Day Twelve: THE TWO FACES OF BEAUTY


Your eyes will see the King in His beauty. . . .
—ISAIAH 33:17

He has no form or comeliness; And when we see Him,
There is no beauty that we should desire Him.
He is despised and rejected by men,
A Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
—ISAIAH 53:2–3

In Scripture, Christ is both referred to as beautiful and radiant and also as not beautiful, even disturbing, to look at. The apparent contradiction has spurred debate; does beauty lead us to God, or does suffering? Is God found best in pain or in ecstasy? Who has a better idea of the deeper spiritual truths: someone who contemplates beauty, or the one who contemplates the pains of the world?

The message of Christ is, perhaps, that both views lead us to God at different points in our journey. Christ is radiant and beautiful, but to suffer in our place, He had to absorb the painful sin we were soiled with. He is the same Christ in beauty as in disfigurement, and we can know Him in either pain or ecstasy.

The concepts of beauty and ugliness are not opposites, but different points on the continuum of eternity. God is total beauty, beauty that crucified our disfigurement. In His beauty we will see the ugliness of a world without Him, and in the ugliness of the world we find the beauty of God.

Ask: Teach me to see You in both beauty and pain.

Believe: Beauty surrounds me where I least expect to find it.

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