Dr. Joel R. Beeke

Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the LORD, she shall be praised. —Proverbs 31:30

“Beautiful” is a term often used today in different contexts. We use the word “beautiful” when talking about a person, the weather outside, or an act of kindness. But this word has also been used to describe a particular type of woman— the kind of woman shown on billboards and internet sites, and in magazines and television ads. These companies and people promote an external beauty based almost exclusively on a woman’s physical appearance. Our culture has told us that the less a woman wears, the more make-up she uses, the more shapely her figure is, and the more she flaunts it, the more beautiful she is.

This error is as old as our fall. Fallen man has always had a natural propensity to see beauty as an external reality. He is also prone to abuse beauty, turning what many call “beautiful” into something to satisfy his sinful passions. Girls are growing up in an age where they face a barrage of messages telling them they need to look like supermodels on pinup posters or be the most attractive girl at school. Our daughters are growing up in a society that tells them they are valued because of their looks more than their behavior or the inward disposition of their hearts.

And the problem isn’t exclusively a matter of how our daughters dress or groom themselves. Our sons are growing up in a world that is saturated with sexual messages of all kinds. The male body is used to sell everything from beer and cigarettes to designer jeans and expensive cologne. Young men are encouraged to build up their bodies and show them off in muscle shirts and tight-fitting jeans. They are encouraged to go after the girls who dress in the sexiest clothes and love pleasure more than God. They are out for “hotness,” not godliness. The warnings posted at large in Proverbs (see Prov. 5:3–14) bid young men beware of such women, but they are all but forgotten.

So what is the remedy? Dozens of books have been written on this topic. Women’s conferences have been established to encourage young girls. Many outspoken pastors, both on the pulpit and in high school youth groups, have attempted to realign their congregation’s thinking. Videos and songs have been written. Actresses who used to be sex symbols have responded to this growing trend. But despite all these efforts, there has not been a good, abiding solution. Men continue to lust after what God created, and women continue to buy into the times that they must be a certain size and have all the right features. This distortion cannot be fixed by mere knowledge, by pep-talks, or by twelve-step pragmatic programs. Psychology or personal testimonies are not likely to change this attitude. You can tell men all you want that beauty is vain and tell women that their favor is fleeting, but the problem will not be solved because it is an inward problem.

A Heart Problem

This problem runs as deep as sin. It is a heart problem. In the Garden of Eden, we are told, Eve admired the outward appearance of the fruit before she took and ate. And since the fall, our eyes have been blinded. We don’t really see. We believe that the shapes, figures, and senses that we see and experience in the present age are what reality is all about. The natural heart seldom thinks deeper than the physical world. We too are prone to think that the physical or material world is all that exists. We don’t think deeper than skin. The solution to this problem lies in the heart of the gospel. The gospel alone is the remedy for the soul sickness that confronts our daughters today. Because of the gospel message, there are proactive steps that we as parents can take to encourage our daughters and sons to have a biblical and appropriate view of beauty.

The response of the gospel to this distortion of beauty begins when we look into our hearts and are convicted that they are wicked and deceitful. When it comes to man, there is more than meets the eye. Though many of us walk around as though we have our lives put together well so that we look secure, happy, and act like we’re going to live forever—the truth of the gospel is that by nature we are dead in our sins and our trespasses. We are alienated from God. We are at enmity with God and Christ. The human condition before God is not like the condition of a little Chinese orphan girl that we see in pamphlets encouraging us to adopt these innocent, suffering children. Our condition is not one of innocence, beauty, or even friendliness before God. Our inward condition is worse off than we care to imagine.

Because of this, by nature, we hate the things God loves and we love the things that God hates. Sinners who are dead in their sins cannot appreciate the glory of God for what it is. They cannot esteem what God values. They don’t see things the way God sees them. Rather, their inward disposition of sin and wickedness causes them to see things radically different than God does. Think of Paul’s statements in Philippians 3. He was so confident of his standing before God prior to his conversion. By all outward appearances, Paul was a devoutly religious man who was zealous for the things of God. But not finding his righteousness in Jesus Christ alone, Paul was quite the opposite of a “religious” man. He didn’t understand that his standing before God was not affected by outward appearances. He saw his own righteousness as a grounds of his salvation, not the righteousness that comes from Jesus Christ.

