With What Voice Shall I Answer You?

“With what voice shall I answer you, oh most High? What groaning, and with what utterance? Is there any tongue that is skilled enough in the art of speaking? Is there any mind capable of conceiving thoughts characteristic of your infinite worth?”

And so, once again, my heart cries this out to the Savior. What is an acceptable response to my Jesus? Even if I could know how to requite the love of God, I doubt I could even muster enough of any available natural resources necessary to praise. To praise a supernatural God, do I not need some sort of supernatural resources? This is a great paradox for me. Although I have mere colored, seasonal praise to offer, which is nowhere near the praise that God requires, this is exactly what He asks of me. He asks me for what I have. It has no inherent worth, for it emanates from something below Him. If I wanted a job reference to become the manager in a business, would I drag up a local street bum to sing my praises to a potential employer? And yet, God does exactly this. Who does he choose to spread His fame throughout all the great world he has created? He chooses us. Us, the local street bum. Us, the fickle and cold-hearted human race, a group of beings who no almost nothing about His greatness. Out of our lack of knowledge He requires us to sing. God did not choose the simple beauty of a budding rose to bear His image. He chose humanity, the complicated, tangled mess of stray desires that has polluted the rest of creation.

I find these desires constantly leading me astray. I am unable to walk closely with my Lord because the strength of these desires is greater than the strength of spiritual tendencies. Or is it possible that the strength of my carnal desire is not the problem? Perhaps, it is that they are weak. For God offers to us joy without bounds, and we are content with limited pleasure. No. I think the problem is more than a carnal desire. The problem lies within a flawed perception, something deep within a darkened heart. Our perception of beauty is wrong. It is beauty that drives us to desire. Lust for a beautiful woman derives from a sense that she is beautiful. Lust for power derives from a belief that authority will beautify the person who gains it. Lust for money exists because the person seeking riches believes these riches will make his or her life a beautiful one. Our carnal desires emanate from a belief that these things are beautiful.

These things are, in fact, not beautiful. When we say that we are, we prove that we have bought into the great deception, the planned fallacy, Satan’s attempted glorious coup. Holiness is beauty. That which is most upright and like our Maker is truly beautiful. When I lust, I desire something contrary to the nature of what God designed for my life. I am saying, “Lord, I reject the notion that your will for my life is beautiful. Lord, this other thing that I have chosen for my life: I believe it to be beautiful. Therefore, I will desire and pursue it.” This is antithetical to holiness. Holiness is understanding. It is understanding that what is eternal is truly beautiful and that what is natural is only a taste of the eternal. In other words, the worldly “beautiful” things pursue derive their beauty from eternal things. They are mere tastes. When we love the world more than God, we are content with a sampling of foods, rather than sitting and dining, consuming the whole feast God has prepared for us. God stands at the door of our hearts and knocks. He wants to come in and dine. Christ opens His arms wide and offers us endless joy purchased by the wounds in the hands He unreservedly stretches out. But we reject this. We reject this because we do not realize these temporal things are representative of eternal things. The temporal pleasures are only there to point us to the God who allows us to enjoy them. In doing this, we reject holiness.

The reason we reject holiness is that, again, we do not understand what it is. We don’t understand the implications of what it means to let God purify us of sin. To most of us, holiness is an appearance, a state of mind, or a pious tendency. The “beauty of holiness” is not that it dishes out obligations, but that it allows us to partake in the wonder of God’s character. Imagine for one moment that all the good that ever existed were summed up in one of your closest friends. This friend is perfect. He is everything that you respect and everything that you wish you could be. He is successful at everything he does. He has never once failed at any endeavor he has ventured upon. He has never, however, let his endeavors get in the way of his friendship with you. He is constant and always there for you. And yet, you admire him so because he befriends everyone else in the world the same way he befriends you. In short, you could never name the many wonderful attributes he has, and everyone else feels the same way about him that you do. If ever such a person did exist, the whole world would flock to him. They would pay anything to listen to him lecture, have a brief meal with him, or even have a piece of his clothing. The whole world would also pay anything to become this one respected and most envied gentleman.

God is this man. Except He is not man. He is the epitome of everything good and right. And because He is of a generous nature, He does not wish to hoard this goodness for Himself. He does not resort to a cave with the wealth of his treasure and say, “Look at me, how splendid I am. I do not want to have anything to do with anything less than me, for it would detract from my absolute goodness and purity.” God has done the exact opposite. He has made available to us the chance to become the beauty that He has. He invites us to the potter’s wheel and says, “Because I love you so, I will make you like myself. I do not want to keep what is good and right to myself. And because I am what is good and right, I have the power to give to you that good. I wish you to partake in this absolute joy. Moreover, I want you, human creature, to become my expression of that absolute beauty upon earth.” For some reason, we reject this invitation. It is because we perceive holiness as an oppressive thing, an obligation, an onerous task. Be it farther from the truth! Holiness is our last hope! It is our opportunity to break from the fallacy. To enjoy firsthand the beauty of the eternal things.

Ignorance is not bliss! Those who, by denying God’s existence, think that ignoring eternal truth and experiencing carnal pleasure are winning—these people are in a wretched condition. Ignoring the beauty of holiness is the biggest tragedy of a mistake we have ever made. We have lost beauty. We think that the vaporous phantom of beauty, natural pleasure, is worth giving our lives away for. Meanwhile, Christ weeps that the natural things he has created have led us far away from Him, rather than to Him, as he intended. We are turned away from God by natural beauty not because God made a mistake but putting it there, but because our dark hearts direct us so.

Is there any hope left for our kind? Are there any left who haven’t betrayed true beauty and embraced the enemy? Our hope is steadfast. To answer the original question, “With what voice shall I answer You?”: the answer we must give to Jesus is “Yes.” Yes to the beauty of holiness! Yes to the invitation to carry truth in our hands, to become everything that is good and right! Yes to having fists afire, smashing the Enemy, who seeks to rob us of knowing, seeing and tasting true beauty. How can we answer “yes” with such darkened hearts that guide not only our desires but also our response to God? Again, all God requires is praises. Is it praise colored by natural desires, whims, affections and sentiments? Yes. Is it natural stuff, incomparable to some sort of supernatural exaltation He deserves? Yes. Is our praise only representative of the extent of His beauty? Yes. And so are the natural things that represent His beauty. The ultimate fact is that the story of history we are characters in is not our own. The epic battle we are fighting is not of our choosing. The beauty we are called to both view and become is not our own. But the God that authors this story, this battle, this beauty: this God is our own. He belongs to us. And we belong to Him.