We Become What We Behold

s we celebrated both Valentine’s Day and her birthday this past week, I had the occasion to dwell for a while on the glory of my wife, full of grace and truth. Because my wife is a flesh and blood human being who has given me intimate access to her life, body and soul, she has become for me my most subjective, immanent experience of objective, transcendent beauty. I like poetry, but I love my wife. I’m a human being: I need more than just a painting or a cloud to stare at if I’m really going to encounter beauty and be changed by it. And by God's grace, she teaches me what beauty is in a way I can actually receive, in a way that trumps and challenges what the world around me says about it. She is poetry clothed in the mantle of humanity, blurring the lines between heaven and earth.The ancients believed that if we could just access pure truth, goodness, and beauty, somehow the experience would transform us into its image: from dust to divinity. So, we look for concrete things in this world that correspond most faithfully to the abstract ideals, and we try desperately to be near them, because we were made with a deep longing for their Source, and because we want to be moved by them toward it. Our biggest problem is that because of the Fall, we are tragically, completely bad at distinguishing truth, goodness, and beauty from their perversions. We end up being conformed to the image of flawed vessels and further brokenness. We become bigger liars, bolder sinners, uglier reflections. We reformed folks call this total depravity. The Bible calls it idolatry.Two weeks ago, Jim covered the crown jewel of John’s prologue: “and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.” That’s a poetic and powerful way of saying that objective reality became a subjective experience. That the transcendent became immanent. And in Jesus Christ, the lines between heaven and earth are not just blurred, they are completely erased by the God-man. The gospel emphatically declares that, yes, there is an objective standard, and no, we are not able to attain to or even to recognize it, but because God became immanent to us in our inability to transcend to Him, we can experience Him, and we are transformed to His likeness.We believe the True and it transforms us. This is logic.We behave the Good and it transforms us. This is ethics.We behold the Beautiful and it transforms us. This is aesthetics.And in Christ, Heaven Is Local. So come, let us behold Him.- Josh