“And thou shalt make holy garments for Aaron thy brother for glory and for beauty…” Exodus 28:2ff
Where is the house of the Lord now? When David was writing this he was speaking to Jews, who would have understood house of the Lord to mean the Temple. It was the place where they would go to meet with God.
How does one gaze on the beauty of the Lord when He is invisible? Perhaps David is referring to the use of imagination. We can imagine what the Lord might look like. Isaiah saw the Lord in His temple on His throne and described him as high and lifted up, the train of his robe filled the temple.
Perhaps one can gaze on the beauty of the Lord through objects that point to the Lord. The Bible describes several objects that are rich with symbolism that points to God. Church and art history is full of the use of visual art; of icons to help the worshipper cast his or her “gaze” upon the Lord.
In order to understand what David meant we must first understand the Hebrew notion of beauty. To the Jew beauty was not just something that was pretty. I was not just something that hangs on a wall or sits on a pedestal. If a thing was beautiful, in the eyes of a Jew that thing worked; it functioned in the way it was intended. A picture of a flower to the western mind is beautiful because of its pretty colors, delicate petals. The picture of a flower in the Jewish mind was beautiful because of what it meant: life is fleeting, it has a beginning as a small seed, it lives and blooms beautiful for awhile, it fades, then it goes away, back into the earth. So, we could say that to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord is to meditate on what He does, on what He intends.
What about this notion of glory? What exactly does that mean? Perhaps you have, on occasion heard this word used in a church setting. It is just not a word used much in our secular society. In some ways I must say that I kind of like that. It makes the word special to me. But, what exactly does it mean? What makes it so special? I believe you can think of it from the standpoint of art. When I go to an art museum or gallery I see all the paintings hanging on the wall, but I also see something else; I see the frames of the paintings. I don’t go to the museum to see the frames; I go there to see the paintings. And yet, my experience of the paintings is not the same without the frames. The function of the frames is for the purpose of drawing my attention to the paintings. The frames bring glory to the painting. We are to bring glory to God with our lives, so that others will see His beauty.
Where is the temple of God now? Paul says in one of his letters to the Corinthians that we are the temple of the Holy Spirit of God. We by our lives bring glory to God, we show forth the beauty of God.
No comments:
Post a Comment