What does God look like?

It stands to reason that no one has ever seen God. We can take account of a thing if it is twenty miles long or wide, and if it is a solid substance that can be weighed. But can we shut up the wind to measure its size, or say where the light ends? God is a Spirit; and heaven, and the highest heaven, cannot contain Him. He is everywhere present throughout this vast universe, greater than everything He has made, not subject to change or breaking up. Where could we even begin to take account of Him?

"God is a spirit." He is the Being who is spirit in essence... It refers to His being, to the Person. He has no bodily shape. He is not limited to one place like ourselves, and He is an omnipresent spirit, and therefore though in heaven, He is here, and we being spirit are in His presence.

But on the mercy seat there was no representation of God. "God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth" (John 4:24). How completely in keeping with all His truth it is that, in those days of partial revelation, of type and shadow, God should have so carefully guarded the idea of His infinitely glorious being from any kind of representation, such as was universal among the nations around.

An "image" means a visible representation of what is invisible or absent. The Son, in the eternal light of His Person in the Godhead, is the Image of the invisible God. He did not gain this capacity to represent Him by being created, as Adam did, who was created "out of the dust of the ground" in the image and glory of God (Gen. 1:27; 1 Cor. 11:7)... But the Son is the Creator, and being God, He, as the Image of God, sets Him forth with an infinite fullness inseparable from His personal glory as the Son, which was His before He became flesh.

He is called "the exact expression of His substance" (that is, His being). This is the closest anyone can come to declaring God's essence, His essential existence... Though you had never seen the seal, I might show you the impression of it, something exactly like it, and from that impression you could form a true idea of the seal. So Christ is the "Impress" of the substance of God, the One in whom all the thoughts and feelings of God essentially are.

There were two ways in which He revealed the Father. He Himself was morally the perfect presentation of the Father to those whose eyes were opened by the Spirit of God, according to His word to Philip, "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14:9); but, as the next verse shows, the two channels through which the revelation was made to others were His words and His works.

If light expresses the divine energy in showing the stainless and unstainable purity of God's moral nature, "love" expresses the energy of God in asserting and maintaining the absolute perfection of His goodness. These two distinguishing qualities must unite in God. If He were not absolutely "light" He could not be absolute goodness; and if He were not absolutely "love" — perfect goodness — He could not be unsullied light.

When the law was given, and broken, Moses found grace in God's sight, and so, encouraged, he said, "Please show me your glory." The answer was, "You cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live." Under grace the contrast is great... Brought into favour, we shall dwell in the full light of the knowledge of God, perfectly revealed in Christ. The prayer of our Lord will be fulfilled, "that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory." We shall see the face of God for ever, in beholding Him.