One thing I ask from the Lord

One thing I ask from the Lord; this I will seek,
That I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life,
And behold the delights of the Lord,
And visit His temple.
- Psalm 26:4 (27:4), Orthodox Study Bible (OSB)

In our small group at my husband’s church, we recently finished reading Seeing the Gospel: An Interpretive Guide to Orthodox Icons by Dr. Eve Tibbs. Now, we are on to Dr. Eugenia (Jeannie) Constantinou’s book, Thinking Orthodox: Understanding and Acquiring the Orthodox Christian Mind. In between, I watched a most wonderful YouTube video on Coptic iconography. Why am I mentioning this? It may have triggered the current pensiveness I feel about the beauty of the house of the Lord in which we worship Him.

From my evangelical days of studying the Old Testament, I remember reading in Exodus how careful the Lord's instructions were regarding how the tabernacle and its furnishings were to look, and how the garments of Aaron and his sons, and those serving at the tabernacle, were to be crafted. Just the other day, this was my reading in the Bible again.

Exodus 25-40 speaks of this in great detail. God even called two men, Bezalel and Aholiab, to be the master craftsmen who would create all this beauty and splendor. Everything from the tabernacle itself, its furnishings, the garments of the priests, the ritual to dress them and anoint them for service, to the precise formulation of the incense and the holy oil for anointing, all was laid out in great detail.

God also advised that the people were to give the money for all the works for making the holy place. Exodus 36 describes how the people gave so much that Moses had to issue a command to stop giving. Imagine that! I think about our parish today, where we dream of having a church of our own. I think about my husband’s parish, which is bursting at the seams and will soon have to build a bigger church. If everyone gave wholeheartedly, as the Israelites did, we could build these houses of God to the glory of His name!

But apart from this consideration, I am simply reminded again that it was God who demanded this splendor. It was not man’s idea. It was God who wanted beauty for the place where He would dwell with the Israelites as they journeyed through the desert for forty years. It was God who later instructed the building of the temple in Jerusalem. When King Solomon, the son of King David, finished building the temple, the ark of the covenant was brought into it. In 3 Kingdoms 3 (1 Kings) 8:10-11, it says, “When the priests came out of the holy place, the cloud filled the house, so the priests could not stand there ministering because of the cloud; for the glory of the Lord filled the house.” (OSB)

What an imagery of the splendor of the house of the Lord. Let me ask you the provocative question posed in a meme: why would anything change in the Lord’s perception between the time of the Old Testament and today? Would He not still desire beauty?

As an ardent student of the Old Testament in my seminary days, I never asked that question, oddly enough. I just accepted that box churches with bare walls are it, as far as worship spaces are concerned. I thought of Orthodox churches as pretty, artistically speaking, but did not think they were appropriate for worship of any Christian in their right (evangelical) mind.

Boy, oh boy, has God changed my perspective on beauty. Every time I enter an Orthodox Church, my jaw drops at the iconography and beauty of the worship space. Whether Syriac, Coptic, or Eastern Orthodox, my heart is drawn to worship of God.

Just yesterday, I was standing in the Divine Liturgy at my husband’s Greek Orthodox church, where the entrance of the Lord Jesus into the temple was celebrated. I looked up at the icons of our Lord. He is depicted as an infant in the Virgin Mary’s arms. He is depicted on the cross. He is depicted as the Pantokrator, the ruler of all and omnipotent Lord of the universe. My heart is deeply impacted as I ponder these truths every single time I come to worship.

I will leave you with another Scripture passage I so love.
Psalm 95 (96):9, here in the New International translation:
Worship the LORD in the splendor of his holiness; tremble before him, all the earth.