Seeing God
“When one turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord (2 Cor 3:17-18).”
If we want to see God, we might look for His hand on our lives. The Lord makes Himself evident through blessings, delivering us from troubles, guiding us, and using us to His glory. Yet, in this article, we will not explore the familiar ground of God’s acts. Instead, we will talk about seeing God’s face, not so much what He does, but who He is. As Paul implies in 2 Corinthians, seeing who God is changes who we are. Let us delve into this mystery.
“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End,” says the Lord, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty (Revelation 1:8).”
Revelation 1:8 tells us something about God’s nature. He is infinite, and the infinite has no measure. God is the Almighty, which means His power is limitless. There is nothing too hard for God. God is also eternal, having no beginning or no end.
That which is eternal is also transcendent, not bound by space and time. When Moses asked God His name at the burning bush (Exodus 3:1-17), God answered, “I AM WHO I AM.” What an unusual name! What does it say? I believe it communicates the Lord’s eternal nature. Infinite things are so. We cannot make them so, and we cannot make them not so. In other words, God is. These are two brief words, but we can ponder them for a lifetime. Their mere mention can change our perspective on anything we are going through, and they make a powerful two-word prayer. God is!
You may have done a study on the names of God. We find them though out the Bible. When the Lord told His name to Moses, it was an introduction. First, God revealed that He is eternal. Then He revealed what is eternal about Himself.
In Judges 6:24 the Lord showed Himself to Gideon as Jehovah Shalom, The Lord is Peace. God’s peace is eternal. It always is. We may be in an unpeaceful time, but God has not stopped being peace. By faith, we partake of who God is, so we can know the peace that passes all understanding, the peace not dependent on anything but God Himself.
Ezekiel 48:35 introduces us to Jehovah Shammah, the Lord Who is Present. David, in Psalm 139:7, expressed God’s presence as something that is eternal. He did not ask, “How can I get into God’s presence?” Rather, he says, “Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence?” To David, God’s presence was eternal, always so, and inescapable. His words reveal our struggles to get close to the Lord as vanity.
One of the greatest revelations of my life was that God’s closeness is not something I achieve, but something I perceive. It is something that is eternal. We do not accomplish the infinite. We merely take part in who God is. He is The Present One.
Throughout the Bible, God continued to reveal His infinite nature until it reached its pinnacle in Christ who showed us God is Love. Infinite love overarches all and ties all together. It defines not only God, but us as well. John, in his first epistle, said that those know God (those who take part in the infinite) love others, because God is love (1 John 4:7-8).
“God is Spirit… (John 4:24).”
In John four, Jesus described God as Spirit. That which is finite has form, and we can perceive it with our eyes. It is easy to perceive and describe. The spirit is not so easy. It is formless, and our eyes can’t see it. Therefore, God must unveil the infinite. We cannot comprehend it alone. We call such an unveiling a revelation.
Jesus came to reveal the eternal. In John chapter four He told the woman at the well, “But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such to worship Him (John 4:23).”
Before Jesus came, the Jews and the Samaritans fought over which mountain should be the home of God’s temple. When it came to worship form was everything. Temples were something you could behold with your eyes. When the Lord revealed the formless, the mountain no longer mattered.
The Old Covenant inheritance had form. The blessings God promised those who obeyed the Torah were all material and finite. At the heart of God’s promise was a place you could find on a map, the Promised Land (Deuteronomy 28).
The New Covenant inheritance is formless. Jesus introduced the idea of heavenly treasure, and Paul said God has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 1:3). The great work of the Holy Spirit is to reveal the things God has freely given us. (1 Corinthians 2:10-16). There would be no need for revelation if our blessings were only finite.
The apostle speaks of God’s love as something that is revealed (Ephesians 3:14-19). If we look at the finite to measure God’s love, we only scratch the surface. We can only comprehend the depths of God’s love in the infinite, in things unseen. Someone in the Old Covenant might gaze at the land flowing with milk and honey, and say, “This is how much God loves me!” Someone in the new should look at the Infinite Christ and say, “This is how much God loves me!” It is a love with no measure, and we cannot comprehend it through the senses or through human reasoning.
The great gift of the New Covenant is not only to perceive the formless, but to partake of it. Christ has become our bread, our life, the living waters (John 6:35; John 14:6, John 7:37-8). Jesus often used things with form to describe the formless. Our blessing is no less than God Himself. He has become our home. We live in who He is, and who He is defines and completes us.
The Lord gave many images in the New Testament to help us understand who we are. Perhaps the greatest is the Temple of the Holy Spirit. To the Jews, the temple was the House of God. In the Holiest of Holies, the infinite and the finite became one. As God’s temple, we have a marvelous identity. We are the place where the infinite and the finite become one.
Jesus said (John 7:37-8) if we trust Him, out of our innermost being shall flow living waters. In other words, the reality of our union with Christ will not stay veiled on the inside. It is going to flow out. Our lives will not just be an experience of form, but of the eternal, and that union will define every moment. We live not just in form but the formless, and our home in this heavenly place (Ephesians 2:6) is greater than the finite world. Paul uses words like above and below to describe our relationship with God (Colossians 3:1), but this has nothing to do with direction. His words describe the earthly reality vs. the heavenly reality. By faith, we live above together with Him.
“Then His disciples came and said to Him, ‘Do You know the Pharisees were offended when they heard this saying?’ But He answered and said, ‘Every plant which My heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted. Let them alone. They are blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind leads the blind, both will fall into a ditch (Matt. 15:12-14).’”
Jesus called the Pharisees the blind leading the blind. If we study them, we can learn what being blind to God means, and we will reach some astonishing conclusions.
