PERFECTLY IMPERFECT MESSES
God exists. We can see His divine nature in all of creation (Romans 1:20). We see His fingerprints in the way creation has His signature of design on it, rather than “chance” or random chaos. In fact, because there is no such thing as an actual “perfect mess,” one is forced into the position to at least deduce the reason our world doesn’t look like what anyone might imagine to be a sulfuric dungeon from hell, is because it was made wonderfully from God’s creative genius.
By “perfect mess,” what I mean is this. We’re all imperfect, and every single person is a mess without God. But those who receive Jesus as Lord have accepted God into their hearts, and God is beautiful; therefore believers are—metaphorically—”beautiful messes.” Or, we could describe them as “perfectly imperfect.”
DISCERNING GOOD IN BEAUTY
On the flipside, when it comes to an actual mess, there’s nothing about it worthy of being considered beautiful. Such as, for instance, trash scattered over the street, or a pile of carnage from war. These delineations have absolutely nothing beautiful about them, no matter who we might ask.
If we were to have a look at pictures taken of the galaxy around us by the Hubble Telescope, we would be amazed by the beautiful symmetry and mesmerizing details of our immediate cosmos. They put us in a state of “awe.” This is because they have an imbued existential essence worthy of drawing our appreciation. Why don’t we feel that from an actual mess? We can just tell by looking at a mess that it’s not worthy of being appreciated. But how do we know?
We were designed by the Designer. Our makeup is made in His image. Male and female He created them, which are His essences (Genesis 1:27). But also, His ability to know what is good is in us. We know beautiful is good, as God spent six days creating all things He considered to be good (Genesis 1:31).
NOTHING TO DISCUSS WITHOUT GOD
To deny there is a God is to deny more than just merely His existence. It’s to deny the Cause of causation. It’s to deny objective morality as well as the origin of every branch of science known to man. Humans didn’t create these, we merely discovered that they were already here, in effect. And these are all large-scale subjects we all know and use on a daily basis. So, if not God—what was the first Cause? Everything leads back to an original, uncaused first Cause, otherwise we wouldn’t even be here, and there would be nothing to discuss.
Certainly, without God there would be no hand to sculpt the very fabric of what we understand to be beauty. We can’t take everything away from the Potter just so we can say He doesn’t exist and expect ourselves to still be there to claim it.
WHAT BELIEF IN GOD MEANS FOR UNBELIEVERS
To deny God is to claim love doesn’t exist, when it clearly does. To deny God is to say that objective morality isn’t real, when it clearly is (everyone takes an offense with something based on their use of morality). There are many philosophical arguments against the nonexistence of God, but at the end of the day, people will deny Him because of one thing, if nothing else: they don’t want to believe in God because of what it would mean for them.
COMMITTED TO THE WORLD
Beauty isn’t enough to keep us from wanting the live the way we want to live. Morality and design aren’t powerful enough reasons to consider a different way of living for those who have committed their love to the ways of the world.
Behind our denial is most oftentimes a wound that still hurts. It’s challenging to see around pain with so many learned excuses to live inside the comfort of mundaneness; living on repeat, over and over again.
Don’t misunderstand this. We’re all allowed to feel hurt feelings, and there is a time and place for those feelings to be experienced (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8). However, there is a discernible difference between suffering purposefully, and intentionally staying in the hurt keeping us from maturing into a healthier life. Our God makes beauty from ashes, but we have to be willing to give Him our ashes while trusting He will give us restoration (Isaiah 61:3).
LIMITED VIEW OF THE DEPTH OF BEAUTY
While living in denial is easy to do (it’s easier than the harder choice of being open-minded and brave), it’s spiritually costing. When we’re aware of the idea of God but deny it for any multitude of reasons, we see beauty differently. We may appreciate it, but we won’t see it as an arrow pointing towards anything. For these minds, beauty is beauty and nothing else. It limits our ability to see what exists behind the mystery of creation.
UNMOVED, UN-AWED, UNFULFILLED
We can appreciate a sunset, but what has caused the planets to orbit so naturally for us to have a sunset to witness in the first place? If we see beauty at face-value, there’s very little to actually resonate with on a deeper level. It is as though once we’ve seen beauty through this lens, we feel as though we’ve already exposed ourselves to the entirety of what there is to be admired about what’s in front of us, and the experience is now over; the heart is unmoved, the mind un-awed, the spirit still unfulfilled, and our faith in what’s really behind everything is dead in the water.
WE CAN’T SEE EVERYTHING WITH UNBELIEF
There’s more to life than meets the eye. That’s a fairly common expression, but do we understand it?
There’s more to beauty than appearances and aesthetics; than color, dimension, or shape. There’s more to life than what pleases us. There’s more to love than taking it from others. There’s more to marriage than signing legal papers. There’s more to a job than a paycheck. There’s more to existing than breathing, eating, and sleeping.
There’s more.
INFILTRATION IS NOT EVIDENCE OF DESTRUCTION
God is bigger. God is greater. He is eternal. He EXISTS. He is good! He’s not stuck or confined to the pages of the Bible. Some of us barely function as we’re dragged underneath the wheels of an obstinate belief that there’s nothing significant left to consider from the words of Scripture. What’s worse is that our reason for this is usually something along the lines of blaming 2,000 years of an imperfect church body infiltrated time and time again by sin, and the work of the devil. But the devil has not destroyed the church, or the Good News of Jesus Christ, because it still stands!
God is still moving. Beauty can still be seen in not only the design of this world and our cosmos, but also in the flow of love between people who see God’s presence in each other, and in the selfless interactions between someone in need and someone willing and able to meet that need.
GOD IS REAL, AND PEOPLE CAN SEE IT
We can still see beauty all around us, but some of us have a long way to go before realizing there’s more to it than that. There’s so much more, but obviously, just reading these words might not bring revelation of that reality. Only God’s grace can enable us to see His truth in Scripture, or notice the real beauty behind the aesthetics of every day life.
I hope and pray that God will reveal Himself to those who read this, those who earnestly consider its implications and its most important point: God is real, beauty is an effect of His very nature as a Creator, and no matter how many times we deny it—no matter how long we live in denial—it’s still true. Otherwise, the people who can see it wouldn’t be able to.
GOD’S GRACE IN OUR HEARTS
This is evidence of something written right into the fabric of reality by God’s hand: God’s grace is helping our eyes to see and our ears to hear that His glory resides in all creation. We can start responding to His grace by praising Him for being real to us, and for being faithful to deliver us from our blindness and deafness in a world full of noise and distraction.
Praise You, Jesus, for Your glorious triumph over death, hell and the grave! There would be no hope in seeing deeper into the beauty that is the life You’ve given to us without Your work in our hearts. Thank You, Jesus. Thank You, Lord. To You be the honor, forever. Amen.
