THE DANGER OF BEAUTY
The UK spent £27 billion in the beauty industry over the last year. But the desire to be beautiful doesn’t just extend to our bodies as the Netflix show Selling Sunset reveals – buying beautiful homes is another desire. To be beautiful and to live in a beautiful home in a beautiful location – who wouldn’t want that?
Of course, beauty is subjective – which is why we use the phrase ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’.
Despite this truth, we’ve been programmed for years through the fashion industry, the beauty industry, through Hollywood and pop culture that there’s a specific kind of beauty. It controls most of our perceptions and desires, and it’s dangerous
It’s dangerous because this kind of beauty has a shelf life. As the title to Lowgold’s song reveals ‘Beauty Dies Young’. With the passing of time, this kind of beauty fades. Age, decay and death will see to that.
AUTHENTIC BEAUTY & HAPPINESS
But aside from physical beauty, or aesthetic beauty there’s also moral beauty. We can see it in the form of sacrifice, in compassion and courage, in love and forgiveness. We could argue this kind of beauty is eternal and yet we rarely reach these standards on a consistent basis.
But what if, in our search for happiness, in the desire to be beautiful – we were made beautiful by someone beautiful, to live in a beautiful land?
Christianity teaches that beauty is real, just not plastic or self-absorbed. Authentic beauty is found in the reality of God and is seen most clearly in the person of Jesus – who was probably not physically beautiful (using the norms of today) – but nobody else in the whole of history has displayed such moral beauty as Jesus. Compassion, sacrifice, courage, forgiveness. Jesus displayed them all. When we look at Jesus we see true beauty.
But even more amazing than this is that Jesus sees all those who trust in him as beautiful! In fact, the Bible uses the metaphor of a beautiful bride. A beautiful bride living in a beautiful land without age and decay in what the Bible calls the New Heavens and the New Earth. [1]
It might not be the kind of beauty this world offers but it is the kind that does not fade and really satisfies.
In a world where self-esteem is low because the standards of beauty are unrealistically high – why not check out the key to authentic beauty that does not fade – Jesus.
1: We see this in places like Revelation 21.
