Navigate Podcast
Welcome to Navigate, we are two long term friends doing life and ministry together. I got tired of the same ole answers when I started looking for help when it came to my walk with God. So together we go deeper than most would on topics that most people have heard or were taught but never fully understood. It is our way of simplifying concepts that we may have over complicated throughout our lives. Bringing theology and life experience into each episode. It is our hope and desire to help Navigate your Christian walk with you
Navigate Podcast
The Universal Truth and Spiritual Significance of Beauty
Tjbhpodcast@gmail.com
What if we told you that beauty is not subjective, but a universal and divine truth, deeply tied with God's design? Join us on an enlightening journey as we delve into the intricacies of this fascinating topic - the objective nature of beauty and its divine blueprint. We extract wisdom from Aristotle, Aquinas, and Edwards and explore how diverse cultures perceive beauty, drawing parallels with biblical definitions of beauty. There's even a funny experiment about beauty perceptions that will leave you chuckling!
What's up, guys? Welcome back to Navigate. I'm with Justin. What's up, buddy?
Speaker 2:what's up, my man? How you doing, oh doing. Fine, we have a third yes, yeah, I'm back.
Speaker 1:Good old, reliable Josiah boom occasional joe's there when we need him to drag me here kicking, screaming just shows up.
Speaker 3:Hey, just pulled the duct tape off my face again. I mean the real reason you guys brought me here today.
Speaker 1:So we're gonna break the record today.
Speaker 3:You're gonna take an hour and a half episode.
Speaker 2:Oh man, I don't know that's gonna be great, I might just turn to everybody away like longer episodes, but then sometimes like a quick, just reminder of a particular thing is good. It just depends on how how ready people are.
Speaker 1:I like a solid, like Netflix episode 42, 45 minutes, call it, call it yeah, but how many episodes do you watch in a row?
Speaker 2:don't lie to me, oh, you don't know my life see what I'm saying.
Speaker 1:I do know your life and that's what I'm saying people like that amount, but then you know, to be fair, there's been a lot of crap lately. I can't watch anything.
Speaker 2:I've been very bored, very bored at home, so I feel like most people at this point just watch old shows that they know are actually good because it's like a safe bet, you know. So it's like there's this return. Right now. I feel like two. Uh, you know friends and you know people are still watching the office for the umpteenth time oh man, I just finished the other parts see there you go, there you go, it's. Uh, they don't make them like they used to really don't.
Speaker 2:People are but what they do is like a remake now of the old thing and hope it's funny, if they had more wokeness, and it's not actually. I really feel like this is an opportunity for breakthrough, for Christians to actually come up with good content, because actually Hollywood sucks right now.
Speaker 1:Disney is losing funds, they also suck, and I'm like this actually is the time well they're actually gonna do something good, it would be right now there's a couple that came out this year sounded freedom did pretty well, yeah. The various did pretty well, yeah yeah, nefarious was really good.
Speaker 2:Um, some of the stuff that uh can impress is putting out is pretty good. You got the chosen, which is taking a lot of yeah, the chosen was massive. Yeah, I didn't even think about that, but yeah, it is. It's a good time for. Christians to make Jesus revolution came out, jesus revolution. There's been some decent stuff. I think nefarious was good, except it like ended with Glenn Beck and I was like what's just that this?
Speaker 3:was a great movie.
Speaker 2:The ending was not then they got Mormon at the end and I was like what? Happened what happened. But to be fair, that is what happens with other movies that you watch. You know what I mean. It's like, oh, there's so many good, but then there was this dumb part. If it's gonna be something dumb in a movie, I'm glad it's not like some weird romance scene. If it's Glenn Beck, you know I can get over to that.
Speaker 1:I didn't know who that was. I know I recognized him, but I didn't know who that was. Yeah, that's what, whatever. Uh, josiah's here in case you guys forgot. Hey, buddy, I am here actually. No, you actually had a topic you wanted to bring up today. I did.
Speaker 3:I think we've been talking about this one for a really really long time and uh, yeah, we're trying to. We're talking about how we were gonna title this one, yeah, or what, what it was really gonna revolve around it was an intriguing idea when you first bought it to me was the beauty of God?
Speaker 1:hmm, yeah, the beauty in general what did you mean by that?
Speaker 3:the beauty of God, you ready to strap up? Yes, we're gonna get the submarine.
Speaker 2:We're going to take us down the wormhole, right right into the submersible that crushes before the titanic let's start with a common idiom that everybody hears.
Speaker 3:That, I think, is just absurd and I can't stand here in it. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Okay, this is a very, very common idiom. I've used this one millions of times and basically, you know different strokes for different folks. You're gonna like who you like. Everybody finds beauty in different ways. People see things completely different, and the reality is, when I look at the bible, I don't see that. I don't see this subjectivity. What I see is objectivity. The bible uses beauty to describe God. The bible uses beauty even to describe people and things. And so when I'm considering that perspective and I look out at the world, what does it mean to recognize true beauty? Yeah, what does it mean? I think I would go from the place of Aristotle. Aquinas Edwards made the same argument that beauty ultimately is objective, and beauty isn't something that's just out there, it's something that's really found within God himself. And so we passed the ball to Jay Hartman are you?
Speaker 1:talking big picture beauty, or we talk like I guess you kind of mentioned it, but like people beauty from the bible like what?
Speaker 2:creation itself this was tricky because it's like the big joke. You guys ever seen this thing? That it's like you know they'll take a girl and they'll give it to each culture and each culture will say make this girl look beautiful. And in each culture it's a, it's a different approach to what they think is actually beautiful, based on the culture at the time. Sure you know, have you guys seen this before?
Speaker 2:I haven't seen it, but I mean, there's like a thing right, and so I do think there's a nuance right. It's like people have preferences, but ultimately, things that are beautiful have to come from something that is beautiful, and I mean, you brought up Aquinas and did you say Plato?
Speaker 3:play. I mean this would be Platonic.