We are all steeped in sin by nature. And it is here that Christ meets us as our only remedy. Two scriptural presentations of Christ are worth meditating on in this context.

Christ as the Only Remedy

First, Christ is exquisitely beautiful. In Him, the sum of all beauty and perfection are found. The beloved in Song of Solomon 5:16 extols the beauty of her Lover. She says, “He is altogether lovely.” There is no spot or imperfection in Him. There is no unattractive feature. Everything in our Lord Jesus is perfect, brilliant, beautiful—He is altogether lovely. All His works are to be adored. His Person is to be worshiped. He is the source of all beauty. Likewise, the psalmist reflecting on the beauty of the Lord Jesus says that his heart is “inditing,” or composing, “a good matter,” that is, “the things that I have made touching the king” (Ps. 45:1). The words come to him as easily and swiftly as an able scribe could write them down with pen and ink. What moves him to sing aloud? “Thou art fairer than the children of men: grace is poured into thy lips” (Ps. 45:2).

In a day when we are prone to idolize external beauty and think that all that glitters is gold, we need to be ravished with and extol the spiritual beauty and loveliness of Jesus Christ. Samuel Rutherford once said, “No pen, no words, no image can express to you the loveliness of my only, only Lord Jesus.” Do we have this view of the loveliness of Christ? Do we see Him alone as “all together lovely”?

Second, Christ is profoundly meek. He is the meek and lowly Servant of the Lord. Prophesying about Christ’s life, Isaiah said, “For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not” (Isa. 53:2–3). The eternal and all together lovely, glorious, and beautiful Jesus Christ took upon Himself the form of a servant. He came in the likeness of sinful flesh to be sin for hellworthy sinners. He was marred, as the prophet says, beyond recognition. He spent His first thirty years of earthly ministry as a plain man in the eyes of others, and the last three as despised and rejected by many of His fellow Jews. We rejected and despised Him. We hid our faces from Him.

And yet, is this not a beautiful picture? Christ, the eternal Son, existing in ineffable glory, comes down and takes upon Himself the form of an uncomely man. Dear believer, taking our sins, burdens, wounds, and transgressions upon Himself, He was made a hideous spectacle before God and man. And this is where true beauty is found. The cross brings together the altogether lovely One and the altogether rejected One, producing a grand tapestry of the glory and wisdom of God. It is from Christ, in these two presentations of His “beauty,” that we are meant to derive our definition of beauty; the beauty of the One who loved God and lived only to do His will, and the One who in love for us consented to be humbled, rejected, and crucified for us.

The gospel weds together Christ’s beauty and our ugliness; it redeems us from our ugliness and gives us the loveliness of Christ. These spiritual truths have large implications in the way we view beauty. If we came to Christ only because our eyes saw something physically appealing, we would never come. Our eyes must see through the lens of faith to understand what is happening as Jesus is crucified on Calvary. His beauty is in His sufferings and death. And this portrait of beauty that Christ paints for us, must become our standard of beauty. What do we mean by this?

Simply put, we need to understand that beauty is not in the eye of the beholder; that is, beauty is not simply a matter of our own tastes or preferences. Beauty needs to be defined by God. Beauty needs an eternal perspective. This is the principle that we must teach our children. God is the perfection of beauty, and any true beauty reflects Him. We must view people as God views people, and we must teach our children to do the same. Regarding the eternal perspective we are to have towards people, C. S. Lewis insightfully said that all people are immortal souls, and that all people will one day fall into one of two categories. They are either “a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare” (The Weight of Glory). From God’s perspective, we are either redeemed, sharing in the beauty and glory of Christ; or we are unsaved, miserable and dead souls abiding under wrath. Beauty, desirability, loveliness—it is Christ who defines these terms. And Christ defines beauty in terms of the object reflecting His glory, not our own glory.

So how do we encourage our daughters (and sons!) towards modesty? The first answer, given above, is to teach them to redefine their terms according to the gospel. Show them that Jesus Christ is the One who defines true beauty, and that true beauty is found in whatever reflects His beauty. We train our children, with the help of the Holy Spirit, to trust the words of the Bible more than themselves, their peers, or the world around them. But we can take this and apply it more specifically to the situations, circumstances, sins, and temptations that our sons and daughters face in relation to modesty.

