God's Beauty - Pt 3

The plans of the heart belong to man, but the answer of the tongue is from the Lord. All the ways of a man are pure in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the spirit. Commit your work to the Lord, and your plans will be established. The Lord has made everything for its purpose, even the wicked for the day of trouble. (Proverbs 16:1-4 ESV).

Our reading is taken from the chapter in Proverbs that speaks to idleness. It is a key issue especially in our culture today. We value our time more now than ever before. Because of that, we tend to seek idleness. And, truly, it is a good thing to simple sit quietly beside a mountain stream, or lounge beside the gentle waves of the ocean. However, there is a real danger spiritually to boredom, even if it is a good thing for a time. Just as God’s beauty confronts our anxieties and our temptations, so also it confronts the spiritual hazards of our boredom. Someone has said, “Sin is the enchanting allure of what is going to kill you.” In 2013, ESPN reported the tragic story of Christopher Lane, a college baseball player who was jogging down a street in Duncan, Oklahoma. Three teens drove up behind him in a car and shot him in the back, senselessly killing the athlete. When the teens were later arrested and asked to explain their actions, they said they did it because they were “bored.” As Martyn Lloyd-Jones said it: “Sin is always, in some sense, a life of boredom. That’s where sin takes us. Among other reasons, hell is hell because it’s so boring.” Yes, boring, because hell is being stuck eternally in self-centeredness that is blind to all external beauty, unsatisfied within and unhappy without. But on the other hand, the Christian life is to be fun. Holiness ought to be playful, clean, and bright. Because we have been swept up into the love of our heavenly Father, because we have been justified and sanctified, we have become human again. That ought to bring great happiness. I know that sounds counterintuitive as a picture of holiness. What typically leaps to our mind when we think of holiness is austerity, coldness, or a grim-faced jaw-set that can only result in unhappiness. Jonathon Edwards, as puritan as he was, said in one of his early sermons, “Holiness is a most beautiful, lovely thing. Men are apt to drink in strange notions of holiness from their childhood as if it were a melancholy, morose, sour thing.” But Edwards goes on to say there is nothing in holiness but what is sweet and ravishingly lovely. Sin is mire and filth. Holiness is sweet, lovely, delightful, serene, and calm. That should correct us. Holiness is calming. It is the only route by which I can actually enjoy my life, because I am not delighting in the world’s fraudulent offers of happiness. God’s beauty protects us from such frau