Speaker 2:That's what I'm thinking, yeah, okay, okay, yeah, the idea that anything that is of substance, that has wonder or glory or beauty, first and foremost comes from something that owns that particular idea or substance first. Okay, and so, tim, if you made a piece of art, it may look different than another piece of art that you have also made, but people would be able to tell stylistically if it was Tim or not. Okay, you know what I mean. So I think that the picture here is that different beauty. You may like one piece more than another piece, you may have a particular preference about something, but we should all be able to agree that, hey, the excrement smeared on a canvas is not beautiful.
Speaker 2:If you want to call that art and then say that we, the same way that we call homosexual marriage, marriage, fine, okay, whatever, but it's not something beautiful is something like Rembrandt, you know what? Somebody who's actually painting something that represents glory, that represents beauty, that represents a moment in time that was actually first crafted by the creator himself. You know I mean. So when we, when we think about beauty or just aesthetics in general, you could talk about it that way. There's a conversation here to be had, because he's saying it's objective and I would say, yes, it's objective and that things that are beautiful, we would all agree at some level.
Speaker 2:For the most part, yes, this is beautiful. In the same way that we would agree most things are moral or immoral. You might have somebody in the world that's like, no, I hate beautiful pictures because I have a demon inside of me, you know, or whatever the issue may be, but in general, like morality, it's beautiful. And that, if you said, hey, murdering somebody is bad, yes, generally speaking, most people agree on that things. We just might speculate about some of the nuance that's involved there. Would you agree with that?
Speaker 3:yeah, I would totally agree with that. I would say just a ironclad this a little bit more, because you know the the whole idea that beauty is objective may be hard to grasp for a moment, but I think we grasp it every day. I think when we play music there's harmony and there's music is almost the the toothpaste proof of beauty being objective, because when we hear certain melodies and sounds, they're actually when they're harmonious, we enjoy it. There's almost a systematic function that they have that when they follow certain patterns they actually are enjoyable you say this way you know when somebody sucks yeah, you know, when somebody sucks, I mean you.
Speaker 3:You're not. Uh, you know, if your kid's screaming, you don't consider that beautiful, what is it?
Speaker 3:in man, you do me a yoko, you know that when you're walking around, then you're walking around in nature and you're hearing birds chirping and there's something pleasant about it to the common man. Now somebody come in here and be like, yeah, but what about heavy metal? What about all these crazy dubstep, dubstep parties and raves that we have today? Well, what I find is that as we get closer to God, there's almost a refinement in man where his recognition of what God finds to be beautiful in nature is imparted to him. The closer he gets to God, the further we depart from God as a society. You actually see kind of a pattern throughout society where they enjoy this chaotic, crazy revelry that that permeates the society and there's almost this desire, like smearing poop on a canvas.
Speaker 3:That's. That's something that we practice today and we call it beautiful. Why do we do that? It's not innate in man to say that that's beautiful. So what? There's a motive behind that. I believe in scripture and the ultimate motive is to destroy and to distort the design that God had made and to warp it, and so that that would be a little bit more of my steel man.
Speaker 2:Yeah no, no that's. I mean, I think that's great and just thinking through the fact that a lot of music that's made today and our culture that hates God is intentionally writing music like a lot of dubstep, you're like, what is this trash? I don't know if somebody is playing an album or if I'm hearing somebody in the restroom after Taco Bell, like what is going on here, and and I think that the difference, the thing that we're noticing here, is that people, a lot of people, who are writing music now, are trying to write things that don't have purpose. And that's actually why they think it is beautiful, because to them, whether it's that, what it's, not that it looks pretty, but what it's communicating is what they believe life to be, which is meaningless, purposeless, cruel, void, you know, and without meaning. And when they hear or see things that reflect their own beliefs, then they see that as something valuable to them yeah ironically the word valuable there I would disagree with.
Speaker 2:But even even guys like Nietzsche had had an interesting he said. He said that aesthetics or beauty actually has a morality associated with it. He said if you, if you kill a butterfly, you're a monster. He said if you, if you kill a cockroach, you're a hero. You know I mean, and any any two-year-old kids know, it knows this. You know I mean, it's like you. You kill a spider, you're a hero, proud of you. You know you kill a. You kill a. You know a, but a caterpillar before it turns into a butterfly. Or you kill a really cool bug. You know and I mean, something is wrong with you why would you?
Speaker 2:do that. That thing is amazing, you know. It's like the joke we used to make all the time, tim, when somebody made something terrible or took something that should taste really good and it was awful. Yeah, it was like killing a unicorn, like you took something that was meant to be beautiful and you ruined it. Yeah, and there's literally a there's, there's a moral aesthetic there that it's like even something that we would say is not, you know, tainted by the world.
Speaker 2:You take a child's innocence or a beautiful let's say a beautiful woman and you, you show pictures of what meth has done to that person.
Speaker 2:We would all agree what, what came out at the end of the after the meth is not nearly as beautiful as what was there before.
Speaker 2:We can agree on those things and we would even say something awful has happened, because it was actually an assault on something that existed, that we agreed on beforehand, was right and pure, and so even somebody who likes chaos and likes these things and thinks it's void or, in the universe, is cruel, void and indifferent or whatever, would still look at somebody who's done meth and said, yeah, that what happened was not good, and so you have to admit that there's even a moral aspect to, to aesthetics and to beauty that exists, and we, as Christians, should really be thinking this through, because it should tell us that some of our jobs, some of what we're called to do in this recreation of Eden and in this fight for what is beautiful and what is right, is realized that it actually touches everything that we do.
Speaker 2:Beauty is something that reflects God, and if we are people who have the image of God, the Amal Gode, then our job is to extend what is beautiful, or what represents God truly, into the world and into the work and into the things that we're doing. Beauty is an incredibly important part of the Christian life.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, we also see it with architecture too. Right, the brutalist architecture was really birthed in an atheistic thought. Basically, a lot of the architecture you see today like ugly, ugly factories in different buildings.
Speaker 2:It's like factories that used to be pretty and did mess, you know.
