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June 4/5, 2016
Jason Meyer | Psalms 27:4
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
Introduction
Our Mission in Relation to Our Cities
Last week we looked at Psalm 27 together. I had planned to go to Psalm 28 this week, but I just could not tear myself away from Psalm 27. What often happens is that one particular application will take on a life of its own and essentially become its own sermon (that is why Psalm 2 and Psalm 8 got two sermons each). That is what happened last week as I began to meditate upon Psalm 27 and what it says about the beauty of the Lord. Those musings made our mission statement come alive a little more: “Spreading a passion for the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples through Jesus Christ.” What about spreading passion for the supremacy of God in the arts (one of the “all things”)?
This is an essential question in relation to our vision to Fill These Cities with the gospel of Christ so that these cities will be filled with worshippers of Christ. Here is the question: How do we bring Christ into every sector of the city—industry, art, sports, etc.?
Consider the arts scene in Minneapolis. Minneapolis touts its own artistic identity. Here is what minneapolis.org says as an advertisement about our city (http://www.minneapolis.org/things-to-do/arts-entertainment/):
World-class museums. Breathtaking architecture. More theater seats per capita than any U.S. city outside New York. Minneapolis has become a premier destination for arts lovers. Take in a show at the Guthrie Theater, one of the city’s Tony Award-winning theaters. Discover new worlds at the Science Museum of Minnesota. Take in the arias of Rossini at the Minnesota Opera. Or visit the Walker Art Center, hailed by Newsweek as “possibly the best contemporary art museum in the country.”
Under theaters, it says:
Arts lovers, take note. In the past few years, Minneapolis has experienced unprecedented growth in our already rich cultural landscape. The infusion of $500 million dollars from individual donors and foundations has created an arts boom that few communities ever experience. With the second-most theater seats per capita in the nation, we’ll always make room for you to check out our rich theater scene.
Minneapolis says it up front, big and bold: We are a city committed to the arts. How should Christians respond? Are we a church committed to the arts? We should start by asking if the Bible is for or against art.
Our text has a stunning texture that skillfully testifies to God’s goodness, truth, and beauty together.
Goodness:
I believe that I shall look upon the goodness of the LORD
in the land of the living!—Psalm 27:13
Truth:
Teach me your way, O LORD,
and lead me on a level path
because of my enemies.—Psalm 27:11
Remember that this has been a dominant note ever since Psalm 25. Watch the way that Psalm 25 brings God’s goodness and truth together.
Make me to know your ways, O LORD;
teach me your paths.
Lead me in your truth and teach me,
for you are the God of my salvation;
for you I wait all the day long.Remember your mercy, O LORD, and your steadfast love,
for they have been from of old.
Remember not the sins of my youth or my transgressions;
according to your steadfast love remember me,
for the sake of your goodness, O LORD!Good and upright is the LORD;
therefore he instructs sinners in the way.
He leads the humble in what is right,
and teaches the humble his way.—Psalm 25:4–9
Now the note of beauty becomes a dominant note (here in Psalm 27 and again in Psalm 29:2).
Beauty:
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
How would you say we are doing as a church in embracing these three dimensions of our text? My sense is that we tend to spend more time at Bethlehem stressing ethics and doctrine (which is good and right and true—let’s not lose even a step here), but we tend to put less emphasis on beauty. The Bible speaks with authority and clarity on all three areas, so biblical Christians ought not be narrow, simplistic, and reductionistic. We must not reduce everything in life to a concern for what is moral, or doctrinal, or beautiful. We must avoid being narrowly preoccupied with doctrine that we don’t care about the ethical or the beautiful. We must avoid becoming so fixated on the beautiful that we forget about the doctrinal or the ethical. The Christian faith embraces all three and binds them together in a beautifully unified cord of three strands of goodness, truth, and beauty that is not easily broken.
