Exodus 20

"If you make a stone altar for Me, you must not build it out of cut stones.  If you use your chisel on it, you will defile it."

Exodus 20:25

We've all heard the ten commandments before, but there's more to this chapter than just the standard 10 rules that we tend to think of more highly than God's other commandments.  I'm not sure why we place so much more value over these ten than any of the others, but I didn't see anything in this chapter telling us that they are more important than the rest of God's commands.  What I did see was that they were designed to be a test.

As for the commandment quoted above, this comes immediately after the ten commandments.  It recaps the first commandment (not to have any gods besides God), and gives some rules about how to worship Him.  Altars are not to be made out of gold or silver, or even cut stones.  They should be made out of rocks that God Himself designed, without human alteration.

As an artist, this sort of commandment really catches my eye.  Where do we find true beauty?  It's made clear that there's a difference between what humans find beautiful and what God finds beautiful.  People look for shiny things with smooth edges and strong lines.  God looks for natural, unaltered, undefiled earth.  The art that humans make is so much more simplistic than the complex nature of God's Creation... yet nature itself has a beauty that cannot be found anywhere else.

Question: How often do you stop to admire the beauty of nature?