Speaker 3:Yeah, basically, basically, but it's funny, because atheistic thought inspired a lot of the brutalistic architecture and a lot of the ideas behind brutalistic architecture is that it's almost like a blank canvas for other people to impose their ideas, and so what it's essentially catering to is this desire within man to be his own God and to see blank canvases and to impose himself and also to distort the beauty that God had already made. I mean, there's such a stark contrast between the ancient cathedrals that we see and then the types of buildings that we look at today. I mean, I don't know. In my opinion, when I look out at downtown Denver, most of the buildings down there I think are pretty hideous. But when you go to Italy and you look at the architecture and the way that they designed their cathedrals, there was such an intentionality there.
Speaker 2:And sometimes it would be like three lifetimes before that would be completed. It was one person finishing a portion of it, handing it off to the next person who was going to finish the next portion of it. All of them working on the same goal to see this beautiful thing done. And now we're like I wonder if we can get this up in two years. It's not a conversation about how is this reflecting beauty, but more it's like how can we make this sleek and crisp and as quickly as we can? I posted this earlier today, but it's like urgency kills depth and oftentimes.
Speaker 2:I think people are more interested in the practical use of something than they are what it's actually doing, what it's actually creating or what it's producing in people when they see it. Or they're working with different things, and it's like if you rush into a marriage, it's going to be a mess. If you rush into buying a car, it's probably going to be a mess. If you rush into doing most things, we would agree it doesn't go well for you. And there's a portion of that that really correlates with beauty, what God is doing. Are we actually thinking about how this reflects God? Are we actually thinking about how the things that we're doing reflect the beauty and the nature of the way that God has intended things to be? And the more we rush it, the less we're reflecting who God is in the stuff that we're choosing. And it's very practical when you think about it in those kinds of terms.
Speaker 1:Well, this sounds like material stuff. I mean, is that what we're focusing on? If I have a crappy car, am I reflecting God?
Speaker 2:Your civic is the skid mark on our neighborhood. You need to reflect the glory of God better.
Speaker 3:I think it's properly categorizing and looking at the way that God designed the world. Rc has a phenomenal quote. He's probably going to be brought up too many times here, but there was a little lady that walked up to him after he taught a lecture and she asked him she's like RC, how do you come up with all these analogies, all these illustrations, like, how do you do it? And he smiles at her, he looks at her and he's like because I see a theological meaning in everything. That's what he said and reality is is that when we look at the Bible and then we use the Bible as the lens at which we look at the world, what we can begin to find are patterns, distinctions and really a design and a framework to the way that God made the world.
Speaker 2:Rationality.
Speaker 3:Rationality, essentially, and we're thinking God's thoughts after him. And as we continue down that path, you actually see society that are Christianized carry basically the similar patterns and similar approaches, and what they begin to see as beautiful is not just random happenstance. It's actually because they're getting closer to God that they're actually able to recognize the theological meaning in everything and properly order their lives accordingly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was going to say what's the pattern that you're talking about?
Speaker 3:The patterns within Scripture. So we see designs within the temple. We see designs, all sorts of designs that God gives the Israelites with, even how making the garments for the priests are considered to be beautiful, and those designs, in fact, have greatly inspired us ever since. I mean, we use those similar design patterns today in many different areas.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and Joseph has talked about like the veil that was in the most holy place before the most holy place, and I mean his description of it is just stunning, like it was a beautiful veil that was in place that was supposed to reflect so much of the other things that were going on within the temple. But to your point, if you look at the Garden of Eden and how it's described, and then you look at the Tabernacle and how it's described, and you look at the Solomon's Temple and how it's described, and then you look at the New Jerusalem and how it's described, there's these pictures of beauty and splendor that are a reflection not only of God and who he is and how he wants things, but of his creation that reflects him. And so when we think about the whole Bible, there's actually this picture of it moving from the broken and ugly and off into the glorious and Edenic perspective that God originally intended it to be. And it's funny because you brought up other cultures on how atheists would create some of these different types of architecture and things, or especially, I would say, post-moderns, who were really the babies of atheists. It came up with a lot of these things that are like it doesn't make sense. It doesn't track, and that's exactly what they're trying to communicate. Their idea of beauty is actually not a thing and they're actually trying to deconstruct that idea with the art that they're creating.
Speaker 2:But if you look at these, let's say, tribal colonies, these different tribes and Papua New Guinea or wherever there tends to be in pagan societies a celebration of death and a reversal of the way that God has actually intended things to be, and so when you see a lot of these cultures begin to become Christianized, what you see is, instead of a love for death and a love for destruction and war, you're beginning to start to see like a love for life and a love for longevity and a care for detail.
Speaker 2:That wasn't necessarily there before. It's pretty, actually awesome to watch. I mean, if you just think about what happens to societies that begin to become Christian and how they begin to care about beauty and care about actually building and not tearing things down, there's a deep love for small stuff and a value of the small stuff that comes out of it, because I am no longer the center of life and me staying alive, survival of the fittest goes away. In the name of all of us together, every one of us has value at some level, because God has created us and our job is to reflect in a better way what God has created in the way that he's created it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and to kind of bounce off that again with the biblical case for beauty being found in Scripture and a pattern being found in Scripture. I mean, even excrement in biblical law was something that you had to do outside the camp and you had to cover it up. It wasn't something to be displayed, it wasn't something to be magnified as we would magnify it today. Okay, in many different places like California right now, they got like an app so that you can identify different places where we're homeless, people basically decided to drop a deuce, I'm like.
Speaker 3:But there's an attitude when we depart from biblical law, we begin to lose that beauty, we begin to distort the way that God had designed and intended the world to be, as Justin was saying. Something else is also death, you know, and actually dealing with death and not touching it and messing around with it. I mean, there's so many different areas in Scripture. We could really spend all day looking at how the Bible communicates a beauty and a pattern for us to live by today. But the big question really for most of us is what is the most beautiful thing out there?