Why do we care about these three things—because we care about balance? No. We care about all three of these things because we care most about the supremacy of God. How is God made supreme in goodness, truth, and beauty? God is the perfection and thus the standard of all three. God’s character is the measure of goodness. God Himself is truth—He is ultimate reality and thus who He is and what He says is the measure of all truth. God is the perfection of beauty and thus He is the measure of all beauty. He is the source and the standard of goodness, truth, and beauty.
There was a time when Christian artists and their art were world class. Milton, Handel, Bach. Today, Christians tend to be skeptical about the arts. They are suspicious of the arts as worldly or perhaps as a pastime that may be a waste of time. R.C. Sproul testified to the same sad story in his context.
I hear all the time from Christian artists—musicians, sculptors, painters, architects, writers, dramatists, and others—that they feel cut off from the Christian community. They tell me that they are treated as pariahs because their vocation is considered worldly and unworthy of Christian devotion. That’s a sad commentary on our state of affairs, particularly when we look at the history of the church and we see that the Christian church has produced some of the greatest giants in music, in art, and in literature.—R.C. Sproul, “Our Beautiful God”
I have heard our own members who have a calling in the arts say very similar things. They wonder at times if they fit in at Bethlehem. Therefore, here is what we are going to do. We are going to have a commissioning service. We are (1) commissioning artists to make God supreme in art and (2) commissioning those who receive art to do so for the supremacy of God.
First, let us see the creation of art as an expression of the truth that we are created in the image of a Creator. What we see right away in the Bible is that God creates. That is what we see right away with Adam—called to use the raw materials of creation in order to create new things that are good and glorify God and are good for humanity. This reality gives all sorts of work dignity—law, medicine, government, education, construction, retail, temp jobs, and also the arts and the gift of imagination that makes improvements in all of these areas possible.
Second, avoid the simplistic conclusion that all art is good or all art is bad, or all art is lawful or unlawful. Art cannot simplistically be reduced to self-expression. In the Bible, we see that God commissions some art (tabernacle) and forbids others (graven images).
Third, expect God to empower Christian art. If you look for the first explicit reference to being filled with the Spirit, what do you think you will find?
The Lord said to Moses, “See, I have called by name Bezalel the son of Uri, son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, to work in every craft.—Exodus 31:1–5
God put such importance on art and beauty that His Spirit empowered the creation of beautiful art in the tabernacle—because the dwelling place of the God of beauty must be beautiful. But no artistic image could ever capture the beauty of God so no graven image could be an idolatrous representation of God.
Fourth, the best art will be art that skillfully weaves together goodness, truth, and beauty. They must be kept together. We are not commissioning you to say the wrong thing really well (i.e., beautifully). Weave the three into a tapestry that makes much of God and brings joy and beauty into the lives of others. I want you to feel God’s smile and pleasure upon you as you do it.
I also want Christians to leave this sermon with a sense of commissioning from the Bible to receive beautiful art for the glory and supremacy of God.
C.S. Lewis’ distinction between the many who use art and the few that receive art is the best I have read. He said that appreciating and evaluating a piece of art requires negative effort and then positive effort. Negatively speaking, we must first empty ourselves—that is, avoid unleashing our subjectivity upon the pictures or the music. We must look or listen and go on looking or listening until we have seen or heard what is really there. We look or listen to have it do something to us, rather than rushing to do something with it. Look, listen, receive, get yourself out of the way. Receive it rather than use it. This looks passive, but it is an imaginative and obedient activity—the listener or observer is simply making sure of his orders. For example, “The composer may begin by giving out a ‘tune’ which you could whistle. But the question is not whether you particularly like that tune. Wait. Attend. See what he is going to make of it” (Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism).
This raises a whole slew of questions. “Should we only look at Christian art or read Christian books? Can we appreciate non-Christian works of art? What if we disagree with elements of the message? How do we evaluate them?”
