THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS

Ps.29:2 – Give unto the LORD the glory due unto his name;

worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness.

This phrase does not even compute to the natural man. The natural man may esteem holiness as a positive virtue but would never associate it with beauty. This kind of beauty, the beauty of holiness, is the way David would describe the Lord. The very essence of the Lord’s nature is displayed through His presence, you would have to say that He is holy and good and that this is a display of the spiritual beauty of the Lord. The Lord told Moses in Ex.33:20 that no one could survive seeing God. This is how He said it, “You cannot see My face; for no man shall see Me, and live.” So the beauty of God would overwhelm us in our natural state, only in our glorified bodies in the resurrection shall we be able to see the unveiled glory of the Lord. Here is how Dane Ortlund describes spiritual beauty from the writings of Jonathan Edwards.

“In another sermon Edwards sets this as his central doctrine: “It is a thing truly happifying to the soul of men to see God.” Note that just as beauty has to do with sight, so Edwards here speaks of the happifying of souls that see God. This is key to Edwards’s whole theology of Christian living: what do we see? Elsewhere in this sermon he refers to the “beatific, happifying sight of God.” God’s beauty happifies us. It nestles us into joy. Seeing him—apprehending with the eyes of the heart his lovely holiness—we are changed. Edwards even argues in a sermon on James 1:17 that the reason no one can see God and live is not God’s wrath or justice, but because “God is arrayed with an infinite brightness” that “fills with excess of joy and delight,” so that “the joy and pleasure in beholding would be too strong for a frail nature.” According to Edwards, it isn’t God’s terribleness that would incinerate us. It is the joy that would erupt within us that we cannot handle.”

So the presence of God is a display of God’s goodness which we can only experience in small measures even as a Christian in our present state. According to Edwards we would literally explode with joy if we saw the fulness of God’s glory before our transformation in His coming kingdom. When someone is born again and filled with the Holy Spirit they experience a taste of Who He is, even that taste can leave us crumpled on the floor overwhelmed with unspeakable joy.