Speaker 3:This has been a question in my mind, you know, I think in everybody's mind their entire life ever since they were a child. You know, we're always looking for something to captivate us. Ultimately, right, we see a beautiful sunset, we see the trees, we see moments in our life where we are in awe and we're blown away at just the countenance of creation. Okay, but they don't last, they end, they come to a point where we're not satisfied anymore and this desire with beauty and satisfaction, or this sense of awe, is really the pursuit of the highest good right. Rc talked about God's holiness.
Speaker 2:By the way, rc's parole, just for people to keep hearing him refer to him by his first name, rc's parole. Yes, richard Charles's parole. I want to be specific. It's like you know, I'm a boy.
Speaker 3:But RC's parole talks about the holiness of God. Now, a lot of Christians recognize the holiness of God being purity, justice, goodness. We think of those things as connotations for holiness, but what we often don't think about is beauty, and he basically makes this entire case in the holiness of God. That beauty is objective and the ultimate beauty is found in none other than God himself. And so what we find in Scripture and I don't want to take this, you know, too far, but I think that this is one of my favorite promises in Scripture we find it in St John's First Epistle okay, first John 3, he talks about basically this promise that we shall see God as he is. And all throughout Scripture you have this concept of seeing God, but you know, god turns his face away from the wicked, but God shines his face and shows his face to those that are blessed In Jesus and the Beatitudes. He says, you know a bluster of the pure and heart, for they shall see God.
Speaker 3:What's this idea with Christians and seeing God? What's this desire that's happening to be able to captivate who God is? What we call in Scripture a theophany. A theophany is when man encounters the divine, okay, when he sees the manifest presence of the divine. And so we see this all throughout Scripture. We see this when Moses essentially has a theophany, when he's at the burning bush. We see this all throughout Scripture. And so what does it really mean? What is John talking about in First John 3? About seeing.
Speaker 1:God, because that's been happened to where it hasn't been a good thing. Yeah sometimes it's not a good thing, people. It's terrifying Die or pass out or come down. You know like Daniel had that vision of God, or yeah, moses saw the backside of God. At one point came down shining like a lamp, right Human glow stick. Human glow stick yeah. So, there's been moments where we so I guess, what are you talking about when you see God?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean that's. That is the, that is the question, and I think I think John helps kind of give a lot of clarity here, because what he's basically saying is that, because we're the children of God, the blessing that we're going to receive from him is to see God as he is. And what does it mean? Well, the word, the word there is cathos, eston, okay, in the Greek, and it is seeing someone's essence, literally seeing their being. So you mentioned Moses, and when Moses saw God and God put him in the cleft of the rock I believe it's Exodus 34, he put him in the cleft of the rock and God passes by and literally says that he sees the back parts of God, okay, yeah, or the buttocks of God. And because he sees this, because he sees just a sliver of God's glory, he's still alive, he still remains alive.
Speaker 3:But earlier in that text, god says that no one can see me and live. So you have this, this antithesis, where people see God just a sliver of his glory and they they're about to die, they're close to death, and if they see him entirely, they die. Why does this happen? Why does this happen? What happens? Because of man's sinfulness, the reason this is attached to his holiness is because man cannot see God because of the wickedness and sinfulness of his very being, and because he's in the presence of the holy. The very presence of the holy would destroy him. God cannot have sinners in his presence. He needs something that is purified and completely clean, for them to be able to see.
Speaker 1:But that's not what you're talking about when you say see God with the beauty.
Speaker 3:Well, it has everything to do with it. It's connected. It's connected entirely.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna jump in here real quick, Tim. I think what you're talking about is hey, when we see God, we actually just die or fall over, and it's awful.
Speaker 3:And I think what he's saying is yeah, if you see God, they're steer.
Speaker 2:If you see God and you're actually not in your new transformed body, if you see God and you're not dead and by dead I mean the last enemy to be destroyed, which is your corrupted self. You know what I mean and that sense, if you see God, before that, it's gonna be rough for you. It's gonna be very rough for you, why? Because you're actually not in a place, you're still in a fallen state. I mean, let's be honest, Hairlines, okay, beer bellies that came after the fall, all right, Thank the.
Speaker 2:Lord, but what we are at some level has been, is a part of it, is corrupted by the world that we live in. That's at least the external stuff that we are. The internal is actually being renewed day by day. Is what we learn in First Corinthians. Actually, is it Second Corinthians nine, but the picture here?
Speaker 2:I actually wanted to emphasize this in the second verse of this title. I'll just read it Beloved now we are children of God and it has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when he appears we will be like him because we will see him just as he is. All right, so, like. What I love about this text here is it says we will be like him because we will see him just as he is. We'll be like him because we'll actually be able to fully see who he is. That's wild to me. So now we see fragments through creation. We know stories of the incarnate Christ. We saw him in incarnate flesh. Right, we see who God is through what we've been given, through general revelation and through specific revelation through scripture, but we do not fully understand all of who he is, and so, in that we're not able to reflect fully who he is, we're only able to reflect the amount that we actually have of who he is. So it's this picture that it's like hey, at some point there will literally no longer be a barrier between you reflecting the glory of God and God himself. There won't be any kind of veiling from you being able to fully represent everything that you were always created to be in the first place, because what we see in Genesis right is Adam walking in the garden with God just chilling. There was no in between, there was no veil. What happened? Sin enters, I'm immediately clothed and I'm kicked out of the garden and there are two cherubim that are with flaming swords to make sure that I don't go in. Why? Because if I go in, I will actually die.
Speaker 2:We think that the cherubim was somehow to reflect or to keep the sinners out of the good place, but actually think those things were placed there as a protection to the people, because if they would come into that presence of God, they would die. It's a representation of that. No, you can't come in. This is not to keep you out. This is from keeping you in, because if you come this way, you will die. Your hope is actually out there now, not out here, which is why Jesus is sent outside of the camp right, which is where all the excrement is and all the dead bodies and all those things.
Speaker 2:The picture is that what Jesus did was he went outside of the camp for us so that we could be brought in to Eden, but the fullness of that is not yet accomplished.
