1 Samuel 16:7

"Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature." 1 Samuel 16:7 .

Men are always doing this: hence they become the victims of appearances. A man has only to be good-looking in order to win the confidence of many people; they think that so fair an exterior must represent an interior worthy of itself. In the estimation of God height is nothing, formal beauty is nothing; the man is within and not without, and not until his spiritual qualities have been tested, can it be known what the man really is. "The Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart." Here is an irony which ought to be intolerable to us, namely, that there should be an infinite discrepancy between the outward appearance and the heart: one would suppose that what a man was in his heart he would be also in his countenance. The poet has told us of a villain with a smiling cheek, "a goodly apple rotten at the core." When the work of Christ is done in the soul, the result will report itself in the face and manner and voice, in every uplifting of the hand, and in every expression of the eye. There may not indeed be formal beauty, but there will be an expression which testifies as to the indwelling and the inworking of God. Many men hold their places in society today, simply because they are of fair countenance or of lofty stature. Time is against all such men; events are never finally in their favour; there comes a period when merely formal beauty is dismantled, and moral ghastliness is revealed in all its reality and sadness; there comes also a time when the despised and rejected, men without form and comeliness, show that they have beauty of heart, dignity of mind, and that they belong to the very aristocracy of heaven.