It's important to point out that we don't worship beauty. Beauty is certainly not an end in itself in that sense. Beauty is a signpost: It points us to the Maker of beauty--God Himself. When we see beauty, it is an echo of the glory of God, and beauty should lead us to praise Him.
When I say that beauty is an end in itself, I am saying that beauty has no utilitarian function. We don't paint landscapes, compose music, write poetry, or add architectural flourishes to buildings because of the utilitarian value involved. There is none! We do these things because beauty has intrinsic value. We love beautiful things because we simply delight in beauty.
And our delight in beauty reflects the image of God. God has created many aspects of this glorious world not to function efficiently but to simply be beautiful. I'm reminded of these words by Luci Shaw:
When the world was created, it might have seemed to be enough to have it work. To include beauty seems unnecessary for a mechanistic universe. We have been given a sense of the beautiful which can be regarded as gratuitous. Which it is--a gift of pure grace. And our own creation of beautiful things links us with our Creator. God was the first Quilter of prairies, the primal Painter (night skies, ferns, thunderheads, snow on cedars), the archetypal metal Sculptor (mountain ranges, icebergs), the Composer who heard the whales' strange, sonorous clickings and songs in his head long before there were whales to sound them, the Playwright who plotted the sweeping drama of Creation, Incarnation, Redemption, the Poet whose Word said it all.In addition to creation, the Bible itself shows us that God values beauty. God could have given us a book-long list of rules and moral principles. But He didn't. Instead, God has given us poems, stories, letters, parables, epigrams, and even a love poem. The moral precepts are there, but the Bible is also full of creativity and imagination. As the Preacher says in Ecclesiastes, God has given us "words of delight." The delight is unnecessary, but it is there, and that fact is significant.
More from Luci Shaw:
Think, for a moment, on the priestly garments. In Exodus 28:40, "And for Aaron's sons you shall make coats and girdles and caps; you shall make them for glory and for beauty." In other words, glory to reflect Yahweh's splendor, and beauty, and adornment, because God delighted in it and wanted his people to enjoy it too. As Gene Edward Veith has said in The Gift of Art, "Beauty is an appropriate end in itself--the garments were to be made for beauty. The inventor of color, of form, of texture, the author of all natural beauties, values the aesthetic dimension for its own sake."