Modesty Defined

Modesty is a New Testament value, having to do with our conduct or our choice of clothing. So, for example, a bishop or elder must be “of good behavior” (1 Tim. 3:2), and Christian women must “adorn themselves in modest apparel” (1 Tim. 2:9). In both places, the Greek text uses the same word, kosmios, derived from the familiar word, kosmos, the New Testament word for the universe. Just as the universe reflects the order and beauty of its Creator, so Christians are to reflect the character of their Lord and Savior in their conduct and apparel. Church leaders must be, according to various translations, “orderly,” “self-controlled,” “courteous,” and “dignified.” Simply put, they must walk as Christ walked (1 John 2:6). In contrast with the styles of the day, Christian women choose to dress simply and sensibly, mindful that they are followers of Christ and handmaidens of the Lord. In these matters, as in all things, the aim is to do all to the glory of God (1 Cor. 10:31).

Modesty, therefore, is a significant aspect of Christian character, so that our dress, as Jeff Pollard says, “should make the same ‘profession’ that we do.” Pollard then goes on to define modesty as “inner self-government, rooted in a proper understanding of one’s self before God, which outwardly displays itself in humility and purity from a genuine love for Jesus Christ, rather than in self-glorification or self-advertisement.”¹ Consequently, modesty cannot be understood as a static definition. Many of the fundamentalists of yesteryear were criticized for their rigid rules and stipulations. It was once thought that a skirt that went past the knee was considered “modest” while anything higher was immodest. Drawing detailed lines in our definition of modesty may be necessary in organizations like Christian schools, but on the personal level it usually leads to difficulties. The reality is that even a dress that goes to the floor can be immodest. In Muslim cultures, the women are encouraged to conceal themselves, sometimes from the crown of their head to the sole of their feet. Modesty, to them and to many of us, has been defined as “less skin.” But nominally Muslim women who conceal their skin can still wear immodestly tight clothes. Then too, some women may find some clothes more modest, while other women find it less modest. Some men may not be tempted or even attracted to seeing a woman in a skirt of a certain length, while it may be imposing a severe temptation on another man. It is difficult to establish hard and fast rules of what is considered modest. The most effective way to address modesty for Christians on a personal level is to ask questions that probe the motives of our hearts.

Questions to Discern Heart-Motive

In teaching our children whether they are being modest, the most direct way is to get at their heart motive. Asking the following questions can help your son or daughter (and you) to evaluate what he or she is thinking about modesty.

1) Are you dressing modestly out of love for Christ? Love for Christ must be our primary motive in every area of the Christian life. Colossians 3:17 says, “Do all in the name of the Lord Jesus.” Let the love of Christ constrain you in this area of life as well. Say with John, “We love him, because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19), so that, out of love for Him, you want to obey His commandments to walk modestly before Him in Christ-like purity.

2) Are you remembering in your dress that, if you are a believer, you are the temple of the Holy Spirit? First Corinthians 6:19 says, “Your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, and ye are not your own.” If you are the Spirit’s temple, you are set apart to holiness in the totality of your life and in all that you convey to others, including the area of how you dress.

3) Are you dressing to get attention from other people? It is not wrong for a woman to want to be beautiful. She is created in the image of God, and women have been endowed with a sense of beauty. But there is a difference between natural beauty that radiates from a woman, and a fabricated beauty. When a woman’s beauty is more dependent on her choice of clothes, hairstyle, or the amount of make-up she has put on, rather than allowing these things to complement her beauty, she has a fabricated beauty. A woman’s adorning is to be primarily what God has given to her (cf. 1 Peter 3:3). Fabricated beauty is indulged in for the purpose of attracting attention. If a girl dresses in such a way that she intends to have guys “check her out,” she is not being modest.

