Seeing God and What God Sees
November 12, 2024
I am likely to die soon. Perhaps my secular friends are correct: when I die, my light will go out, and that is that. That would be fine with me; I have already lost much of what makes life worth living, and each day something new seems to break.
But if my Christian beliefs are correct, when I die, I will see God. What might this mean?
I can only guess. Because I am guessing, surely most of what follows will be wrong. Moreover, I’m not a Biblical scholar or theologian, so my words can’t be taken as statements of orthodox Christian views.
The Bible discusses seeing God in many passages. However, none of the Biblical writers have seen him. In Exodus 33:20, God said, “You cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.”
However, Moses saw the manifestation of God in a burning bush. Isaiah saw God in a vision: “In the year that king Uzziah died I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple” (Isaiah 6:1).
Many people saw Jesus. St John wrote, “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known (John 1:18)."
In the Divine Comedy, a character named Dante ascends to Heaven and has a ‘Beatific Vision.’ (It’s unclear whether the author Dante also received that vision.)
Dante says that his words are inadequate to describe what he saw. Nevertheless, he writes:
[M]y vision quickening, in that sole appearance, still new miracles descried, and toiled me with the change. In that abyss of radiance, clear and lofty, seemed methought, three orbs of triple hue clipped in one bound: And, from another, one reflected seemed, as rainbow is from rainbow: and the third seemed fire, breathed equally from both. (Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, Canto 33)
However, I do not expect to see what Dante saw. God is not a being in the physical world; and whatever Dante’s rings are, they seem to be objects in space. We cannot see God face-to-face because we are beings in space.
To see God face-to-face, I must become one with God, outside time and space. Then, I will see what God sees.
What does God see? Everything in the material universe, everything that has ever been, and everything that will be. God experiences the ocean currents’ flow, the continental plates’ movement, and the thermonuclear explosions at the hearts of stars. All this across the infinity of space and all of time.
But God also sees our inner lives, our consciousness or sentience. Our here means everyone’s sentience.
If, one with God, I know what God has seen, I will know what I looked to a person who stood behind me on a subway ride in Boston as I hung on a strap. I will see what my parents saw, what they felt, their joys and disappointments. I will see the consequences of all my actions. I am not looking forward to that.
Moreover, God knows the interior lives of all beings, not just humans. God experiences what a bat experiences through echolocation, the panoply of smells illuminating the life of a dog, the magnetic fields sensed by migrating birds, and what a mother cat feels for her kittens.
Plants appear to have some way of registering the events in the environment they care about: the bite of an insect, and the wind through the leaves. I will learn what the millipede experienced when squashed it under my heel. If a being has sentience; God shares it.
My human intellect can process only the tiniest fraction of this. Hence, God must transform me. St Paul wrote
So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. (1 Corinthians 15:42-44)
What will this resurrection body be like? I have no idea.
Your secular light will not go out Bill. I intend to carry it with me for a long, long time.
You are in my prayers. May God bless you and embrace you always.