Mono Lake, CA
One thing have I asked 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 gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to inquire in his temple.
Splendor and majesty are before him; strength and beauty are in his sanctuary.
There is in the human heart an unquenchable longing for beauty. And I am persuaded that the reason it is there is because God is the ultimately Beautiful One and he made us to long for himself… And we can know that our desires are remnants of this urge for God because everything less than God leaves us unsatisfied. He alone is the All-Satisfying Object of Beauty. Only one vision will be sufficient for our insatiable hearts—the glory of God. For that we have been made. And it is for this we long, whether we know it or not.
John Piper
Eastern Sierra, CA
“God is God, and distinguished from all other beings, and exalted above them, chiefly by his divine beauty.”
Jonathan Edwards
Beauty elevates the human soul.
Paul Twiss
My Father, supremely good, beauty of all things beautiful.
Augustine
Mono Lake, CA
“I believe that God is a God of beauty and majesty. He is the ultimate creator who is not only beauty itself but creates beauty. Because it is important to Him, it should be important to me.”
Peter Voth
Beauty, rightly understood, should always push our thoughts to higher realities. The splendor and majesty of the ocean hints of things yet greater. To meditate upon it is to allow the grandeur of the waves to push our thoughts beyond that which we see. Taking in the beauty of the ocean should prompt us to think upon a broader universal order. Ultimately, it invites us to consider the Author of beauty, God himself.
Paul Twiss
It was when I was happiest that I longed most. The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing to find the place where all the beauty came from.
C.S. Lewis
When our back is to the breathtaking beauty of God, we cast a shadow on the earth and fall in love with it.
John Piper
Every year of my life I grow more convinced that it is wisest and best to fix our attention on the beautiful and the good, and dwell as little as possible on the evil and the false.
Richard Cecil
We don't just stand outside and analyze the natural word as a beam [of sunlight], but let the beam fall on the eyes of our heart, so that we see the source of the beauty- the original beauty, God himself. . . . All of God's creation becomes a beam to be "looked along" or a sound to be "heard along" or a fragrance to be "smelled along" or a flavor to be "tasted along" or a touch to be "felt along." All our senses become partners with the eyes of the heart in perceiving the glory of God through the physical world.
John Piper
John Muir Wilderness, CA
Inerrant in both form and content, the inspired word of God constitutes the clearest, highest, and purest manifestation of beauty we will ever perceive this side of glory. Moreover, it is a story that boasts splendor and majesty from beginning to end. It is a narrative that tells of a man, whose life, death, and resurrection are beautiful: providing a response to the malaise of immanence experienced by so many in our secular age. The gospel of Jesus Christ truly is a beauty that saves.
Paul Twiss
If we want freedom from our blindness to the Beauty of God, we must have the Spirit. We are slaves to the worldly substitutes for divine Beauty until the Spirit takes the veil from our minds and grants us to see with joy the Beauty of the Lord.
John Piper
Who’s the star of the Psalm 104 galaxy — sun and moon, birds and lions, oceans and forests? The one who became flesh and dwelt and worked among us. “He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him” (Isaiah 53:2) — and yet he’s the beauty in every beauty, the paradise hiding in our fallen world, the Creator born in the likeness of the creature, the sun dawning on the darkness around us, the crucified, risen, reigning — creating and sustaining — Jesus. And so whenever we enjoy and use creation rightly, it will surely lead us to him.
Marshall Segal
The following quotes are from Steve DeWitt’s Book:
The cross is love’s highest human expression and beauty’s ultimate declaration. Before a sunset, mountain range, painting, or song can be relished as beautiful, our souls must awaken to true beauty. The cross and resurrection of Jesus shine as supreme demonstrations of beauty. Everything else is a reflection.
Steve DeWitt
Beauty is both a gift and a map. It is a gift to be enjoyed and a map to be followed back to the Source of the beauty with praise and thanksgiving.
Steve DeWitt
God has so wired us that beauty generates powerful experiences of wonder. Wonder is one of God’s most precious gifts to us, especially when it leads us to its intended end—worship of our beautiful God.
