The Beauty of Holiness

O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness: fear before him, all the earth. PSALM 96:9

Ask most Christians what holiness is, and you will get an answer about rules. Holiness is not doing certain things; it is separation, restraint, moral seriousness. All of which is true, and all of which Edwards would have said misses the centre entirely. For Edwards, holiness is first of all beautiful. It is the moral loveliness of God, and the reason we so often experience it as a burden is that something has gone wrong with our capacity to perceive beauty.

Holiness as loveliness

In the Personal Narrative, describing the change that came over him after his conversion, he wrote about how holiness itself began to appear to him. It struck him as sweet, pleasant, charming, serene and calm — language no one would use of a rulebook. He described the soul in a state of holiness under the figure of a flower in a field, opening to the sun, quietly receiving light, giving off fragrance, harming nothing. That is a long way from the grim caricature attached to his name, and it is the authentic Edwards. Holiness is not the absence of pleasure; it is the presence of a superior order of pleasure. It is what a human being looks like when everything in him is rightly proportioned and rightly aimed.

One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to enquire in his temple. PSALM 27:4

Sin as deformity

If holiness is beauty, then sin is not merely rule-breaking. It is ugliness — disorder, distortion, a thing out of proportion. Edwards found this a far more penetrating way of exposing sin than the merely legal one, and it is worth seeing why. A man can hear that a certain action is forbidden and feel only that a restriction has been placed on him. He may comply resentfully, looking for the boundary of the rule. But if he is shown that the thing is ugly — that his envy is a deformity, that his self-importance is grotesque, that his harshness with his family is a species of squalor — something different happens. He does not want it any more.

Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice; and be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you. EPHESIANS 4:31–32

Put those two verses side by side and consider which is the more beautiful human being. That question, Edwards thought, is not sentimental. It is theological, and it goes deeper than duty.

Why this changes obedience

The consequence for the Christian life is considerable. If holiness is a rule, obedience is compliance, and compliance is always grudging at the margins. We keep what we must and negotiate the rest. Our sanctification becomes a matter of managing behaviour, and we measure progress by how little we have broken. If holiness is beauty, obedience becomes desire. We pursue it as a man pursues anything he finds lovely — not because he is required to, but because he wants it. This is why Edwards insisted that the will is never moved by bare duty alone. The heart follows what it finds attractive. The whole work of grace, in his view, is to change what a person finds attractive, and everything else follows from that.

Delight thyself also in the Lord; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart. PSALM 37:4

There is a practical implication for how we teach, and especially for how we raise children in the faith. A generation instructed only in prohibitions will keep them while supervised and abandon them at the first opportunity, because nothing has been done to their affections. A generation shown that God is beautiful, that holiness is lovely and sin is squalid, has been given something that survives the removal of supervision. Edwards’s own preaching bears this out. He described sin’s ugliness relentlessly — but he spent far more time on the loveliness of Christ, because he believed that only a rival beauty can dislodge an old affection.

Shadows of divine things

Edwards kept a private notebook throughout his life which he headed Images of Divine Things. In it he recorded the ways the natural world seemed to him to picture spiritual realities. The rising sun and the coming of grace. The way a river finds the sea.

The silkworm that spins its covering and dies in the labour. The fact that the most beautiful flowers grow in soil made of decay. Hundreds of such entries, made over decades by a man walking and riding through the Connecticut Valley with his mind never off the subject. This was not idle fancy. It followed directly from his theology of glory. If God made the world to communicate His own fullness, then the world is a kind of language, and everything in it means something beyond itself.

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. PSALM 19:1

For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made. ROMANS 1:20

The practical value of this habit is considerable, and it is available to anybody. Most of us pass through a day registering almost nothing. We see weather rather than glory, and traffic rather than providence. Edwards trained himself to look at ordinary things until they yielded something, and the discipline seems to have been a substantial part of how his affections stayed warm through decades of routine. There is a caution to attach. Edwards’s readings are sometimes strained, and a reader can slide into finding secret meanings everywhere, which is a different activity and a less healthy one. The natural world illustrates truth; it does not supply new doctrine. Scripture governs. But held soberly, the habit is a gift. The believer who has learned to see a sunrise as more than a sunrise — who notices that seed dies before it grows, that light travels vast distances to arrive silently, that a river cannot be prevented from reaching the sea — has been given a thousand daily occasions for worship where he previously had none.

O Lord, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches. PSALM 104:24

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Take one sin you tolerate. Stop asking whether it is permitted and ask whether it is beautiful. Sit with the answer. 2. Read Psalm 27:4 and ask whether beholding God’s beauty is genuinely among the things you desire, or only among the things you approve of.

3. Name a believer whose holiness you find attractive rather than merely impressive. Ask what makes the difference, and pursue that. 4. If you teach or raise children, audit what you say. What proportion is prohibition, and what proportion is the loveliness of Christ? 5. Ask God this week not merely for the strength to obey but for the desire to — for a changed taste rather than a stronger grip.

A PRAYER

Father, You are beautiful, and I have treated Your holiness as a burden to be carried rather than a glory to be enjoyed.

Show me the ugliness of the sin I have been excusing — not only its guilt, but its squalor. And show me the loveliness of Christ, until the comparison does what argument never has.

I do not merely want the strength to obey You. I want to want You. Change my taste, and let obedience follow desire, as it does in every heart that has seen what You are like. Amen.