I love the approach of Francis Schaeffer. Schaeffer could appreciate what was excellent about something in an artistic sense while also evaluating what was not good and right and true about it. In responding to a nihilistic poem by Dylan Thomas, Schaeffer says,
This poem is by a fellow human being of our generation. He is not an insect on the head of a pin, but shares the same flesh and blood as we do, a man in real despair…. It is not good enough to take a man like this or any of the others and smash them as though we have no responsibility for them. This is sensitivity crying out in the darkness.—Schaeffer, The God Who is There, 38–39
Far from limiting a reader’s taste or restricting the artistic canon to a few doctrinally pure artists, world-view criticism as practiced by Schaeffer actually opens up the whole range of the arts to the Christian. One does not go to a work of art to agree or disagree with it, but to understand the depths of personality that it expresses and to encounter the world view that it signifies. It involves what C.S. Lewis describes as “receiving” rather than “using” the work of art. According to Lewis, “the specific value or good of literature” is that “it admits us to experiences other than our own.” Thus, it is possible “to enter into other men’s beliefs (those, say, of Lucretius or Lawrence) even though we think them untrue.”
—Veith, Schaeffer, 38
We are also commissioning parents to disciple their children in goodness, truth, and beauty. Parents, please take away the mystique and allure of the forbidden. Don’t start by just saying no and smashing something; start by seeking to understand with wisdom and sensitivity. If a child is drawn to something, seek to understand it—what makes it attractive or compelling? Is there something excellent or skillful about it? Seek to appreciate, then evaluate according to the standards of goodness, truth, and beauty. And don’t allow your kids to just ask minimalistic questions—“What’s wrong with it?” Stop asking the minimalist question and go for the maximum—“What is good about it?” Then take the next step and provoke your children to go all out for goodness, truth, and beauty. Is there something better, something more true, more right, more beautiful?
Explain why those things are inferior. We are not killjoys, we are simply against things that kill joy. Help your children to process and ponder and think through questions like that. Prompt them to reach for a fuller quest for things that bring together all three: goodness, truth, and beauty—when you find those three together, give yourself to it.
Don’t baptize your biases and call them Christian in an exclusive, restrictive, self-centered way. God-centered art by definition will be far more extensive than your preferences. When you think about hymns and choruses, we don’t just baptize a preference for what is old or new or familiar. We go for the best. Some new stuff is not great, but some old hymns are not great either. We should be looking for the best of the old and the best of the new.
Ethnic harmony also has a part to play here. Personal preferences and cultural preferences should not squeeze out the art and expressions of minority cultures. Bethlehem is a predominantly majority culture church. Majority culture people think a certain style of music is upbeat and we think, “Wow, we are really jamming,” but our music is certainly not as lively and celebratory compared to other cultural expressions.
Therefore, when you hear something that you do not immediately self-identify as your musical preference—your musical heart language—think to yourself, “I bet this song is an expression of someone’s heart language in worship. I bet this is especially and uniquely blessing them.” Let your own confession of limitation and narrowness lead you to worship the wonder of the infinity and limitlessness of God. Say to yourself, “The excellencies of God are way too great to be confined to one culture’s expression of them.”
The gospel of Jesus Christ in its fullness has more goodness, truth, and beauty in it than any other story. It is the one narrative to rule them all—it inspires other art, it judges and evaluates other art.
God created everything good. We reject the idea that “spiritual” is good and “physical” is bad. Everything that God made is good and contains an echo of his greatness and goodness. We don’t ask, “Should I enjoy this or God?” God richly provides us with everything to enjoy.
We noted last week that we are worshippers. We are false worshippers. We do what we do because we want what we want because we worship what we worship.
… because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.—Romans 1:25
We have done the wrong things. We have desired the wrong things (or good things became god things because we treasured them more than God). We have treasured and worshipped and loved created things more than the Creator. We are bad, not good. We have been false, not true. Our lives have produced things that are morally ugly, not beautiful.
