Not everyone sees God’s beauty. Some are “haters of God” that have “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images” (Romans 1:23, 30). That’s why Samuel Parkison says there is an aesthetic component to salvation: when the Spirit regenerates us, he enables us “to behold the beauty of the Trinity mediated in Christ.” This new ability to see God’s beauty isn’t mere intellectual perception; it “includes the affections,” so we are stirred and drawn by his beauty (Irresistible Beauty, 15).

Mary Oliver once said, “Attention is the beginning of devotion” (Upstream, 8). Yet we struggle, don’t we, to set our minds on “the things of the Spirit” and “the things that are above, where Christ is” (Romans 8:5–6, Colossians 3:1–2)?

We know the mind attentive to the Spirit is “life and peace,” yet we’d blush to admit how often we reach for the empty stimuli of social media and news feeds. And it’s easy to wring our hands and declare that we’re uniquely handicapped by our Age of Distraction and the relentless competition for our attention. Are we really defenseless, though, doomed to distracted, ever-scrolling minds?

In the Footsteps of the Undistractable

In my own war against distractions, I find hope and help in saints who lived centuries before our digital age. Read slowly these words of Augustine, describing “the bridegroom who is beautiful wherever he is”:

He was beautiful in heaven, then, and beautiful on earth: beautiful in the womb, and beautiful in his parents’ arms. He was beautiful in his miracles but just as beautiful under the scourges, beautiful as he invited us to life, but beautiful too in not shrinking from death, beautiful in laying down his life and beautiful in taking it up again, beautiful on the cross, beautiful in the tomb, and beautiful in heaven. (Essential Exposition of the Psalms, 131)

If we had a time machine and could pull this man taken by the beauty of his Beloved into our digital age, would the wild horses of iPhones and earbuds drag his attention from God? By no means. The way Augustine talks about Christ convinces me that he could not not be captive to God’s beauty. He’s held firm and undistracted by the same one-thing passion that captivated David:

One thing have I asked of the Lord,
that will I seek after:
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord
all the days of my life,
to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord. (Psalm 27:4)

Jonathan Edwards, another undistractable saint, found God not only beautiful but “the foundation and fountain of . . . all beauty” (Works, 8:551). In his sermon on “God’s Excellencies,” he told the congregation,

God is every way transcendently more amiable, than the most perfect and lovely of all our fellow creatures. If men take great delight and pleasure in beholding and enjoying the perfections and beauties of their fellow mortals, with what ecstasies, with what sweet rapture, will the sweet glories and beauties of the blessed God be beheld and enjoyed! (Works, 10:429)

Like Augustine, Edwards was enthralled by God’s beauty in Christ and would surely never trade those “sweet glories and beauties of the blessed God” for the empty cisterns of clickbait. The question is, would we? Can we ordinary saints living in the Age of Distraction be so captured by God’s beauty that we grow increasingly undistractable?

Beauty of All Things Beautiful

Before we answer, we should clarify what we mean by God’s “beauty.” Philosophers love to ponder the idea of beauty. When they meditate on what is truly beautiful, they are (perhaps without knowing it) granted glimpses of the God who is beautiful.

Beauty is the good, and God is most good (Psalm 119:68). Beauty delights and arouses desire, and God is our delight and the desire of our hearts (Psalm 37:4). Beauty displays perfection, and our heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:48). Beauty shines with radiance and splendor, and Christ is the radiance of our God who is clothed with splendor (Psalm 104:1; Hebrews 1:3).

Beauty resounds in harmony and unity, and the unity of the Father, Son, and Spirit is the eternal perfection of harmony.

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