A Clar­i­fi­ca­tion on Beauty

Yester­day, in The Beauty Band­wagon, I made the case that beauty is vain. I didn’t offer much in the way of qual­i­fi­ca­tion of that state­ment, and my wife Ali­cia made a good point: If beauty is vain, worth­less, or empty, why did God cre­ate such a beau­ti­ful world, why was beau­ti­ful orna­men­ta­tion so essen­tial in the build­ing of the taber­na­cle or temple?

Exo­dus 28:2 explic­itly says that the priestly robes were for glory and for beauty.

Var­i­ous pas­sages in the Psalms speak of God’s beauty, and Psalm 50:2 declares that God is the per­fec­tion of beauty.

So what’s going on here? Is beauty vain?

Well, the answer is yes and no, and while talk­ing to Ali­cia it occurred to me that beauty, like most things, can be a bless­ing or a curse, so to speak.

Proverbs 31, the con­text of yesterday’s “Beauty is vain” con­clu­sion, lauds the vir­tu­ous woman, the woman who man­ages her house­hold, has a keen busi­ness sense, praises her hus­band, and most impor­tantly fears the Lord. The vir­tu­ous woman may be exceed­ingly beau­ti­ful or she may be plain to look upon; the point is, her value is not dis­cerned from her beauty. This con­sid­er­a­tion was miss­ing from yesterday’s post, and I apol­o­gize; my wife, vir­tu­ous as she is, is great at help­ing me real­ize the wis­dom I may have missed in con­clu­sions I come to.

Know­ing the Proverbs, it is impos­si­ble to focus upon beauty apart from god­li­ness. Indeed, it is said, “Like a gold ring in a pig’s snout is a beau­ti­ful woman with­out dis­cre­tion” (11:22).

But a beau­ti­ful woman who is also godly? I sup­pose there is noth­ing wrong with that, and I find myself to be in good com­pany; fre­quently the Bible authors speak of beau­ti­ful women, of beau­ti­ful wives. One can­not so much as read the first chap­ter of Song of Solomon with­out see­ing the appre­ci­a­tion of beauty therein!

While in this world, I won’t deny that it is far too easy to become fixed upon looks. Both men & women are at fault for this, so I won’t point my fin­ger at one gen­der or the other, but beauty far too eas­ily becomes an idol. Teens rebel against their par­ents to dress cer­tain ways, to pierce cer­tain things, to have cer­tain hair styles, for exam­ple. Like­wise, far too few seem to know the value of mod­esty and dis­cre­tion in dress, and the impres­sion I get is that those who do seem to know it seem to know it only because they don’t think they could get away with the more immod­est styles.

God­li­ness is no longer admired in soci­ety, and some­thing of course had to replace it. It is no longer enough to be vir­tu­ous, God-​fearing, exhibit­ing the fruits of the Spirit in your life.

Beauty is vain inso­far as it dis­tracts from God’s glory & wor­ship, and I do not think it a stretch to say that men & women who focus sig­nif­i­cant time & money on their appear­ance are miss­ing some­thing much big­ger. How dif­fer­ent would the world be if every per­son who iden­ti­fies them­selves as Chris­t­ian would take all the time & money cur­rently devoted to beauty and used it to grow in the Lord and for His service?