The Lord is clearly interested in beauty. Some form of the word is used 76 times in the Bible. We are told that God "hath made every thing beautiful in his time" (Ecclesiastes 3:11). He so highly exalts the proper concept of beauty that He often associates it with holiness (Psalm 29:2; 96:9; 110:3). Unfortunately, men tend to pervert beauty as they do all that they touch. God reminds us that outward "beauty is vain" (Proverbs 31:30) and human "beauty is a fading flower' (Isaiah 28:1). Men corrupt beauty and make the "beauty of a man" a focus for idolatry (Isaiah 44:13). Eventually, man's perverseness causes his "beauty to be abhorred" (Ezekiel 16:25). The very concept of what is beautiful is no longer recognizable.
The following is an excerpt from Soldiers in Training by Brother Daryl Coats.
According to an article in Thursday's "Wall Street Journal," earlier this year on the day Muslims celebrate the willingness of Abraham to sacifice his son on Mt. Moriah (a son they claim was Ishmael), 25,000 sheep in Brussels, Belgium, had their heads turned to Mecca and were sacrificially killed by having their throats slit so that they would die from the shedding of their blood. Many of the Muslims will be eating their sheep for lunch that same day. Although home slaughters are illegal in Belguim, Muslims now make up over 15% of the one million people in the city of Brussels.
Mathematics can be quite complex, yet one of the most basic divisions of mathematics is called arithmetic. You may better grasp what I am talking about when I say that the most basic operations of arithmetic are addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. A grasp of these basic operations is a necessity for anyone who desires to grasp any of the more complex divisions of mathematics. Interestingly enough, the same things hold true for the Christian life. It can be quite complex, but at the same time we could break it down to the simplicity of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
