Jeremiah 4:30, “O desolate one, what do you mean that you dress in scarlet, that you adorn yourself with ornaments of gold, that you enlarge your eyes with paint? In vain do you beautify yourself.”
Isaiah 60:9, “…the Holy One of Israel…He has made you beautiful.”
Like painting makeup on a corpse, any and all attempts to beautify the ugliness of our sinful hearts is in vain. We may lay the rouge of activism, or acts of kindness, or religious fervency on as thickly as possible over our envy, or rivalry, or lust, or selfishness, or indifference, or self-pity….but it will not avail us. Indeed, our cosmetic veil may so successful that outwardly we look “beautiful,” but the Lord knows and sees the reality. Self-beautification is self deception.
But see what a glorious answer Isaiah 60:9 gives to the despair of Jeremiah 4:30. Attempts to beautify the self are vain, but YHWH Himself, the Holy One of Israel, HE is the one who has and will make His people beautiful. The beauty of Christ’s bride is not the painted-on beauty worked by flesh, rather it is the imputed beauty that comes from being united to YHWH Himself in the person of Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 6:7)….it is the beauty that comes not from the scarlet of gaudy dress or the rouge of obscuring paint, but from the crimson of our Lord’s own blood (Rev.7:14).
To search inside for beauty—or to paint that beauty over ourselves in human efforts—is hopeless. The beauty of God’s people is the beauty of God Himself into which we enter by grace through faith-union to the Lord Christ (a faith-union of which the union of husband and wife is an image and parable)….it is the glory of the crucified and risen Jesus, shining on and in and through and so forever beautifying His blood-bought people (Is.60:1-3).
