terms as being a delight to the eyes.
Later in the prophecy of Ezekiel, when he is discussing the kingdoms of this world and their glory, he compares a great kingdom to the flourishing of a tree like the beautiful trees of the Garden of Eden. This is an image that’s taken for granted by the later prophets, that God put man in a garden that was a place of beauty, that trees in that garden were trees of beauty.
Notice also the divine ordering of creation. Great emphasis is put on that in the first chapter of Genesis; God’s work in dividing: light from darkness, day from night, the waters from the waters in the creation of the firmament, the land from the sea. There is design in the structure of God’s creation. He creates the animals after their kind and prepares his creation with design. Men too are going to be designers in God’s creation, for why else would we be told that there is gold in Havilah? There are precious stones there, the same gold and precious stones that are later mentioned in connection with the making of the epaulets of the high priests’ ephod. So God stores creation with the material you see for artisanship.
Another theme in the creation account is the evidence of abundance. There is a prolific provision for all of our needs. God creates a living, abounding, and abundant world. And in all of this, God rejoices, affirming the life he has made and pronouncing it very good. It is right for us to understand that as we are made in God’s image, we should be able to share in that vision of the satisfying beauty, wonder, and glory of the creation of God.
And God, who sealed with delight his work of creation, has also maintained it in judgment. Although man’s sin brings the curse into the world, the creation is spared. The garden itself is kept by the sword of the cherubim. The tree of life is preserved. There’s to be a new heavens and a new earth ultimately, and the creation is preserved and spared. And after the story of the flood, the earth is restored. The animals are preserved in pairs; the dove returns with the olive leaf as the sign of the new creation emerging after the judgment. A restored creation followed the flood, a renewing of life in the world.
God has charged man to be a culture maker.
Moreover, we have this theme of the restoration of God’s promise. God promises a new order of transcending glory. In the Old Testament, we observe how the prophets use the imagery of the Garden of Eden, the imagery of the glory of the original world that God has made, to describe what God will do at last. For at last, there will be the tree of life again. There will be the water of life flowing forth from the throne of God and the tree of life with the leaves for the healing of the nations. There will be a new order, all brought together in a beautiful way: a garden, a sanctuary, a city, and a wonderful unfolding and development of a fullness of a new creation.
New life abounds in the new order. The bounty of nature is described in terms of the blessings that God will at last pour out. For example, in Amos 9, we have the picture of the plowman overtaking the reaper, and those who are harvesting the grapes catching up on those who are sowing the seed, showing rapid growth there—a beautiful picture of how the Lord is the Lord of creation and how at last God’s blessing will rest upon his creation. That promise of blessing in creation is never abstracted from God the Creator. He who made the world is the one who was going to come, and the trees of the field are the trees that clap their hands before the Lord because he comes. God’s coming is the secret of all of this glory of restoration.
Beauty in the Works of Redemption
It’s also true that we find in the Bible that God reveals his beauty not just in his work of creation but also in his work of redemption and salvation. This implies a long story of God’s calling to man and God’s covenant with man, the fact that man is put in the world as God’s image bearer, that he’s called to a personal fellowship with God, and that man, male and female, is called to corporate fellowship with God and service together in creation. And the call also comes to man after the fall. God comes seeking Adam in the garden. And to the sinner, the call of God is renewed out of God’s free grace and mercy. God spares; God restrains judgment. Especially in the line of Cain, God shows that his purposes are still being maintained: the earth is still being developed; there are those in the line of Cain who develop culture, such as Jubal, the father of all those who handle the harp and the pipe. God has charged man to be a culture maker.
Culture making is ascribed to men who develop the world that God has given them. God is sparing them with the purpose that he might bring in his great promises of salvation in order that there might unfold the great history of redemption that we have in Scripture. In his work of salvation, God calls men to himself and gives them the promise of his final and full deliverance and restoration. Psalm 90, the prayer of Moses, says, “let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us: and establish thou the work of our hands upon us.” Now, that’s not only a beautiful prayer, but one that’s particularly striking in the setting.
Moses is writing as one who leads a generation that’s going to perish in the wilderness. And Psalm 90 presents with power that dreadful situation of Israel, how they are turned to destruction. God says to them in judgment, “Return, ye children of men.” They are turned back in order that they might be consumed in the desert. Because of God’s wrath they are troubled—as we would be, that God has set our iniquities before him, our secret sins in the light of his countenance. Moses describes this human existence in terms of brevity. Our life is like a sigh, and it’s gone. He describes it in contrast to God’s eternity. But against this background, Moses prays for mercy. He says, “Return, oh Lord, how long?” not that men should be returned under judgment to death in the wilderness, but that God should return in grace and mercy and deliver his people. It’s there that the beauty of God might rest upon them and that the glory of God might rest upon their children. He prays, “Establish thou the work of our hands upon us.” Now, for a generation in the wilderness, what would the work of their hands mean? What cultural monuments would be left among the rocks of Sinai? How could the work of their hands be established? He prays that the work of their hands might be established by God, given eternal significance, praying that the beauty of God might crown him and his generation, that the beauty of God be given to these wilderness wanderers walking under the doom of destruction, that God’s grace will reverse the situation and give meaning and abiding beauty to these pilgrims.
