Our study in Genesis on Sunday night has us in chapter two, and we looked at verse nine: “And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight.” At one point in the sermon, I focused on those last four words, “pleasant to the sight,” and talked about objective beauty.
The second chapter of Genesis has detail in it, but it doesn’t say that awfully much for everything that did happen. Of all that God could say and do, He made a point that the trees that He planted in the Garden of Eden were good for food, yes, but also and listed first, pleasant to the sight. This is aesthetic value. If something can be pleasant to the sight, then it can also be unpleasant.
God made Adam and Eve in His image, so they had the same sensibilities for beauty. Particular qualities in accord with the nature and attributes of God made something beautiful. The ugly would clash with those qualities. Today in rebellion against this character of beauty, men say that everything is beautiful to the eye of the beholder, making beauty not a quality it has in itself, but based on the relativistic feelings or preferences of the subject. This is subjective beauty.
When God makes something pleasant to the sight, He doesn’t ask His audience whether it is pleasant to the sight. It just is. A lot of ugliness is out in the world today and it’s getting worse. The standards have dropped just like the world follows its own lust and God turns it over to a reprobate mind (Romans 1:18-32). This in itself is a rejection of God and its consequences. It’s true that the inmates seem to be running an asylum.
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