Speaker 2:So this is like a I'm like man, we went deep here and I'm fine with that. I actually kind of dig it. But I think when you're talking about dude but when people stand in front of God they die I'm like, yes, the glory is that one day he will stand before God, and it will not be that way. One day you will stand before God and you will not crumble because you will be made of the same substance, let's say in the bodily form, that Christ was when he was resurrected. His body was no longer held back in the same ways that ours are. He had a resurrection body that still was a representation of his body, like we could talk about the resurrected body and exactly what that looks like. But at some point we will see Jesus and we will be able to reflect and see him for who he is and be able to reflect that perfectly, without the veil of a sinful, fallen world that we currently are a part of, whether we want to be or not.
Speaker 3:And the manner in which we are able to do this is actually basically revealed in the text. Okay, because he's basically saying that the very way that we're transformed is because we see him as he is. It's because God basically shines his face in a merciful fashion. So in Exodus 34, again, when Moses sees the buttocks of God, what happens to his face? His face begins to shine. As you said, this is what we call a hierophany, and we're teaching it two words here. But theophany is when you see God or see a divine manifestation, and then a hierophany is essentially the effect that that divine manifestation has on the surrounding area.
Speaker 2:On reality.
Speaker 3:So you have this with Moses and the burning bush. What does God say? Take off your sandals, because you're standing on what?
Speaker 1:Holy ground.
Speaker 3:Holy ground. Why was the ground holy? Because God manifested his presence there. The same thing happens to Moses' face when he sees God. There's a hierophany, his face is transfigured and, as a result, he goes down there and everybody's freaking out and they gotta throw a veil on his face because there's a fear with the holy as again, like we talked about because man is sinful. The reverence saw that, yeah, he's afraid of God. He has a fear of God. But what we're seeing in this passage is the reason we can see God as he is, or the effect that seeing God as he is has on us is going to be the ultimate hierophany. It's gonna be the ultimate moment that man is purified.
Speaker 3:This text really is grounded in what we call the beatific vision, if I can just kind of circle around here and connect it to ultimate satisfaction. The beatific vision not a lot of people know about what the beatific vision is. I think the last time I taught on this, I asked people to raise their hand if they knew what the beatific vision is and nobody raised their hand. A lot of people think that it's a Catholic doctrine, but ultimately it's a Christian doctrine. Christians have taught on this and we've never denied the beatific vision. The beatific vision means this we get it from the word beatitudes, which means blessedness, but beatific is not any blessedness, it's the supreme blessing.
Speaker 3:The beatific vision is the ultimate moment that we see God, as he is referring to 1 John 3.2 here, and so what's happening in this moment is that when we see God as he is, it completely finishes our sanctification. We are completely transformed because God has revealed himself to us and we know him fully, and this is the moment that I would say that we have ultimate satisfaction. Now this sounds like a three-headed gazelle frolicking around in the clouds, but this is something we deal with every day, because if you have ever fallen in love, do you remember the time you fell in love, tim?
Speaker 1:Okay, if you've ever fallen in love that.
Speaker 3:A lot of the times that I fell in love, it was a moment. It was a moment when I looked at the person's face and in that moment it was like almost all the whole entire world dissolves around you and all you can fixate on is that person and you almost feel like it's just you and that person in the world. It feels like there's nothing else going on around you and in those moments people are changed. They stick with you.
Speaker 3:I remember when my buddies began to fall in love for the first time you know, we're all teeny poppers and one of them comes back. He's been hiding away from the group, hanging out on Friday, hanging out somewhere else on a Friday night, and he'd come back in and he was just totally different. You'd look at him and be like, good, what happened to you? And after a while of this pattern, you would be like, oh, he fell in love. That's what happened to him. You see, we experience this every day. We experience the sensation of falling in love, of fixating on something, that we see something and it changes us completely and ultimately, what God's giving us is a teaser trailer and a prelude to what will be the moment. We fixate on his face and we are completely satisfied.
Speaker 1:And some said sorry go ahead, but this is possible before we die.
Speaker 3:This is possible because if you look at this set, if you look at first John, towards the end he says and everyone who does hope, hopes in him, purifies himself as he is pure. This, the very hope of seeing God as he is, is a higher off any already in and of itself. Because you hope to see God and to find your ultimate satisfaction in him, it already begins that process of transforming you so that you can stand before him that day and see him as he is. This is why we go through the sanctification process in general, so that we can stand before him and see him.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you won't ultimately be able to stand in front of God. Right now. What he's saying is the process begins because the things that we do know of God already start transforming us. So we begin to better reflect and be able to show people who God is through who we are, because of what we can see of him. Now it starts a process when we come to know Christ, that begins to see sin and brokenness working backwards, because we're actually able to see some of who God is and start putting pieces together to reflect who we were always meant to be. And so in societies that don't love Jesus this is what he was getting at earlier these things tend to get reversed.
Speaker 2:You start to see things falling apart Suddenly. Music we're more interested in it, going everywhere. You know what I mean. It doesn't have a unifying factor anymore when we do jeez, I was gonna bring up science, but I won't bring up science People start to lose the sight of where these things have come from, why the universe is rational, why there's a particular you could say Principium or element that is holding all things together and from which all things come, and the way that we're able to understand what beauty is, what ration is what logic is what we are and where we have come from. If you don't have any of those things, then you actually lose beauty in that process too. But as you grow to know God, those things start getting put back into the place that they're meant to and you're able to come, start walking back into this place of relationship with God. Now you're already positionally perfect before him because of Christ's sacrifice, but from a sanctified perspective or how close do I actually look to Jesus right now? That's still a little rough. You've got some stuff that we got to work on and walk towards Jesus, and actually when we do that individually, it transforms societies.
Speaker 2:I brought this up a long time ago. One of my favorite stories about this is actually from the Thracians, which were kind of lost to history. Is this weird thing? Is there's this group of people? If you've seen Troy, you know what I mean. Or you enjoy the Iliad or any of these things you hear about this massive group of people called the Thracians. They were a huge.