On the outside, a Pharisee would appear to be the perfect church member. They had the entire Old Testament memorized. Most devout Jews did. They fasted two days a week and paid their tithes to the penny (Luke 18:10-14). They had great zeal for God’s Law, keeping not only the commands but also the oral traditions. For instance, Torah says don’t work on the Sabbath, a simple command. Yet, men like the Pharisees added details to define working. By Jesus’s day, they had 39 categories of work, including things like tying or untying a knot or how far you could walk. Jesus relished breaking their traditions. For instance, in John chapter nine, the Lord broke three of their manmade rules in one miracle. I will leave it to you to figure out which three.
The Pharisees tried hard, but no one was more clueless. God in the flesh stood before them, but they could not recognize Him. In fact, when they looked at Jesus, they saw the Devil (Matthew 12:24)!
What made them so blind? We associate ignorance with unacceptable behavior, but theirs was exceedingly good! We can’t define their darkness through their deeds. Instead, we must consider their source of identity. It was self, or what Paul called the flesh (and what I often call the ego.) They trusted in themselves that they were righteous (Luke 18:9).
To the Pharisees, the finite defined the infinite. Who they were and what they did made God who He is. Their own righteousness made the eternally present one present and the infinitely good one good. It is outright blasphemy when you think about it. In the New Covenant, the infinite was defining the finite, and the Pharisees stood in its way.
When you are a Pharisee, you don’t know it. You suppose you are on God’s side, but you are fighting Him. You think you see, but you are blind. We all have a little Pharisee in us. There was a lot in me. When I was younger, I thought I was pursuing God with my many good deeds, Bible studies, church attendance, and prayers. I am not saying these things are bad, but if we assume they define the infinite or make it so, they can be opposition to the Lord. I reckoned I was pursuing God by my doing, but I was running from God. Fortunately, when we run from the Lord, either by doing good or evil, we always end up at the end of self. When God exposes the ego’s weakness, He unveils the eternal.
It was not at the height of my pursuit that I caught God, but at pursuit’s end, He caught me. On the day I could pursue Him no more, the Lord reframed my relationship with Him not in terms of doing but of seeing. My great need was not to do more for God but to behold God’s face, to see that which is so. The Christian life is not a doing as much as an unveiling. This paradigm change vanquishes the Pharisee in us.
“For we walk by faith, not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7).”
Some say this verse means if we have faith for what we cannot see, it will become seen or manifest. In other words, faith is for receiving finite blessings. I disagree with this interpretation. While there may be some truth to it, I think it falls short of faith’s highest purpose. Faith is for living in the formless or the unseen. Through faith, we partake of the infinite.
We can never see God by looking at form. We might notice His fingerprints or that which points to Him. I am the pastor at Thorncrown Chapel, which is an extraordinarily beautiful place.
In the Spring, Thorncrown’s environment comes to life with endless shades of green as new leaves mature. Wildflowers, dogwoods, and redbuds show off their splendor with splashes of pink, white, and purple. Summer days are beautiful at Thorncrown, but on rare occasions, the sun hits the tree branches at exactly the right angle, creating a kaleidoscope of light and shadows. The wind sets everything in motion. Add to that the hue of a pink or orange sunset, and it is almost too much for the eye to take in. In the fall, the green of summer gives away to hues of red, yellow, and orange. At dusk, as the sun disappears behind the Ozark hills, the autumn leaves glow almost like they are emitting their own light. Winter days can be just as stunning, but there are rare moments when ice and snow cover the Ozarks, turning it into a crystalline forest. Ice cycles adorn the chapel and the surrounding rock bluffs. You wonder if it is real or a dream.
People who visit the chapel often say it would be very hard to view such splendor and not have faith in God. An atheist would disagree. They point not to what is beautiful and good in the world, but to what is ugly and bad. In fact, the strongest argument against God is the existence of evil and suffering. A non-believer might point to tornados, hurricanes, and earthquakes, which kill countless innocent people. They could talk of diseases and other afflictions, or they might point to a child with cancer and say there can’t be a God.
If we think the human journey is about form and making it better, we are going to have trouble with God, even if we are Christians. When life is good, we can proclaim God’s faithfulness, but when we encounter loss, when we suffer, or when our burden becomes unbearable, doubt sets in.
However, when our journey is not to better form but to the formless or infinite, God’s hand becomes visible, and His unwavering love becomes clear.
We have all asked God to take control of our lives. “Jesus, take the wheel!” we exclaim. Yet, if we put the Lord in the driver’s seat, wouldn’t help to know where He is taking us?
If we think God takes us out of our troubles and increases our finite measures of life and identity, we are in for a bumpy ride. What if the Lord turns the wheel down the road of suffering or loss? We might think God has taken a wrong turn. We reckon if we can believe hard enough, we can get the Lord to turn the wheel again and get us back on course.
“Therefore, we do not lose heart. Even though our outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, while we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal (2 Corinthians 4:16–18).”
In 2 Corinthians, Paul revealed our true destination. He talked about an eternal weight of glory. Our destination is that which has no form, the infinite, that which is divine. And our journey takes us down some surprising roads. The apostle associated suffering with glory. Suffering’s end is glory.
In the kingdom of God, we gain through loss (Luke 9:23-25). The one steering our lives knows this. We often don’t. When we go down the road of decrease, it can be bewildering. Losing our finite measures of self is painful (Philippians 3:1-10) so is the day our dreams die. Nobody wants to be alone, weak, or lacking.
Yet, the one who guides sees the road of loss, weakness, and lacking as the way to gain. The Lord is a fire who consumes the finite measures of who we are and what we have for such measures blind our eyes. When the veil is removed, God reveals the infinite measure of who we are and of what we have. We see His face, and when we do, we know that we never lacked worth, and we were always complete. Why? Because God is.
