Is physical beauty important?

A very interesting blog post from Tim Challies entitled Letting Herself Go in response to an article by Rachel Held Evans. Here are a few excerpts:

“The message is as clear as it is ominous,” she (Evans) concludes. “Stay beautiful or your husband might leave you. And if he does, it’s partially your fault.” She spent a month “studying everything the Bible says about women and beauty.” She “turned the Bible inside out, combed through dozens of commentaries, conducted word searches and topic studies and extensive research” and at the end of it all “found nothing in the Bible to suggest that God requires women to be beautiful.”

I agree that when the Bible speaks of beauty it largely downplays physical beauty in favor of inner beauty...But. You knew there had to be a but. I think Evans may draw something of a false distinction between the inner and the outer as if these things are entirely disconnected. I would suggest that these two things are actually inexorably connected: the outer is a reflection of the inner.

What is outward is significant. Clothes make a statement. There is a spiritual dimension to what a person wears...In every case, there is a connection between the heart and the body, between the adorning of the heart and the adorning of the body.

Now, I've only included a few paragraphs from a very interesting post. Go here to read the whole post.

I will also add that at the end of the post Challis asks for feedback. My very favorite comment of all? This one, probably because there seems to be a bit of snark to it: Why do men, especially pastors, seem to want to spend so much time giving advice to women about how to dress?