I used to cringe at songs that made us sing about God or Jesus being beautiful. “God is not beautiful” – I objected. “Beauty is something that describes women, not men!” But here is David – a man’s man – resolved to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD! As in so many cases, I needed Scripture to reform my thinking. These days I find encouragement in Proverbs 20:29, “…the beauty of old men is their gray hair.”
Beauty is an aesthetic quality of what we find attractive, satisfying, and excellent in an object or a person. What makes beauty are attributes like unity, balance symmetry and harmony. Biblical writers use beauty as a quality signifying the positive response of a person to nature or a person. Moving far beyond just physical attractiveness, the positive qualities of beauty provide language for identifying the perfection of God and the pleasure that a believer finds in His perfection.
David expressed the delight and satisfaction he found in God, and the longing he had to see God face to face. To express the inexpressible – what God is like – David identifies God as the definition of beauty i.e. attractive, pleasant, satisfying, right, good, everything in place, etc. There are a few like Isaiah (Isa. 1:1-4) and John (Rev.1:13-18) who were given glimpses of God’s personal glory. We can learn from their experience to long for, seek and gaze upon the beauty of God. This calls us earnestly and passionately mine the treasures of God’s self-disclosure. Maybe what we could strive for is to be like Moses whose face was radiant from being in the presence of God.
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.
Psalm 27:4