But He said, “You cannot see My face, for no man can see Me and live!” Exodus 33:20
This is God’s reply to Moses on Mount Sinai when he asks God to show him his glory. Evidently, to actually see God would be an experience so overwhelming that one would not survive. The belief is that it would kill us if we were to look on the face of God.
The statement seems rather straightforward until we consider Jacob’s encounter with a stranger, the night before he was to meet his estranged brother, Esau. In Genesis 32:30, after wrestling with that man all night, Jacob realizes that he had encountered God and exclaims, “I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.”
Jacob believed that no one can see God and live, and he is amazed that somehow he did the impossible. Of course, he walked with a limp thereafter, and he also received a new name, Israel, and maybe that is a clue to something more.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Matthew 5:8
This beatitude must have sounded exceedingly strange to Jesus’ Jewish audience, because they would have known what Moses was told on Mount Sinai. Jesus is claiming that to see God is a blessed state, but his listeners must be thinking that to see God is to die! Does Jesus want them to die?
Father, I desire that they also, whom You have given Me, be with Me where I am, so that they may see My glory which You have given Me, for You loved Me before the foundation of the world. John 17:24
Moses asked to see the glory of God and was told it would kill him, but Jesus is praying that his followers would see his own glory, which is the glory of God. Jesus seems to want to kill his followers!
Though at first confusing when we think of the ancient warning against seeing God, we begin to see a consistent theme emerging. Jesus wants to show us his Father, and his own glory, and he is also the one who keeps talking about dying to ourselves, taking up the cross, and following him. Maybe Jesus is not talking about the death of the body, as what Jacob and Moses perhaps thought, but the death of the person we have been.
The spiritual transformation that has been described for us in the gospel is one in which we die and are reborn. This spiritual renewal is portrayed and experienced in baptism. We die and are raised “to a new life” (Romans 6:4). Death in this manner is a blessing, the pure in heart seeing God.
If we go back to Jacob’s night of wrestling, when morning is coming the stranger asked to be let go, but Jacob refused and insisted he receive a blessing. He got one. He had seen God, and when the sun rose, a new man, now named Israel rather than Jacob, walking with a limp, began a new life. He had not seen God and lived, but had seen God and died, and been reborn a new man.
We cannot see God and live, that is, remain the people we were. We will be changed by the encounter. No one survives coming face to face with God, but all are changed and blessed forever.
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