Terms for Beauty
Now, many terms for beauty in the Old Testament are applied in various ways to God and his works. One class of such terms is the term for majestic beauty.
God dwells among his people in beauty. The tabernacle is constructed with beauty by skilled craftsmen, filled with the Holy Spirit and wisdom that they might make the tabernacle with skill and artistry. God, who comes to dwell in that place of beauty, is a God who descends in a cloud of glory, of majesty. One aspect of the beauty of God seen in the Old Testament is in terms of this majestic glory in Isaiah 60:19: “The sun shall be no more thy light by day; neither for brightness shall the moon give light to thee: but the Lord will be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory.” Here, that word is translated glory, but it’s sometimes translated beauty, the majestic glory, the beauty of God, like the beauty of the cloud. “In that day shall the Lord of hosts be for a crown of glory, and for a diadem of beauty, unto the residue of his people” (Isa. 28:5).
Other terms that are used in the Old Testament refer to the beauty of intelligent design, the kind of beauty that you find in the breastplate of the high priest. And this term is used for the works of the Lord in Psalm 90:16: “let thy work appear unto thy servants, and thy glory unto their children.” The word translated is glory. There is a word that is often associated with this beauty of design, such as in Psalm 96, “oh worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.” And that’s a difficult phrase to translate. It could be “holy array.” But it’s the idea of design, of having built together a patterning, which results in beauty. A majestic ceremonial display would sometimes be associated with this thought of the beauty of a display. The term itself has the thought of intelligent design.
The third class of terms for beauty are those which refer to the beauty of delight: that one person may find in another—a woman’s beauty, a man’s beauty, the beauty of a landscape. And we read in Psalm 27:4, “One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to consider his temple.” The beauty of the Lord that’s used in this verse is this beauty of favor, grace, pleasantness, in which we find restful delight, and a thrilling perception. So you have these terms for beauty: the beauty of majestic glory, of intelligent design, the beauty of delight and of fellowship, all used in relation to God.
The Beauty of God in Christ
Now, God dwelt with his people in the tabernacle, the God of glory, the God of the cloud, the God of the hangings woven skillfully, and the God of grace, who called his people to himself that they might bear his name. That God has come to dwell with us in Jesus Christ. He showed the beauty of his majesty in the transfiguration of Jesus Christ on the mountain. It’s that God who has shown the light of the knowledge of his glory in the face of Jesus Christ. As we come to Jesus Christ, we come to the Lord of glory. We come to the one who is filled with the light of the glory of God. And the beauty of holy array is the beauty of Jesus Christ, the priest of heaven who has all the wisdom of God. If God’s beauty, as a beauty of design, is a reflection of the divine wisdom and ordering of all things, then that comes to full manifestation in Jesus Christ, in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
The beauty of grace is revealed in Jesus Christ. We’re told in Isaiah 4:2, “In that day shall the branch of the Lord be beautiful and glorious.” Over all, glory will be for a covering. And Jesus Christ, who is the branch, the root of David, the branch of God’s choosing, is the one who is the branch of beauty and glory, the beauty and glory of grace. It’s this Jesus Christ of whom the prophet says he has no beauty that we should desire him, this Jesus Christ who is made so hideous in his sufferings that he seemed to be completely dehumanized on the cross, made to be a spectacle and dehumanized in his wounding. In that agony, in that suffering, he brings to us the fullness of beauty. Psalm 90 cries out, “Who knoweth the power of thine anger? Even according to thy fear, so is thy wrath.” And the answer given in the New Testament is that Jesus Christ does, upon the cross, “for he is made to be sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Cor. 5:21). And the one who is the King of beauty and grace, the one who is the fairest of 10,000 to our souls, in him, it is fulfilled: “Thine eyes shall see the king in his beauty” (Isa. 33:17). But the mystery of the Old Testament is that when we see the king in his beauty, first of all, we see him not in the beauty of resurrection glory, but we see him in his beauty as he suffers on the cross; as there his obedience is made perfect; as there his love is made perfect; as there he gives himself for his people.
I’m not speaking of that in an effort to draw general principles from it. I’m merely pointing out the fact that God, in the wonder of his glory, manifests the beauty of his grace, and the fact that Jesus Christ bears our sins in his own body on the tree. How then are we as the people of God to receive, to walk in, to perceive, and to manifest this beauty? The psalmist prays that this beauty might be upon us and that the work of our hands might be established upon us.
Living in the Beauty of God
And here I would like to make some observations about the meaning of living our daily life in this beauty of the Lord, a bringing to expression of this beauty in our fellowship before him.
