As many of you know, I am laboring this year on a huge book surveying the theology of Jonathan Edwards.  Michael McClymond (who did the weekend for us a few years ago on revival) and I are co-authoring a 48-chapter tome, which amounts to roughly one chapter every two weeks for each of us.   These labors have renewed my appreciation for the man called "America's theologian."  For he, more than anyone else in the history of Christian thought, said the most essential attribute of God is his beauty, which is the consent of one being to the totality of being.  All beauty here on earth is a matter of relation between different things in proportion or harmony, and therefore all earthly beauty is an image of the spiritual consent of a person to God, which is spiritual beauty.  This is seen most perfectly in the inner life of the Trinity, in which each Person loves perfectly and infinitely the other two Persons, and most dramatically  in the life and death of Jesus Christ on earth.   

 

This understanding of God as beauty revolutionized my relationship with God when I first caught hold of it thirty years ago.  Walking with God is not a matter of doing the right thing or simply believing the right thing.  Instead it is seeing God's beauty.  Once that happens, everything else changes.  Everyhting we do and believe about God flows from what we see in God.  Therefore the way to move further up and further in, as CS Lewis put it in the Narnia Chronicles, is to see more.

Pastor Gerry