Steve DeWitt
Yosemite National Park
God’s beauty is divine, eternal, and infinite. He is beautiful. He always has been and eternally will be. God’s beauty defies our ability to comprehend.
Steve DeWitt
Wonder is what image-bearers feel when they glimpse a reflection of God’s beauty. Remember, all beauty is a created expression of God’s beauty. When experiencing beauty, we are really experiencing a reflection of God’s beauty. God has designed us in such a way that any experience of His glory powerfully moves us.
Steve DeWitt
Without God, we are left to worship the beauty for its own sake. . . . Our wonder collapses onto itself, leaving us to worship stuff and matter. This is the bane and emptiness of our materialistic secular age.
Steve DeWitt
Ice Detail, Yosemite National Park
Our eyes must search for what our spiritually alive hearts delight in—anything that reflects God’s beauty.
Steve DeWitt
Christians who properly place God as the source and goal of the things they enjoy will find themselves enjoying those things even more. In this, a Christian’s experience of beauty should be a kind of apologetic for the gospel.
Steve DeWitt
The way Christians relish created beauties ought to outstrip that of unbelievers since we neither find our identity in them nor hold on to them as ultimate.
Steve DeWitt
Yosemite National Park
God made every created beauty in this world as an expression of Christ’s beauty and the beauty of the Father’s love for the Son. All beauty is a breadcrumb path that leads us to Christ.
Steve DeWitt
Until we see the beauty of Christ, we will never see the true beauty in anything else. Once we discern His glory, however, we enjoy the moonlight of created beauties all the more because they remind us of Him.
Steve DeWitt
Beauty is God’s invitation to delight in Him.
Steve DeWitt
Yosemite National Park
The following quotes are from Sam Storms' books:
God has, as it were, placed Himself on display in the art gallery of the universe. He beckons His people, you and me, to stand in awe as we behold the symmetry of His attributes, the harmony of His deeds, the glory of His goodness, the overwhelming and unfathomable grandeur of His greatness; in a word, His beauty. God is infinitely splendid and invites us to come and bask in His beauty that we might enjoy Him to the fullest.
Sam Storms
God’s revelatory manifestation of Himself in creation, in providence, in Scripture, and pre-eminently in the face of His Son, Jesus Christ, is designed to evoke within the breathtaking delight and incomparable joy of which God alone is worthy. Beauty is that in God which makes Him eminently desirable and attractive and quickens in the soul a realization that it was made for a different world.
Sam Storms
In God alone are perfect proportion, harmony, unity, and diversity in delicate balance, stunning brilliance, and integrity. God is beautiful! If we were able to think of God as a painting, we would say that there are no random brush strokes, no clashes of colors. God is aesthetically exquisite.
Sam Storms
Mono Lake, CA
Divine beauty is absolute, unqualified, and independent. All created reality, precisely because it is derivative of the Creator, is beautiful in a secondary sense and only to the degree that it reflects the excellencies of God and fulfills the purpose for which He has made it. Perfect order, harmony, magnitude, integrity, proportion, symmetry, and brilliance are found in God alone. There is in the personality and activity of God neither clash of color nor offensive sound. He is in every conceivable respect morally exquisite, spiritually sublime, and aesthetically elegant.
Sam Storms
The aesthetic experience of God, the encounter of the human soul with divine beauty, is more than merely enjoyable, it is profoundly transforming. There is within it the power to persuade and to convince the inquiring mind of truth. This may well be the Spirit’s greatest catalyst for change. Paul alluded to this in 2 Corinthians 3:18 when he said, “We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into His likeness from one degree of glory to another.” The point is that what we see is what we be! We do not simply behold beauty: beauty takes hold of us and challenges the allegiance of our hearts. Beauty calls us to reshape our lives and exposes the shabbiness of our conduct. It awakens us to the reality of a transcendent Being to whose likeness of beauty we are being called and conformed by His gracious initiative. Beauty has the power to dislodge from our hearts the grip of moral and spiritual ugliness. The soul’s engagement with beauty elicits love and forges in us a new affection that no earthly power can overcome.
Sam Storms
Yosemite National Park
