Beauty or beast?

God does not judge by external appearance (Galatians 2:6).

The Phantom of the Opera, written by Gaston Leroux in 1911, has been made into numerous movies and a famous Broadway musical. It tells the story of a disfigured man who succumbs to madness in pursuit of a lovely young woman. This is not a new idea. The Beauty and the Beast, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde, and the Hunchback of Notre Dame are but a small sampling of stories built on a common theme—evil ugliness verses beautiful goodness. Human culture is fascinated with beauty and repelled by ugliness.

What does the Bible have to say about beauty? According to Scripture, only perfect things are truly beautiful—and since only God and His heaven are perfect, only heaven and its occupants are truly beautiful. This is why humans are repelled by ugliness—because ugliness is the undeniable manifestation of imperfection.

But it is a mistake to confuse physical beauty with inner perfection. All earthly beauty is temporary, as the sin that lives within all of us slowly shows itself through wrinkles and gray hairs, loss of muscle tone, skin blemishes and decaying gums. No one is beautiful when life has ended; the ugliness of death is the ultimate expression of the sin that is destroying each of us from the inside.

It is a sad truth that people who are beautiful often get special treatment. This is unfair, because the imperfection of sin lives within everyone. I have met some extraordinarily beautiful people, but when I got to see the amount of ugliness living inside of them, they stopped looking attractive to me. Conversely, I have met many people who were not gifted with good looks, but had such wonderful personalities that I soon came to disregard their appearance.

Thankfully, God is not shallow like we are. In His eyes, all of us bear the disfiguring marks of sin. Yet we can still be beautiful in His eyes, if we give ourselves to Christ. Our Lord takes away our sins, and dresses us with His beautiful robe of righteousness (Isaiah 61:10). With the imperfection of our sins removed by Jesus, God can view us as beautiful in a way that cannot be appreciated by human sight—beautiful enough to enter heaven and join our beautiful Savior.