Peter Berger and Transcendant Beauty

Nothing provides us with greater meaning in our lives than relationship with others. This is infinitely true as it relates to our relationship with God. We were made to find our ultimate pleasure, our ultimate satisfaction, our ultimate meaning in the very Person of God. But our sin causes us to pridefully rebel, saying, “I can make my life work without Him.”

As Peter Berger points out, all beautiful things are to be “signals of transcendence;” that is, they are to point us to God. But instead we take the beautiful things and make them our god. The problem is that they can’t bear the weight of our God-given desires. Eventually the structures of meaning, pleasure, and happiness that we have constructed, and we ourselves, crumble to the ground. And there we sit in our pile of rubble, still stubbornly resistant to turn to the source of true pleasure, meaning, and happiness.

Have you ever considered that the fact that you can’t make your life work the way you want, far from being evidence of the judgment of God is actually evidence of His mercy? That He is actually wooing you to Himself, to a place where your desires will no longer be disappointed?

Something to think about from “The Kingdom Perspective.”

“Then I looked again at vanity under the sun. There was a certain man without a dependent, having neither a son nor a brother, yet there was no end to all his labor. Indeed, his eyes were not satisfied with riches and he never asked, ‘And for whom am I laboring and depriving myself of pleasure?’ This too is vanity and it is a grievous task.”

~ Ecclesiastes 4: 7-8