4) Does your dress reflect your love for others? Do you wish to preserve their purity as well as your own? Romans 13:10 says, “Love worketh no ill to his neighbor: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.” When you dress immodestly, do you realize that in God’s sight you will almost certainly be guilty of provoking lust in a fair number of men, including God-fearing men who grieve over their own lust? Don’t say, “If my clothing is making men lust, that’s their problem.” That attitude is simply unbiblical. You are then saying that you are not responsible for the moral stumbling blocks you place in the path of others. The Puritan William Gurnall said that if Paul would not eat meat sacrificed to idols so as not to offend his brother, surely a God-fearing young woman would not wear immodest clothing so as to offend her brother in Christ.²

5) Does your outward appearance detract from your inward appearance? This is really a question of character. What we mean is, If a stranger were to see you, would your appearance detract them from seeing your inward beauty? Would a boy be more likely to want to talk to you merely because of the way you look, or does your dress reflect a deeper character than surface appearances can give? A Christian woman should aim to have her outward appearance direct other people to her character or personality. If she claims to be a Christian but is seeking her security in her outward appearance, she is not dressing in a way that reflects her inward disposition; rather, not secure in being a child of God, she is seeking the acceptance of the world.

6) Are you honoring your father in what you are wearing? There are too many fathers in our world today who, unfortunately, do not have a place of authority in their daughters’ lives. But God has instituted the family, and the father, as the head of the family, is to care for and protect those under him. Our daughters need to give their fathers (or perhaps fathers need to take) authority to help them discern what is modest dress and what is not. Our daughters, especially our teenage ones, may not always think rationally or purely; a father’s input can help our daughters refocus their intentions and motives. And fathers should not be afraid to tell their daughters “No” if they think what they are wearing is immodest. A father must retain his God-given headship over his children. It seems that some fathers neglect their daughters, as they do their wives, withholding affection and praise, and only seem to speak up when there is something calling for rebuke or correction. Such men don’t realize that they forfeited their authority long before they felt called upon to exercise it.

7) Would it be okay for your mom to wear that? This question sounds absurd, and, sadly, some mothers do wear immodest clothing. But it can be a good question to ask your daughter. This is because we should view our mothers as wiser, more experienced, and godly. Paul exhorts young women to learn from older women (cf. Titus 2:1–5). Our mothers should be an example of what purity and modesty ought to look like. If a daughter can’t see her mother wearing tight jeans or a low-necked blouse, then she should see this as a sign of wisdom.

8) Can you ask God’s blessing on what you are wearing? Can you get down on your knees and ask God’s blessing on what you are about to do? If not, you had better not do it. We can apply that to clothing as well as to many other things. Can you get down on your knees and ask God’s blessing on what you are wearing? If not, you had better not wear it.

9) Do you young men show by your dress and your attitudes that you cherish biblical modesty both in yourself and in young women? As fathers and mothers, we must also teach modesty to our sons. We must encourage them to value it and to practice it in their conduct and choice of clothing. We must strive to promote in them a sense of true beauty, so that they will seek godly women as their friends and, ultimately, as their wives. As fathers, we must set the example here for our sons so that they see these virtues modeled in us for this simple reason: we will encounter an uphill and losing battle with our daughters if our sons don’t share the same values and live by the same code of modesty.

10) How do your clothes bring glory to God? Paul tells us that whether we eat or drink, or whatever we do, we should do it all for the glory of God—also in our body (1 Cor. 6:20; 10:31). Paul had in mind all areas of life, including the purity, chastity, and modesty of our daughters. Parents need to teach their daughters the necessity of glorifying God in all things, including what they wear. If a daughter can’t say how her particular clothes bring glory to God, she may not be thinking from an eternal perspective. We need to help our daughters see the necessity of glorifying God. It is important to remember that in the Garden of Eden after the fall, Adam and Eve were given clothes. Their clothes were not about revealing more skin or showing off their bodies to good advantage. Rather, Adam and Eve were given clothes to cover their nakedness and their shame.

These ten questions will help us and our children examine their intentions. The choice to dress modestly or immodestly is a heart decision. It is only through directing our children back to the glory of God and the gospel that they can actually dress modestly. Notwithstanding what has been said above, there are some guidelines we would like to offer in a concluding article in next month’s issue.
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1. Jeff Pollard, “Christian Modesty Defined,” in A Theology of the Family, ed. Jeff Pollard and Scott T. Brown (Wake Forest, N.C.: NCFIC, 2014), 608–9.
2. Ibid., 642

Published by The Banner of Sovereign Grace Truth, used with permission.