Speaker 2:Herodotus says for all you history nerds out there that at one point there were the third largest, basically, civilization on the planet and they just vanished. They totally disappeared. Nobody knew what happened to them. Well, in the Balkans they actually found these burial mounds for the Thracians and they found inside these burial mounds that the Thracians had begun to celebrate death and mourn birth. They had these pictures and stuff and carvings on the walls where it was like when somebody was born it was mourning because somebody had been brought into this awful, terrible world, and every time somebody died it was the celebration that, oh, this meaningless nonsense is finally over for you and you can pass on and no longer have to deal with it.
Speaker 2:And the thing about the Thracians is nobody conquered them. You couldn't find anywhere in the history books where somebody came in and killed this group of people. They functionally destroyed themselves and just disappeared. They all ended up joining other civilizations and shrunk to the point where they were no longer a thing. Nobody had to conquer them. They destroyed themselves because they lost purpose. They stopped having a hope for a future. They stopped trying to reflect the prolific nature of that, which is what we receive from God, which is when we know him we actually build. We have a hope for the future, we have purpose, we have life. We're modeling it off of the things we intrinsically know. Their culture started working backwards and when it started working backwards, they literally defeated themselves and disappeared.
Speaker 2:I would say that happens on a massive cultural scale.
Speaker 2:That also happens to us as individuals. When you lose purpose in sight of your heavenly Father, what ends up happening is you degenerate into depression and anxiety and brokenness, and suddenly I can't build anything and I've lost my hope for the future. I've lost the things that I'm doing, and what we want to tell people is hey, listen, it may sound weird to you, but the reason that's happening to you is because you're not beholding Christ. You've lost sight of what beauty is. You've ended up spiraling into this worldview of nothing really matters and it's all pain and it's all brokenness. And actually the cross represents to us. Nope, jesus took the brokenness so that you could actually start to make sense of what's happening and rebuild your life, so that one day you would stand before the Lord, jesus Christ, and you wouldn't be surprised at what you saw, but an awe at the beauty that was there, because you've been learning more and more about this person until the day where you finally saw them and want to say person, I mean the Lord.
Speaker 1:God Himself? Is it possible to die before the sanctification process ends?
Speaker 3:No, because God appointed your time. God appointed your time and he knows your timeframe and ultimately, you're going to be alright. Give you a high five before you go.
Speaker 2:So here's the deal the final sanctification does happen when you've received your resurrected body, right, and then you stand before God in your resurrected body, totally transformed. So at some point your body has to physically change before you could withstand standing in front of God itself. Right, that has to happen. But here's the deal. God isn't just interested in transforming you and pulling you out and then separating you from everything else. God is actually using his church and his people that are being made in his likeness to transform the world around them. God is see when God transforms people. It transforms families, it transforms communities and then cultures and eventually the world. And so God's beauty, us seeing him rightly and being able to emanate or reflect those things is the very thing that ends up actually transforming the world around us. It's when we've turned and we have our back to God that we become destructive.
Speaker 3:And it really comes down to again, like you were saying, what you hope in, what your expectations are of the future, do have an absolute bearing on what's happening to you today. Okay, if your end is in chaos, death and destruction, like many peoples are, especially in our nation, as a nation becomes less and less Christianized, post-christian, that's their future Chaos, death and destruction. And they celebrate it now and in like manner, the Christian celebrates the beauty and the joy and the glory of God. Now, the reality is that you don't want to have misplaced expectations, and I think a lot of Christians have misplaced expectations, especially when it comes to heaven. You know, when we look at heaven, we think of the golden streets, we think of playing harps, we think of frolicking in the clouds with each other and honestly, a lot of our expectations of heaven leave us pretty apathetic. We don't think that we're going to be truly satisfied and really we're looking at the wrong thing, we're paying attention to the wrong thing, we're hoping in the wrong thing, because the Psalmist says in Psalm 73, and this is probably one of my favorite verses in all scripture whom have I in heaven but you?
Speaker 3:Why does he say that? Because there's nothing else in heaven that we desire more than God. He says don't my heart and my flesh may fail. The Lord is my strength and my portion forever. The ultimate reward of heaven, the ultimate reward of eternity, is to be with God. This is why, in John 14, when Jesus is basically saying I'm going away, I'm going to be betrayed, the disciples are extremely discouraged. And he says let not your hearts be troubled. And he chooses to double down on one promise. And the promise is this that where I am, you may be also, so that I will take you to myself. He doubles down on that promise. Why? Because the concern of the disciples was not eternal life, ultimately, and not all these different things. Their biggest worry in that moment was Jesus. We want to be with you.
Speaker 1:We want to be with you, lord, that's why I think heaven is a very hard concept, man. One eternity sounds terrible, right, because we're mortal, yeah Darn it.
Speaker 2:You want to live forever.
Speaker 1:That sucks.
Speaker 2:I think heaven is a strange concept because I just I don't think we understand what it means. Yeah, Like we.
Speaker 1:I think we understand hell's bad. I don't want to go there, so I'll go here.
Speaker 2:Right and we're like I understand pain. Yeah, Right but, tim, imagine, gosh, I'm trying to not go down a wormhole here. But okay, man, if you ever bought, you ever bit into a piece of food. And I love this thing because you're like you know it's going to be delicious, you've had it before and somebody just made it wrong. Oh yeah, and you're like it's the worst experience ever You're like so close.