Incarnation
The incarnation made the beauty of God more visible than it had ever been before. What about this surpassing delight that the Psalmist finds in the dwelling place of God? Jesus is the radiance of God’s glory (Hebrews 1:3). God the Father looks upon the beauty of the Son and loves him. “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17). All the fullness of deity dwells bodily in him (Colossians 2:9). Jesus is God in the flesh, making his dwelling, his tabernacling among us (John 1:14). Jesus is Immanuel, God with us (Matthew 1:23).
Crucifixion/Resurrection
But on the cross there is a stunning exchange. He took on all that was bad, false, ugly, and broken about us, so that we receive what he did in our place—a life that was good and true and beautiful in every way. He is our goodness, truth, and beauty. Look at the stunning reversal in God’s victory. God took what was considered the ugliest, most cursed thing imaginable—crucifixion—and made it a thing of beauty so that the cross is a place where ugliness and beauty crashed together. The resurrection says, “Beauty won; glory won; love won.” Christ is risen and forever glorified—bodily. He forever bears the scars. We call them the precious nail-prints—that should be nonsense to say precious nail-prints (like talking about the treasured, radiant electric chair). God has turned everything upside-down through the cross. It was the ugliness of our sin and the dark backdrop of wrath that caused the mercy of the cross to shine like the sun bursting through the clouds.
Crown Him the Lord of love, behold His hands and side,
Those wounds, yet visible above, in beauty glorified.
No angel in the sky can fully bear that sight,
But downward bends his burning eye at mysteries so bright.
Conversion
In the first creation, the heavens and earth are telling the beauty of God. We suppress that sight and knowledge and try to make our own rules and go our own way because we are blind, dead, and deaf to God’s beauty.
In the new creation, we see the beauty of God in the face of Jesus Christ: “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6).
This is a miraculous intervention, a new creation. Salvation is a saving seeing of the beauty of God in the face of the crucified Christ. We say, “I see it.” “Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see.”
Conclusion: Communion Treasures the Tangible Until He Comes
In the eating and drinking of the Lord’s Supper, only converted eyes can see the beauty of salvation, only converted taste buds can taste the sweetness of salvation, only heart’s made new can feel the joy of our salvation.
The work of Christ is historical and objectively true—outside of you. It is just as real as the cracker or cup you are holding. Furthermore, its reality does not rise or fall according to our emotions about it. You cannot with your moral effort make this cracker more of a cracker; you cannot make this juice more juice than it already is. You can only receive it. Eat the bread. Drink the cup.
In the same way, you can’t improve God’s salvation in Christ. You can only receive it or reject it. May your eating of the bread and drinking of the cup be a reminder—an acted out parable of your receiving of Christ’s salvation.
The Lord’s Supper also encourages us to wait upon the Lord—“For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes” (1 Corinthians 11:26).
Consummation—the Fullest Sight of Beauty for Some
He is coming. We will see him. What do you see now? That will determine how you experience him then. For Christians who do not see him now, but worship him and love him, his coming will be the fulfillment of all of your longings and thirst for beauty. Christians throughout the centuries have talked about this blessed longing and beatific vision:
… when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints, and to be marveled at among all who have believed, because our testimony to you was believed.—2 Thessalonians 1:10
Verse 10 is all about beauty and victory, but verses 7–9 testify to a completely different experience. If you don’t know, treasure him, and see him as the perfection of beauty now, his coming will not be good news for you. It will be an experience of horror that no horror movie could ever capture—a horror movie that never ends, no closing credits.
… When the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might.—2 Thessalonians 1:7–9
Make haste. Turn to Christ. Turn away from all the things you love and trust more than him. Christian, we are the bride of Christ, and the Bible closes with a word from our bridegroom in Revelation 22:20—“He who testifies to these things says, ‘Surely I am coming soon.’” The Bride of Christ says, “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!”
Sermon Discussion Questions
Main Point: Psalm 27 eloquently and clearly testifies to God’s goodness, truth, and beauty.
Outline
Discussion Questions
Application Questions
Prayer Focus
Pray for a grace to spread a passion for the supremacy of God with respect to goodness, truth, and beauty, for the joy of all peoples through Jesus Christ.