There is in the human heart an insatiable longing for beauty, and I am persuaded that the

reason it is there is because God is the infinitely beautiful one and He made us for Himself.

Only one vision is sufficient for our insatiable hearts, the vision of the glory of God.

That's what we've been made for, and that's what we long for.

If we are made for the beauty of God, how do we come to see it and be satisfied with it?

That's the question John Piper answers from 2 Corinthians 3 7 to 11 in this episode of

Light and Truth. This sermon was originally preached at Bethlehem Baptist Church on March 28, 1982.

I'm going to assume this morning as the basis for everything I say that there is a God,

a personal God who created us and as a purpose for everything that He made.

If there is no personal God, then the concept of beauty dissolves into personal idiosyncrasy.

That is, unless beauty is rooted in God's mind rather than your mind,

whenever you say that's beautiful, all you really mean is I like that.

Unless there is a God, your praises of beauty are no more than expressions of your own personal

preferences. If there is a personal God and He has created all that is and He has given purpose

and form to everything, then we must define beauty in relationship to this God.

So try to picture with me something impossible here. Try to imagine God before there was any

creation at all, before He had made anything from angels right on down to dirt.

Once there was only God and nothing else and God is the way He is always. He never was influenced

by something outside Himself to become what He is and therefore what He is, He has always been

forever and ever and ever. When I tell the kids this and my kids class at 9.45,

they just shake their heads. He had to have had it beginning. We need to become children again

and be dumbfounded by what we simply say when we believe that God is God and never became

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