How beautiful is your love, my sister, my bride! How much better is your love than wine, and the fragrance of your oils than any spice! (Song of Songs 4:10 ESV)
Fear Not… Then Behold
When my mom looked at my barely recognizable stick figure portrait, she smiled and declared that it was beautiful. I knew better. When I brought home a bust of the prophet Jeremiah, my family praised me for my artistry in sculpting what they assumed was either my father or my dog. They said how beautiful it was. I knew better. The first song I wrote was praised by my high school easy listening band. They said it brought tears to their eyes from the beauty of the music. But I knew the real reason they cried.
We say, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” But it seems to me that we misunderstand that quote. Beauty is not defined by our flip-flopping likes and dislikes. Beauty has real objective truth, defined by God and God alone.
But in this verse, we see a connection between our eyes and the thing being considered.
It is not merely eyes that declare beauty… it is love that gives rise to beauty.
The love of the speaker inserts the beauty into the beautiful. The love of the speaker makes the beautiful, beautiful. The love of the speaker is more than naïve niceness, or expressed loyalty to the beloved, or willingness to overlook faults.
Love transforms the ugly into the beautiful. Love transforms the mundane into the exciting. Love transforms the boring into the exhilarating.
When we look at each other with love, we do not simply ‘see’ things other than what we first thought. Our loving look changes the thing itself.
We do not have that power in and of ourselves. But Christ does. He created, and He now makes new. He formed the dust, and now He makes glorious. He changes, through His love, everything broken into everything made new.
And we, if we love unconditionally, whole-heartedly, and well… lovingly… make beauty, too.
Once we are past the fears of the ugly, broken, shattered, dead world, drenched in the power of sin… we can see things as He has made them.
Fear not, then behold.