How We Avoid Things We Don’t Want To Do

“Do not let the desires of the flesh turn you away from these our earnest words [about fasting]. It is so easy to label ‘superstition’ anything that thwarts those desires.” -Abraham Kuyper

Love Kuyper, But Not This Quote About The Nature of Sabbath Observance

“In many of our Christian homes Sunday is still observed with impressive quietness and solemnity. There is a hush in the home. No running up and down the stairs, no rushing about. But a subdued, restful spirit of solemnity. In the kitchen, too, there is little activity, for the meals are of the simplest, merely enough to satisfy hunger.” -Abraham Kuyper

Images of Eden in the Desert

“And does not the Manna in the wilderness remind us of Paradise, where man also ate freely from the bountiful hand of God?” -Abraham Kuyper

More Reason To Fast

“Unhesitatingly we recommend fasting for the Christians of today. In fact, we are inclined to say that there is more reason for fasting in our day than ever before. Corrupted human nature yearns for luxury, and tends to become more corrupt as wealth and luxury increase. God knows that we cannot well be checked except by burdens and sorrows. And he himself has suggested fasting, by means of which we may guard against the unspiritual influence of ease and luxury.” -Abraham Kuyper

Art Enriches

“Without artistic enjoyment our human living is impoverished.” -Abraham Kuyper, Wisdom and Wonder

Cultural Observation: Oh, Kant, You So Crazy

“[Immanuel] Kant may well have gone too far with his qualification that beauty refers only to what “serves no use,” and may have discredited at least architecture.” -Abraham Kuyper, Wisdom and Wonder

BTW NOTE: Yes. Yes, he did go too far with that.

Common Grace: The Preserver of Beauty

“From this it becomes evident that common grace has performed a twofold service with respect to beauty. First, common grace has spared much paradise beauty and preserved it from loss, and continues to supply us along our life’s way with such a rich treasure of beautiful things in nature. Common grace has tempered the curse and in this

way left us with genuine poetry within nature. One and the same stem holds both the unfurled rosebud and the wounding thorn. Second, within the sinful human being common grace has preserved from complete loss the sense of this beauty in nature.” -Abraham Kuyper

The Beautiful, The Ordinary, and The Ugly in a Fallen World

“Nevertheless, beauty no longer adorns the whole earth. On the contrary, we discover alongside each other the beautiful, the ordinary, and the ugly. A lion is beautiful; a calf is ordinary; a rat is ugly. The same holds for the plant kingdom. The cedar enthralls us with beauty, the willow strikes us as ordinary, and the thistle turns us off… You find this same threefold categorization not only among plants and animals, but even among nonorganic nature. Some mountain ranges inspire worship. Then there are very ordinary humpbacked mountains that you scarcely notice as you walk past them. There are wild rock crevasses so barren and awful that they arouse an involuntary shudder; these are real specimens of the “formless and void” that once existed. Similarly you find next to the lushness of nature in one region the bare flatness of another region, and next to that terrain you find the barrenness of heath and desert. This is true of the atmosphere as well. Some days you enjoy the kind of sky and weather that make you smile and lift your spirit to the heights, followed by other days that are rather ordinary, when it does not rain and the sun and moon make their appearance. Then you face the days when the stormy winds splash the rain against you and the walkway underfoot becomes impassable. In those three phases the activity of common grace swings restlessly back and forth in terms of the beauty of nature.

Repeatedly God shows you and gives you a sense of what your lot on earth would be, and how ugly the world would be, if the curse had been carried out to its ultimate conclusion. And then God lets you behold an exhilarating natural phenomenon that makes you homesick for paradise. Then you sink again back into the ordinary where nothing excites you or repulses you, but instead where everything around you lacks any vitality and chills your enthusiasm.” -Abraham Kuyper

BTW NOTE: As an “ordinary means of grace” Presbyterian minister, I know I’m ‘in the tank’ on this, but I would not make the absolute contrast between “the beautiful” and “the ordinary” that Kuyper does here. But I think I can still see what he is getting at.

Through the Resurrection of Christ, We Are Diamonds in the Rough

“By means of his resurrection, Jesus arose in the same body that had hung on the cross, and he appeared in glory to John on Patmos with this continually identical body. This makes us think of an uncut diamond that is soon to be cut. Remaining the very same stone, the finely cut diamond radiates an entirely different glory. People realize in advance that a diamond is nothing but a piece of coal, which is transformed into carbon through intense heat and exposure to oxygen in the air. If a piece of coal can become a diamond simply through the application of elemental natural forces, and by some polishing that diamond can obtain a most elegant luster, what would prevent God from transforming what is now on earth into the exalted luster of his glory? When Scripture tells us that the precious jewels that are now so rare on earth will be the ordinary building material in the New Jerusalem, we receive the very same mental picture that the minerals will remain the same, and that through a new chemical process, from what now exists the exalted heavenly divine glory will sparkle.” -Abraham Kuyper

When You See Something Beautiful You [Inadvertently?] Confess Your Desire for the Return of Christ

“Glory [Heaven] is, in fact, nothing other than a higher degree of beauty. It is beauty in its consummation, but still in a way whereby present beauty and coming glory are connected to one another, such that both are revelations of one and the same principle.” -Abraham Kuyper

BTW NOTE: What Kuyper is saying is that present expressions of beauty reveal in lesser degrees the beauty that will be revealed at the end of the age. In principle, ‘beauty now’ and ‘beauty then’ are the same thing. So, those who admire beauty (in creation, in art, in a person, in music, etc) cannot help but indirectly express longing for the world that Christ will usher in at his return–even if everything else about them is marked by unbelief. This is another example of the inconsistency of unbelief.