The Beauty Bandwagon

I also believe, on a spir­i­tual level, that a Lov­ing God wants to per­fect His cre­ation, and by hop­ping on the beauty band­wagon I am essen­tially declar­ing my grat­i­tude for this life and try­ing to “win one for the (Big) Gip­per”. If God wanted me to be a purely spir­i­tual and/or men­tal being, He could have kept me in gas form, but He did NOT, and that is a whop­ping mes­sage right there. While in this body, I intend to max out on the (good) things a body can do. It is such a priv­i­lege to be alive, and I want to look the part! — Hol­lis

That kind of think­ing is what hap­pens when beauty becomes an idol. If you really want to know what God thinks about out­ward beauty, He doesn’t keep it a secret (Proverbs 31:30):

Beauty is vain.

I don’t think a stronger word could be used. Van­ity car­ries with it the ideas of fool­ish­ness, empti­ness, use­less­ness, fruit­less­ness, and worth­less­ness. Beauty is all of those things, and in Proverbs 31:30, it is con­trasted with fear­ing the Lord.

In other words, it seems fairly appar­ent that if you are “hop­ping on the beauty band­wagon,” you are hop­ping off the “fear­ing the Lord” band­wagon, and that is not a posi­tion in which any­one should want to be.

The con­text of the above quote from Hol­lis is a post ask­ing why women want to appear younger. My answer to that is because peo­ple are, well, vain crea­tures, but I wanted to point out some­thing else.

While it could be argued that grow­ing old is a side effect of our sin­ful nature, grow­ing old is some­thing to be admired. The­o­ret­i­cally, as you grow old, you grow in wis­dom. You grow in matu­rity. These are aspects which are to be admired and respected. I like what Proverbs 16:31 says: “Gray hair is a crown of glory.”

Plenty of peo­ple — both men and women — dye their hair to hide gray­ing; I sub­mit that if God declares gray hair to be a crown of glory, then hid­ing it or oth­er­wise being ashamed of it reveals our atti­tude toward God.

Also, while God is in the busi­ness of per­fect­ing believ­ers, you will note through­out the Bible this per­fec­tion is always related to good, right­eous works, not in appearance.

Keep in mind that God, when He took on flesh, had no beauty in Him. He was an every­man and He looked the part. He did this in obe­di­ence to the Father. Like­wise, in obe­di­ence and good works, He under­went bru­tal beat­ings and the cru­ci­fix­ion, which dis­fig­ured Him to an unrec­og­niz­able state. If God is in the busi­ness of mak­ing us pretty, then the Incar­na­tion seems to have gone totally awry.