The Beauty of Holiness

(Psalm 96:6-9) Honour and majesty are before him: strength and beauty are in his sanctuary. Give unto the LORD, O ye kindreds of the people, give unto the LORD glory and strength. Give unto the LORD the glory due unto his name: bring an offering, and come into his courts. O worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness: fear before him, all the earth.

The Holy Scriptures abound with references to the dwelling place of Jehovah, and each of these references abounds with detailed descriptions of the majestic glory and exquisite beauty of God’s habitation.

Before the Fall, Jehovah met with our first parents in a luscious garden, perched atop a mountain from which flowed a single river that soon parted into four. After the Fall, the patriarchs met with God in groves of trees planted on the high places. In the wilderness, Jehovah gave His people an incredibly complex list of instructions regarding the construction of His house, right down to the color, arrangement and types of materials to be used. When it was time to build the Temple in Jerusalem, God gave similarly detailed instructions, and one can only imagine the majestically glorious and exquisitely beautiful dwellings that resulted from God’s commands and enabling gifts and graces.

In the very last book of the Bible we are given glimpses of the glory and beauty merely foreshadowed by Jehovah’s earthly abodes. And again, heart-stopping glory and indescribable beauty abound as John details his vision of precious gems, crowns of gold, magnificent beasts, a sea of glass, a river and a tree of life, and the shekinah-glory of God to illumine all.

As is most often the case, there are two ways to go wrong at this point: The materialistic sensualist wants to make idols of the visible forms of glory and beauty, ignoring Him to whom they point. The Gnostic Pietist attempts to worship God as a disembodied spirit divorced from this world, and winds up with worship wafer thin, stone ugly and depressingly drab; the very antithesis of that which it pretends to emulate: the sumptuous splendor of the Lamb’s wedding feast, set out and celebrated on the heights of Zion. But the true worshipper sees through the external forms of beauty and glory by faith, and through faith beholds and adores the beauty and glory of the Lord who dwells in unapproachable light.

Every material thing has a form; every form is an art form; therefore every material thing communicates something to those who behold it. If this is true (and it is) then every Lord’s Day, the clothes that we wear, the part in our hair, the color of the carpet beneath our feet, the height of the ceiling above our heads, the candles on the communion table, the volume and skillfulness of our singing, and even the taste of the bread and wine all bespeak something (whether true or false) of the nature and character of Him who dwells in the “beauty of holiness”, and say something about the nature of worship around His throne. So with these truths in mind, and your hymnal in hand…Come, let us worship the Lord.