Speaker 1:I couldn't have made this better at home.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Or like you have expectations for something being amazing, this trip or whatever and you go there and it's the opposite, yeah, and the picture that Scripture gives us is that the substance of all of the things that we love and were meant to enjoy and were made for are found in Christ. And so when you enter into heaven, we're thinking about, well, there's going to be good food. You know what I mean. And it's like no, you don't understand Actually, the thing that you feel like you've been missing in life forever, like that feeling in your gut that it's like I know this isn't right and it's not going the way that I was hoping and things aren't working out the way that I was planning on it working out and this isn't. You know why is pain? Why is this? Why is that? What if, in an instant, you bit into that piece of food and it was exactly what it was supposed to be, but that feeling didn't go away? You know what I mean. Or that relationship that you had, or Josiah brought up that moment with that girl, or, if you're a girl, that guy that you know is your future husband or whatever. It's like that moment where you're like, oh my gosh, I'm looking at forever, somehow, like that's what it's supposed to be, and I think when we downplay the significance of heaven, I think we suck at recreating it here. But the substance of heaven is not the stuff that we're doing. It's the stuff that we're representing because of who created us and who created these other things. Our greatest joy is found in him, because he's the one that created us and we were meant to be in unity and perfectly united, and Christ has given us the ability to do that. But there's a culmination coming. It's a bit like being engaged. The day is coming when it will finally be done and we'll begin the great journey and adventure together until death do us part, right. But when we're talking about that final resurrection day, before we enter into the eternal state, and the pictures, the bride and the groom finally come together and there's this culmination, the beginning of an adventure that will never end. We're in that, we're betrothed state. The plan is there, it's already sealed, it's being done, everything is breaking this off, but I am not yet at a place where I'm fully united with the person that I'm meant to be with. But that day will come and I will stare, you know, my bride in the face or, you know, the Lord will stare his church in the face and we will know and be totally one like we would never imagine before.
Speaker 2:So I think we downplay heaven because we make it some kind of Greco-Roman perspective on the future, where it's cupids flying around and everyone's in a toga for some reason, or you're naked and then it's awkward for everyone, you know, or it's like, well, it's a, you know, there's food and the people you know, grandpa's there and I love grandpa, he was great, right. But actually heaven itself is hell if Jesus is not there. Heaven is hell if God is not there, and actually that's what we have here is fragments of the good things that we know the fullness exists of somewhere, but we don't have it. So what do we see? The brokenness, the messed up stuff and what doesn't exist. This is why Augustine talked about sin as privation. It's the removal of something that was meant to be there that actually makes something perverse and jacked up. What we're living in is a world that echoes and smacks of the holy but at the same time is seen as perverse, because the glory of God is not fully displayed or the kingship of Christ isn't fully implemented here.
Speaker 3:In that sense, the problem is also is that we've made reality, as we perceive it, ultimate. And if you make it ultimate, you essentially destroy the hope that there could ever be anything more, because if this is all there is, then it's not too great. Plato had the analogy we knew we're going to bring up the.
Speaker 3:Plato's Cave analogy, but you know he had these chained up guys in the cave. He talked about chained up dudes in the cave that couldn't see the fire directly but they could feel the heat of the fire and they could see the shadows cast into the wall. And because they were in this cave for such a long time, they thought all of reality was simply the shadows. And that's what they, that's all they perceived. And in many ways we're very similar, because all we see of reality are truly just shadows of the eternal. They're shadows of the full culmination of what things are meant to be.
Speaker 3:I mean, paul makes this quite clear in 1 Corinthians 13-12. For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then shall I know, even as also I am known? What's he saying? He's saying right now what you perceive, christian. The world that you look at is but a shadow of the things to come. It is a hope, it is just a glimmer, it is a little, a little teaser trailer for what God has in store for us. And if that is in fact the case, why do we have any reason to doubt that God could truly not satisfy us when we make it to eternity.
Speaker 2:But the less we fall into full Platonism. I do want to make the point that the things that are here, that are being transformed by God, are solid Like your. Your essence, your spirit is solid. What you do here, it does matter, it does echo in eternity the kingdom that we're ushering in here. The work that is being done here actually is reforming and bringing about the fullness of what God has actually called things to be in the first place.
Speaker 2:So it's not as though none of this stuff matters and it all sucks and every it's. We live in ghost world and one day God will come and then he'll make it all solid. It's more like we build things into the fullness of what they were meant to be and then it becomes solid. When he comes down, it's like staining the deck and then putting the lacquer on. Afterwards it's beautiful. Now it's permanent. That's, that's supposed to be the picture, and that's why, when I use this word eternal state, that's what I'm talking about. What I mean is that's the, that's when things become permanent and are no longer dealing with destruction or death or age in the way that we think about those things, but actually now, everything that is meant to be, and that transformation is now permanent as we go forward.
Speaker 2:So it's not like what we're doing now doesn't matter, it's that we need to understand. What we're doing is we're beginning to reflect and become people who are no longer ghosts better, solid because we're beginning to reflect with the real thing instead of instead of a shadow of it. Amen, interesting. That's a wild thought, isn't it? Like this, is what kind of like Tim, like Theoden in the Lord of the Rings? This is what I think about. You have Wormtong, who's been whispering into his ear and has become this disgusting old man who's almost unable to move and just kind of mumbles. But when he has his sword put back in his hand and this curse is broken, suddenly that age is working backwards and he's becoming the fullness of what he always was meant to be. That's supposed to be what it looks like in Christ, and when we finally come into the fullness of who we were meant to be, boom, now it's solid and we're responsible with manifesting this hope.
Speaker 3:We're responsible now with ushering this hope in. It's not just you. Sit on your couch play your video games eat your Cheetos and not walk into it for heaven.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, wait for heaven, wait for heaven Go invest in the bomb shelter.
Speaker 3:Jesus will come back tomorrow. Don't do that. No, what God's calling us into is to manifest that hope here, now, through the power of his spirit. It's not something that's just given to us later. His kingdom is here, right here, right now. As Jesus said, I will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Speaker 2:Yeah, how else are you going to muster the roll here? Throw you nerds out there. Some of you guys are like what is even happening? I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:All right. So this question has been ringing in my ear then for the last few minutes. Why bother creating us then, for any?
Speaker 2:of this. Why bother creating like creation itself?
Speaker 1:Why bother saving Noah at the flood? You know what I mean, oh man.
Speaker 2:I mean that's kind of the whole point. Right Is if you have, if you have crap, world that has been robbed of the fullness of what God has intended things to be his desire he already had.
Speaker 1:We already have heaven for that Right. I think you're getting into the full desire of what God wants us to be is when we get to heaven. So why not just?
