How Does a ‘Man’s Man’ Sing to a ‘Beautiful’ Jesus?
00:00:00.000 | Welcome back to the Ask Pastor John podcast. We hope you had a wonderful Christmas weekend
00:00:04.800 | to reflect on the Savior and His birth and His sacrifice for us.
00:00:08.160 | Jesus is beautiful, and we talk about His beauty a lot as a way of fleshing out
00:00:13.680 | what it means to have faith and to treasure Christ for all that He is for us.
00:00:18.080 | But He is fundamentally beautiful. That's common language for us here at DG,
00:00:23.600 | but that language leads to a problem too and to a question from a podcast listener named Adam.
00:00:29.440 | "Pastor John, how does a masculine Christian, a man's man, see Jesus as beautiful? It's odd
00:00:36.160 | and uncomfortable for me, a man, to look upon another man, even the God-man, and say, 'Beautiful.'
00:00:42.160 | Yet I believe that expectation of men, indeed all people, is not only taught in Scripture,
00:00:47.840 | but a necessary ingredient to saving faith. This is troublesome and quite unnerving to me.
00:00:55.200 | Can you help me come to terms with the awkwardness I feel here?"
00:01:00.320 | So should we feel awkward as men, or Christians in general, women or men,
00:01:08.400 | should we feel awkward, but especially men,
00:01:10.560 | seeing Jesus as beautiful? That was the first thing he said. And then
00:01:18.640 | should we feel awkward to look upon the God-man and say, "Beautiful"?
00:01:25.280 | Well, the answer is yes and no. Yes and no. If the term "beautiful" carries with it
00:01:33.360 | connotations of any sensuality at all, there should be an awkwardness in calling Jesus beautiful.
00:01:44.000 | Indeed, I would say, if the preponderance of what we mean when we say "beautiful"
00:01:51.520 | in reference to Jesus refers to His physical appearance, we should feel awkward.
00:01:57.760 | And here's a couple reasons. First, because when the Bible does talk about the physical
00:02:05.440 | appearance of the Son of Man on earth, it describes Him as the opposite of beautiful.
00:02:09.840 | Isaiah 53, 2, "He grew up before Him like a young plant, like a root out of dry ground. He had no
00:02:16.640 | form or majesty that we should look upon Him, and no beauty, no beauty that we should desire Him."
00:02:23.680 | 52, 14, "As many were astonished at You, His appearance was so marred beyond human semblance,
00:02:32.480 | and His form beyond that of the children of mankind." So we should get out of our minds
00:02:39.920 | all notions that calling Jesus beautiful says anything about His physical appearance
00:02:48.720 | while He was on the earth. He was not physically beautiful as far as we know,
00:02:55.920 | and certainly not at the end of His life during His sufferings.
00:03:02.560 | In His exalted state, His resurrection glorified body,
00:03:10.160 | the way He's described in Revelation 1, for example, it would be completely appropriate
00:03:18.720 | to attach the word "beautiful" in a very exalted way. Here's what it says, "I saw one like a Son
00:03:28.800 | of Man clothed in a long robe and with a golden sash around His chest. The hairs of His head were
00:03:36.080 | white like wool, like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire. His feet were like burnished bronze
00:03:44.800 | refined in a furnace. His voice was like the roar of many waters. In His right hand He held seven
00:03:53.440 | stars, and from His mouth came a sharp two-edged sword, and His face was like the sun shining
00:04:03.360 | in full strength." That man is beautiful the way Niagara Falls is beautiful, the way the
00:04:11.120 | northern lights are beautiful, the way the Hubble telescope's pictures of the galaxies are beautiful.
