HIS BEAUTY FOR OUR ASHES

In the last chapter, we looked at a passage in Isaiah describing God’s plan for us:

The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon Me, because the LORD has anointed Me to preach good tidings to the poor…to give them beauty for ashes… (Isaiah 61:1-3)

Ashes are good for absolutely nothing. What does it mean to have ashes and why is it that we have them? They are the by-product and result of burning our passions on wrong things. Some believers’ lives are like ash heaps even after they have known the Lord for many years. Most people don’t realize how much they have lost by making sinful choices. They find them- selves midway through life with nothing to show for it, or even worse, having accumulated a jumbled mess of wrecked relation- ships, disappointments and debt. Regardless of how they ar- rived there, they come to a realization that they’re sitting on an ash heap and they wonder, “What would anyone want with me? What I have done is so…ugly.” Nobody wants our ashes. Nobody, that is, except God. And when He takes them, He will trade them for His beauty.

A significant purpose for which God sent Jesus to Earth was to orchestrate a divine exchange on a level that is impossible for humans to orchestrate. Since the Creation, time after time, hu- mans made choices that reduced their lives to ashes and rubble, to useless, worthless rubbish that nobody would want to possess. First in Eden, then at the tower of Babel, and again in the days of Noah, man repeatedly destroyed his own hope for future glory and beauty by his selfish acts. This pattern continues today and shows no sign of abating.

During the Reformation, Martin Luther revived Evangelical Christianity as he accentuated the foundational spiritual, born- again experience. Unfortunately, decades of evangelical empha- sis has left the Western Church woefully out of tune with the fullness of redemption. We have concentrated on the legal ben- efits of salvation, but have almost resigned ourselves to living in the ash heap until we receive “a little cabin on the edge of glory, somewhere in the great beyond.” In promising to exchange His

beauty for our ashes, God says He will answer our core desire for beauty now, in this life, as well as for all eternity. Taking the mess we have made of our lives, He will give us the very thing our hearts were meant to possess—the beauty of God. When you became a believer, you weren’t merely saved from Hell. You were made to be beautiful and to show forth God’s beauty to the rest of creation forever.

Because of an erroneous understanding of the desire for beauty, most people try to deny their attraction to it. We in- sist that we are not so shallow as to be distracted or even driv- en by beauty. At the same time, if offered any car, the one we would most likely choose would surely be the one described as “exotic”…the curve of the grille, the headlamp cluster and the sweeping profile that all scream beauty. We also choose suits by the cut of the cloth, how they transform our profiles into some- thing magnetic, and by how luxurious we feel even when wear- ing them to the most mundane of occasions. Many of us search for a mate based on appearances, initially at least, and sometimes exclusively. Finding that this sort of beauty leaves us with vacant hearts, we rebel against the desire rather than the method we’ve used that led only to false answers. Some have gone too far and disavowed every association with natural beauty.

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