Speaker 2:No, no, no, no, no. This is what I'm saying. The goal is not to just to get rid of the things that he's created and say I guess we start over. No, the goal is actually to bring about life and bring those things back and a triumphal display of the finishing of wickedness and evil, the loss of the dragon and the victory of the prince. That's supposed to be the picture. So if you said like, well, why, even you know why save him in the first place, just end it and start over, it's no. The glory of God is actually the victory over the darkness, not just a pressing pause and doing something else entirely. It's finishing the project. It's overcoming wickedness and evil is actually a huge display of the beauty in the grandiose story that God has painted.
Speaker 3:So I mean just tag on to this as well. Glory as well. It's all for God's glory. The Bible makes it very clear that that's what's ultimate is for God's glory. And God, you know, has been eternally satisfied in himself. You know, you can't fill a bucket full of water any fuller than it is we. The closer we get to God, the more we are satisfied and enjoy the glory that God has manifested for himself. That's what we're supposed to find satisfaction is is the glory of God. And so when God has written the narrative of the world which he has, he has displayed that glory to its magnitude and the reason that and I always like to say this I think people emulate God the most when we write stories, I think when we write narratives, because God is the great narrative writer, he's the great author of everything that we see, and we emulate him the most when we make stories.
Speaker 3:So I do believe that when we get to heaven, we're not going to lose this memory of the past where, you know, a lot of people think he's going to do a memory wipe because your memories are so terrible. I don't believe in that at all. I think that we are going to look back at our lives with heavenly eyes and we're going to be able to see the beauty and the design and the complexity of God's narrative and everything that he had planned out, and it's basically going to be watching the greatest movie of all time, which God himself directed, wrote and produced and sustained every single particle.
Speaker 2:And it doesn't end, it doesn't end, it doesn't end, it's like this is part one.
Speaker 3:It just keeps getting better. It just keeps getting better.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean every story. We love Tim. We love the underdog story. Nobody loves the story about the guy who rules a kingdom. He's wicked and he just keeps doing his thing and that's the end.
Speaker 2:Everybody's like that's a terrible story. Or how about the guy who's poor and decrepit and awful, and that's the whole story. That's the whole thing. Everybody's like well, I can resonate with that, but that story sucked. Everybody knows it's the story of the person who is not where he needs to be. But we know there's more inside him becoming the person that he was always meant to be, righting the wrongs, transforming the things around him and creating a heritage and a future and a hope. Like everybody's like that's the story, that's the hero's journey, that's what's supposed to happen. Everybody knows in their guts that's what it's supposed to be. And the Bible reflects this story and it's telling us the story and how we're a part of that story and how we're bringing about the fullness of the culmination of that last day, when all things are not just done, they're there, seem to be done. Justice has had, beauty's revealed Glory is on display and we are taking our part on the seats at Caraperavel, you know.
Speaker 3:And we see this too with the moment of the cross. I mean, the most greatest moment in history was the cross of Jesus Christ and in that moment God displays. I like to call it the divine paradox, but it's literally the moment that God displays all of his characteristics and his attributes. And mankind is affected emotionally at every single level when it involves the cross. So I like to walk through it and I don't want to run off on a tangent on this front because I know we got to wrap up here but it's fascinating because God only God, could have written such a story.
Speaker 3:You look at the cross of Jesus Christ. You're filled with the deepest despair, why? Because the most beautiful thing that entered into this world is being crucified and destroyed, but yet, at the same time, the Christian is filled with the deepest joy and happiness because what they see is the most beautiful act and expression of love possible that is even conceivable by man. And then, third, you're filled with deep sadness because you love Christ, because you see what's happening to him. I mean all of these emotions that are captivating a person when they look at the cross of Jesus Christ. It almost hits every single level. It's the touch point of God's immaculate story that he wrote, the touch point between the divine and the corporeal, and it's going to be the point that we're going to reflect on for all of eternity.
Speaker 3:What do we say in heaven? Worthy is the Lamb who is slain. Why do we say that forever? Because forever we're going to be captivated at the most amazing moment in history, when God crushed his own Son for our sakes on the cross. We're going to be singing that forever and ever and ever, and it's something that we can find joy in today and be captivated by right now. And so, if you want to be satisfied by God and if you're looking for eternal satisfaction, there's only one place that you can find it, and it's in the cross of Jesus Christ. The more that you meditate on it, the more that you fixate on it, the more you're going to be astounded at who God is, and his love and his glory, his wrath and his power was all made known in that moment.
Speaker 2:Amen. Yeah, I think the big takeaway today is hey, if you're beholding Christ, everything in your life is going to start to line up with what that actually looks like and what that means. If things in your life are constantly going downhill, there's a good chance that you're really not spending time with Jesus, you're not spending time in his word, you're not seeing the glory, you're not seeing what he's done in this world and the beauty of how God actually intends things to be and then owning that and bringing about in your life. If things are falling apart, it's because your focus is in all the wrong places.
Speaker 2:The point of the beautific vision is that at some point you will fully see. You don't fully see right now, but you do see in part. And the more you learn who God is and what he does and how he does things, the more you'll be able to see of who he is, until one day you fully stand before him in perfection. But at that point you had better have changed some things in your life to better reflect who he is and what he's doing, or else what you'd be saying is I actually don't see him and I don't understand. If you're struggling with that stuff, guys, I'm telling you right now you've stopped seeing beauty and you're allowing a secular and even pagan or evil world to reinterpret the things going on around you to only be chaos and destruction and brokenness. When there's so much more there, and until you see the resurrected Christ and his power and everything else that's going on, you will not be able to bring that resurrection power into anything that you're doing.
Speaker 1:You got any final thoughts there, Josie? I think that's a good stopping point. So it was an interesting topic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was like today was a little wild man because we just went, we weaved in and out of some deeper stuff. Josie, I love just some of the, the insight man, of the depth you were bringing to how these things connect. I love that. So thanks for thanks for sharing, dude, I think my heart is like push people into hey, god made you to be glorious. Now go be glorious, go reflect him well and go be the kind of person that displays Christ so that they would see the beauty of him in simple people like us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, man. Yeah well cool. All right guys, we'll catch you all next week.
Speaker 3:Have a great week. I'll take care.