00:04:17.840 | Nevertheless, I still stand by my statement if the preponderance of what we mean when we say
00:04:30.640 | "beautiful" in reference to Jesus refers to His physical appearance, even His glorified appearance,
00:04:37.680 | we should feel awkward, because—and this is the main answer to Adam's question—because
00:04:48.640 | the reason that calling Jesus beautiful is never, neither in His incarnate state
00:04:56.720 | or His glorified state, the reason is He's never called beautiful fully appropriately because of
00:05:05.440 | His physical appearance, no matter how glorious, but rather because of the excellence of His
00:05:10.640 | character and the greatness of His deeds. When four jets, the blue angels, roar overhead with
00:05:21.280 | deafening thunder, aiming at each other from the four points of the compass, they're going 400
00:05:27.600 | miles an hour, and as they approach each other ready to collide, suddenly they simultaneously,
00:05:32.800 | all four, do a 90 degrees in a vertical ascent, and up they go, belly to belly,
00:05:38.880 | straight up in the air, nobody misunderstands when you say "beautiful." Or when an Olympic gymnast
00:05:47.040 | on the rings swings himself in a double back somersault and suddenly nails a motionless
00:05:56.880 | iron cross without the slightest swing in the ropes, and you drop your jaw and say "beautiful,"
00:06:05.200 | nobody misunderstands. Or when a small boat with a family in it is about to be swept away in a
00:06:13.840 | horrible flood tide rushing through a town, and you get one chance to throw a rope as it comes
00:06:22.000 | by, this little boat comes by, and you throw it, and the rope happens to land perfectly in the
00:06:29.120 | hands of the one person who could catch it, and the people with tears in their eyes say "beautiful,"
00:06:35.280 | nobody misunderstands. Or when a father sees his child snatched away by a wild animal, and he
00:06:43.200 | throws himself against the animal at the loss of his own life to save his child,
00:06:48.320 | everybody knows what we mean when we say "that was beautiful." Now, when all of that
00:06:56.960 | beautiful virtue and all of that beautiful achievement are summed up in one person,
00:07:05.680 | which it is in Jesus, that person is so identified with all of his virtuous capacities and all of his
00:07:13.440 | magnificent achievements that it is natural—natural, not awkward—natural to call the person himself
00:07:22.560 | "beautiful" for all those reasons. When Paul said, "How beautiful are the feet of those who preach
00:07:32.640 | the good news," he meant the utter devotion, the self-sacrifice, the unflinching resolution,
00:07:40.800 | the overflowing love that motivated the feet to move toward the lost made the feet beautiful.
00:07:50.000 | The feet aren't beautiful. Feet aren't beautiful. They're gross, especially bare feet in primitive
00:07:57.760 | cultures. Feet on the way to die for others are beautiful feet, no matter what they look like.
00:08:05.520 | And the beauty of Christ that the devil does not want us to see or talk about or celebrate
00:08:14.320 | is not his physical appearance, but the peculiar glory, the peculiar brightness
00:08:22.000 | of all the excellencies that shines most brightly in the sacrifice of Christ on the cross and in
00:08:30.560 | the power of the resurrection. That's precisely what Paul meant when he said in 2 Corinthians 4.4,
00:08:38.000 | "The God of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light
00:08:46.400 | of the gospel of the glory or the beauty of Christ." That glory, that beauty, is the beauty
00:08:55.440 | of his moral perfections expressed in the gospel. So I think Adam is justified in feeling awkward
00:09:04.960 | if we carelessly refer to the beauty of Jesus so that it sounds like
00:09:10.320 | we're adoring his physical appearance. Let's find language. So Adam, join me,
00:09:19.440 | join me in groping for language for men and for women, for language that enables us to revel in
00:09:30.800 | the unsurpassed moral and spiritual beauty of one who was so marred that we would not have been able
00:09:40.960 | to look at him. Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you, Adam, for this really good question.
00:09:47.920 | And thanks for listening to the podcast. You can find our audio feeds in our episode archive,
00:09:52.160 | and you can reach us via email like Adam did, all through our online home at desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn.
00:09:56.960 | We are going to return on Wednesday, and we have another really good question on the docket. A
00:10:05.360 | listener, Amy, wants to know, "Why are women more eager for missions work than men seem to be?
00:10:10.320 | The statistics seem to bear this point out, and I will ask John Piper on Wednesday
00:10:16.160 | why he thinks that's the case." I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor
00:10:21.040 | John podcast.
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