What it means to see the face of God in the Bible
The phrase "face of God", as used in the Bible, provides important information about God the Father, but the expression can easily be misunderstood. This misunderstanding makes the Bible appear to contradict this concept.
The problem begins in the book of Exodus, when the prophet Moses, speaking with God on Mount Sinai, asks God to show Moses his glory. God warns that: "... You cannot see my face, because nobody can see me and live". (Exodus 33:20, NIV)
God then places Moses in a crevice in the rock, covers Moses with his hand until God passes, then removes his hand so that Moses can only see his back.
Use human traits to describe God
Revealing the problem begins with a simple truth: God is spirit. It has no body: "God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in the truth." (John 4:24, NIV)
The human mind cannot understand a being who is pure spirit, without form or material substance. Nothing in human experience is even close to such a being, so to help readers relate to God in an understandable way, the Bible writers used human attributes to speak of God. In the passage from Exodus above, God also he used human terms to speak about himself. Throughout the Bible we read of his mighty face, hand, ears, eyes, mouth and arm.
The application of human characteristics to God is called anthropomorphism, from the Greek words anthropos (man or man) and morphe (form). Anthropomorphism is a tool for understanding, but an imperfect tool. God is not human and does not have the characteristics of a human body, such as a face, and while he has emotions, they are not exactly the same as human emotions.
Although this concept can be helpful in helping readers relate to God, it can cause problems if taken too literally. A good study Bible provides clarification.
Has anyone seen the face of God and lived?
This problem of seeing the face of God is further aggravated by the number of biblical characters who seemed to see God still alive. Moses is the prime example: "The Lord would speak to Moses face to face while talking to a friend." (Exodus 33:11, NIV)
In this verse, "face to face" is a rhetorical figure, a descriptive phrase that should not be taken literally. It can't be, because God doesn't have a face. Instead, it means that God and Moses shared a deep friendship.
Patriarch Jacob fought all night with "a man" and managed to survive with a wounded hip: "So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying:" It is because I saw God face to face, yet my life was spared ". (Genesis 32:30, NIV)
Peniel means "face of God". However, the "man" with whom Jacob fought was probably the angel of the Lord, a preincarnation of Christophanes or the appearance of Jesus Christ before he was born in Bethlehem. It was solid enough to fight, but it was just a physical representation of God.
Gideon also saw the angel of the Lord (Judges 6:22), as well as Manoah and his wife, Samson's parents (Judges 13:22).
The prophet Isaiah was yet another biblical personage who said he saw God: “In the year of the death of King Uzziah, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple. " (Isaiah 6: 1, NIV)
What Isaiah saw was a vision of God, a supernatural experience provided by God to reveal information. All the prophets of God observed these mental images, which were images but not physical encounters from man to God.
See Jesus, the God-man
In the New Testament, thousands of people saw the face of God in a human being, Jesus Christ. Some realized it was God; most do not.
Since Christ was fully God and fully man, the people of Israel saw only his human or visible form and did not die. Christ was born of a Jewish woman. Once he grew up, he looked like a Jewish man, but no physical description of him is given in the Gospels.
Although Jesus did not compare his human face in any way to God the Father, he proclaimed a mysterious unity with the Father:
Jesus said to him: “I have been with you for so long, yet you have not come to know me, Philip? He who has seen me has seen the Father; how can you say: "Show us the Father"? (John 14: 9, NIV)
"The Father and I are one." (John 10:30, NIV)
In the end, the closest of humans to seeing the face of God in the Bible was the Transfiguration of Jesus Christ, when Peter, James and John witnessed a majestic revelation of the true nature of Jesus on Mount Hermon. God the Father masked the scene like a cloud, as he had often done in the book of Exodus.
The Bible says that believers, in fact, will see the face of God, but in the New Heaven and the New Earth, as revealed in Revelation 22: 4: "They will see his face and his name will be on their forehead." (NIV)
The difference will be that, at this point, the faithful will be dead and will be in their resurrection bodies. Knowing how God will make himself visible to Christians will have to wait until that day.