Knowing God..

                I am sure that many of you have tried to picture God in some way. We all have some type of conception of what we think He may look like. In reality now one knows for the Scripture tells us in Exodus 33:20, when Moses asked God if he could see Him, God flatly to him no. God replied "you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live." Yet, God did put Moses in the cleft of the cliff and covered Moses’ eyes as He passed by and then allowed Moses to see His back side. It is written in Scripture that after Adam and Eve has been disobedient; they hid from God as they heard Him walking in the garden in the cool of the day. One can only speculate that God had on other occasions appeared to them during that period of the day and talked with them. How God appeared to them it does not say. Maybe prior to their sinning they could look upon Him, that though is guessing. One thing is certain, God has said that no one may look on Him and live, and Jesus has said that no one has seen the Father.

                When God did make an appearance to the elders of Israel they saw only the pavement under His feet (Exodus 24:9-10), and when Isaiah
“saw the Lord”, all he got a glimpse of was the hem of His rob (Is. 6:1).  The writers of the Scripture used what is called anthropomorphic terms to convey the point that God is so different from us, that all our attempts to grasp or describe this Holy One is doomed to failure.  Anthropomorphic is a fancy way of say saying that the writers, because they did not see what  God, looked like they used human characteristics to describe God who is all glory; so indescribably glorious and perfect that there are no words perfect enough to fully and truly describe Him. We who are sinners cannot look upon Him who is all perfection and that is wh, like Adam and Eve, we conceal ourselves from Him, because deep inside we know we are guilty.  This keeps us from knowing Him.  One thing is certain and that is one will know what God is not.  How do we then learn anything about God with any amount of clarity? Left to ourselves it is impossible.  Look, ask twenty persons about God and you will most certainly get almost twenty different perspectives. The only way to get to know who and what God is like will be for God to take the initiative and show Himself to man (mankind).  And that is just what He did.  In His infinite and perfect wisdom and having a foreknowledge of the fall of creation and humanity God foreordained the plan of redemption.

                The first chapter of the Gospel written by the   Apostle John it spells out clearly that in the “beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…” then further on in the fourteenth verse it says, that the “Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” 

                The cry of humanity has been to cry asking Him to come down and speak to us.  This was fulfilled in Jesus Christ who said, as it is written in John 14:8-9 when Phillip asks Jesus to show them the Father He replied by saying “Don’t you know me…. After I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” Paul emphatically declared in his letter to the Colossians, “In Christ, the fullness of God lives in a human body.”  In 1 John 1:1-2 the Apostle John write again concerning the incarnation, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched —this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.  The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us.”

                Mankind does not have to say like Job, “If only I knew where to find Him; if only I could go to His dwelling” Job 23:3 (Todays NIV).  God reconciled Himself to mankind, He came, took on flesh, became one of us, without sin, the second Adam as Paul writes, and He, God paid the price to redeem the world to Himself. We have His word, written in the Scripture, testified by the Apostles and over 500 other witnesses who heard, walked and talked with Jesus, God in the flesh.