Ugly? The Son of God-ugly?!!? Yes, when He bore all the ugliness of sinners’ sin on the cross.
How can that be? It happened at the cross when Jesus Christ, God’s Son, the radiance of the glory of God, became ugly. God is so wise, so powerful, and so good that He is going to remake the universe and is currently remaking men and women who are becoming and who will be (at the resurrection of the just) a pure reflection of His perfection and beauty. The sum of all of who God is, is beautiful. We know that God is the absolute standard of beauty. This is a very dark, evil, and idolatrous system of thought. For instance, our culture may objectify one woman as THE standard for beauty, while ignoring the God-created beauty in every single woman. We see this same ugly system in our own culture today. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things” (Romans 1:21-23). “For although they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks to Him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Whenever one exchanges the glory of God for the created things, one’s system of thought becomes very dark and narrow. They started worshiping the created forms that were beautiful and began looking to them as the absolute instead of the Creator. The only problem with the Greeks, however, is that they did not see beauty with its source in God.
The Greeks believed in an absolute standard of beauty developed by Pythagoras in the 6th century BC. So in our fallen world everything is a mixture of the reflection of the beauty of God mixed with our own ugliness of sin. Enter the devil, the fall, death, disease, destruction-ugliness. If God is the standard for what is beautiful, anything that seeks autonomy from Him suddenly becomes ugly. In fact, all of His creation is beautiful and communicates and reflects His beauty to one degree or another: “He has made everything beautiful in its time” (Ecclesiastes 3:11).īut not everything in creation is beautiful, right? That’s right, because of sin and rebellion against God. I would make the case that beauty is objective because it describes who God is.
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