First we must perceive beauty. And our aesthetic experience responds, first of all, to the depth of wonder of God’s revelation. In our ethical life, we are called to love, but we are called to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind. And we are called to love our neighbor as ourselves. And in our cognitive life, in our knowing, we are called to know the Lord, and then to know and to perceive, and to have wisdom in the world in which God has put us. And I would suggest that the same thing is true too in our aesthetic life. First of all, we are to rejoice in the Lord. We experience the very fountain of aesthetic delight in terms of our fellowship with God himself and the joy that we know in knowing him. There is this abounding fullness of God’s revelation. We are continually surprised by joy. There are always those extra perceptions forced in upon us from the richness and the fullness of God’s work in this world that he has created, the relation of form to function as we perceive it in the leap of a deer, the symmetry of an animal, the beauty of a flower. These things are driven home to the Christian continually as showing, layer upon layer, in a wonderful arabesque of richness—all the fullness of that which God has done. There’s always more.
As we perceive the richness, it’s not just that we see more quantitatively. We see and perceive also from new and different perspectives. There is a perception of richness that is at the same time a perception of simplicity: the multidimensional discovery that we make, as we look at God’s creation from yet another point of view, of a tremendous richness in plurality drawn together in a unity and harmony of design.
Further, God’s beauty is reflected in creaturely creativity. Just as God works in such great abundance and with such richness of design, so he gives to us in a measure as his creatures to work richly and to work with profound implication in his creation.
And God calls us to doxological living. God calls us to obedience with the depth of the dimension of praise. God calls us to a living of rejoicing in him. And God calls us to a rejoicing that is a rejoicing to the fullness and the richness of his creation, both the world out there, and in the sense of our own being and our new being in Jesus Christ. The fullness of our experience given to us by God becomes the medium in which we are called to be creative in God’s image.
All this reflection of beauty is part of the way in which we are enabled to serve the Lord God as Creator because of the richness of his creation. We can share this beauty with others as we work together and share it also before God, rejoicing in him. There is a heightening in producing. There is a heightening in receiving. And I don’t think that those who have written in the field of aesthetics—stressing the heightening and the intensification of experience—I don’t think that those comments are out of order. There is a certain heightening that’s involved in the aesthetic experience, a heightening involved with perceiving the richness and the depth.
I believe perceiving also that God-grounded reality in which all of this takes place, for the final allusion that delights the heart of the Christian is the allusion to God himself, to God’s presence, who is the Creator and Source from which the possibility of all our experience flows as new creatures in Christ Jesus. All experience in the world has to be derived from his creative ordinance. And then the matter of significance of vision and meaning is the way in which we apply and perceive this beauty as over against a mere formalism in art, or an approach to art that would just see a picture, a painting, for example, in terms of formal dimensions. We as Christians must see it in a broader context. We must take seriously the history of art, so that we perceive something of the meaning and understanding that people had who were creators of arts in other periods. We have to understand that we, as creatures of God, in the fullness of our experience, necessarily work in a context where there is a framework of depth of meaning.
You should consider what it means to receive from God the richness of experience in the world of his creation, the world for which God has given his word of the promise of a new creation, a world that’s given to us by Jesus Christ, our Redeemer. He calls us to serve him and to be his people. We do not make our joy, our delight in the Lord—even in its profoundest religious sense—the totality of our obedience, because the Lord God calls us to serve him. He calls us to serve him in Christ’s kingdom. He gives us an order of priorities in the kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And in the order of priorities, we are given the marching order of our Lord and Savior in the Great Commission. And yet, while we do serve him in the Great Commission to carry the gospel to the ends of the earth, it is also true that that Great Commission, the fulfilling of all the commandments of Jesus Christ, requires of us not only that we respect priorities, not only that we seek and save that which is lost in Jesus’s name, but also that we fulfill all the fullness of God’s commandments, that we take seriously what it means to live before God in this world, returning the praise to our Creator that is his due. It isn’t just that we miss so much from life if we drop out, as it were, one dimension. It is not just that our life becomes stark and diminished. It’s that we owe to the Lord our God the fullness of a living joy before him, in which our attitude is continually one of grateful praise, blessing the name of our Creator for everything that he’s given us, delighting in it even as we go forward in his service. Moses prayed, “let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us” (Ps. 90:17). He prayed it as a blessing for life in the wilderness, and his prayer continues in Psalm 90, “establish thou the work of our hands upon us; Yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.”
My Christian friend, fill your hands with the work of the Lord, dedicate to him that which you do, whatever it is, whether it’s in words and deeds, whether it’s in paintings or words of gospel testimony, whether it’s in music or in dance—whatever you are doing, do it as unto the Lord. Do it with all your might and do it understanding that the Lord has called you to a life which, in the midst of suffering, is yet a life of joy, a life which while it proclaims the gospel to a generation dying in the wilderness can yet speak of the beauty of the Lord, a life which knows beauty not just in the God of creation, but in the suffering Savior who gave his life and rose again, that we might be brought to that last great feast in the house of God forever.