I was working on polishing my sermon this week and came across a quote so beautiful and majestic I felt compelled to share it. The quote reads as follows:
“O fair sun, and fair moon, and fair stars, and fair flowers, and fair roses, and fair lilies, and fair creatures; but O ten thousand thousand times fairer Lord Jesus! Alas, I wronged Him in making the comparison this way! O black sun and moon, but O fair Lord Jesus! O black flowers, and black lilies and roses, but O fair, fair, ever fair Lord Jesus!”
What a majestic quote. The first time I heard it, it had been attributed to John Flavel. Any time I hear something like that, I start doing some digging and try to trace back the source. I thought I had found it within Flavel in his work The Fountain of Life Opened Up. It was in the introduction, but when I read it, I realized that he was quoting it as well. So the digging began all over again.
I came to discover that it was actually from Samuel Rutherford, written around 34 years before Flavel quoted it. It was found in a letter that Rutherford wrote to the Laird of Cally in 1637. Flavel later quoted Rutherford in The Fountain of Life Opened Up in a prefatory letter dated March 14, 1671, introducing the quotation simply as the words of “one” who had well said it.
If you have not read Rutherford’s Letters, or the smaller collection of quotes from them contained in The Loveliness of Christ, I cannot recommend them enough.
So much of our personal correspondence today is practical and driven by the moment-to-moment need. How refreshing it is to read a letter written to friends and co-laborers that goes deeper than the present moment, stretches into the eternal, and shares something beautiful. Rutherford, in writing on the beauty of Christ, gives us more than a poetic image of the glory and majesty found in Christ alone. He gives us a glimpse of what happens when a Christian has learned to behold Christ.
Beholding this beauty in the face of Christ is what brings transformation in us from glory to glory, as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 3:18:
“And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image...”
Paul goes on to say that this transformation is from one degree of glory to another and that it comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.
You can tell that Rutherford is taking a page out of Paul’s letter writing and majestically weaving the truth of God into a personal letter. Paul is arguing that we become what we are beholding and understanding the beauty of the risen Jesus, who is the majestic God seen in Isaiah’s vision of the throne, who left that throne, took on the form of the slave, and endured the suffering that you and I deserve. The beauty of His overwhelming kindness and compassion towards us.
This beholding is what transforms us not only at the moment of salvation but every day as a believer. We have the gift of getting to spiritually see all of who God is in Christ. To experience not only His justice and law but His grace and mercy. We get to know Him and be His people. What a beautiful gospel message that not only are our sins forgiven, but in just a closer look and closer walk with Jesus, we are being changed from one degree of glory to another. We are being transformed into the image of God, the fullest image of God found in Jesus.
And perhaps this is what I find so compelling about Rutherford’s words. He was not merely describing Jesus beautifully. He was writing as someone who had been captivated by the beauty he was describing. What we behold shapes what we love, and what we love shapes the way we live. If Christ is truly the fairest object before our eyes, then His beauty ought to begin changing the way we see everything else.
This has begun to shape the way I think about my own writing. In writing about my children, disability advocacy, my ministry, and in all my work in the written word, I desire to behold the beauty of Christ and then help others see what I have seen. I want to write beautifully, expressing the glory and wonder of our God.
I want to write and express how, in my children, I see the beauty and wonder of a God who is a patient and kind heavenly Father who hears us when we cry. I see something of my Father in heaven when I watch my children stumble and fail. My own failing love as a father bursts forth from my heart, telling me that I would never leave or abandon my children. And in those moments, I hear something of the love that my Father in heaven has for me.
I want to write and express the wonder that Christ cares for the broken and hurting. When I look at the life of Jesus and listen to the words that flow from the Holy Spirit from the beginning to the end of the Bible, I see the care and compassion that comes from the heart of God toward children like mine.
And I want to see not only His compassion, but His beautiful wrath. The same God who tenderly cares for the hurting is also a just and righteous God whose wrath against sin is real. When sin enters the world, God is not a wicked judge who sits idly by, but out of an overflow of His love and compassion towards the hurting, slowly and patiently stores up His wrath for the Day of the Lord, when all evil shall be purged away.
There is beauty in the restraint of His anger. And in both my parenting and in my advocacy, I can learn to express godly criticism and channel my anger not from my wrath over slights towards me, but for the good of my children and those like them.
And perhaps this is where beholding Christ changes even something as ordinary as my anger. If I look primarily at the ways I have been wronged, my anger becomes centered on myself. But if I learn to look at the world through the holiness, compassion, and patience of Christ, anger can be redirected toward what harms those I love.
The same is true of ministry. I want to behold the beauty of Christ not only in my home and in the brokenness around me, but in the work of ministry itself.
As Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 3:1:
“Are we beginning to commend ourselves again?”
Paul then turns the entire idea of commendation on its head. The Corinthians themselves are his letter of recommendation, written on his heart and known and read by all. He explains that their lives are a letter from Christ, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God. He then says that our sufficiency is not in ourselves, but comes from God, who has made us ministers of a new covenant.
Paul expresses that to serve God in the ministry of the new covenant, of righteousness, of life, of the removed veil, of proclaiming Jesus Christ as Lord kind of ministry, that all of it is simply a mercy given to us by God to weak and vulnerable men. That we hold this treasure in jars of clay, and the more we are broken by the pains of ministry and the pains of life in this fallen world, we are struck down but not destroyed, persecuted but not abandoned.
Oh, what beauty that God would give us this mercy to see lives transformed from glory to glory. To see drunks trash the bottle, to see marriages restored, to see generations changed from death to life, to see saints live and die well.
What a mercy it is to work, to be worked on in my Father’s workshop as my Father’s piece of art. The more I behold the beauty of Christ, the more I realize that I am not merely looking at something beautiful. I am being made beautiful. The One I behold is the One whose image I am being transformed into.
Knowing that one day I will cast off this earthen vessel and be transformed into the fullness of the glory set aside for me in the name of Jesus Christ. And not only that, everyone that has believed that I have ever led to the Lord Jesus or ministered to imperfectly in this flawed world will be transformed into something so beautiful that the image of it would cause my heart to shudder now at this moment.
What a gift and mercy of our beautiful, beautiful Savior.
Yes, as Rutherford implied, the sun is beautiful, the stars are majestic and stun our hearts and minds at the infinite nature, the flowers cast our eyes down at the beauty and intricacies of their wonder and fragrance, and yet, in comparison to the beauties and wonder of our fairest Lord Jesus, they all fail.
As the hymn says:
Jesus is fairer, Jesus is purer
Who makes my woeful heart to sing.