ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY EDUCATION NETWORK EXODUS DR. DAVID ADAMS #51 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> I thought that the Bible said that no one can see God and live. So what does Verse 10 mean when it says that Moses and the elders saw the God of Israel? >> This is a concern that has been shared by many readers of the text over the ages, not just in modern times but in the ancient world, as well. In fact, to avoid the scandal of seeing God, the ***Septuagint, the Greek translation -- the early Greek translation of the Old Testament makes an intentional change in the text at this point. Where the text says they saw they saw God, the Greek translaters translated "They saw the place where the God of Israel stood." In other words, they didn't see God. They saw the spot sort of like after God left it. I was in a recording studio a few years ago in Memphis, Tennessee, where Elvis Presley had recorded his very first hit song. And they had an X marked on the floor where Elvis stood as he recorded this song. And as I stood there and looked at the X, I thought of this transactional variant in the Septuagint. They saw the place where he had stood. Well, this is a concern for some people theologically. And so I think we do need to take a moment to look at it. First there are a couple of ways that we can answer this question I think. And any of the answers will meet the need and perhaps all of them or some combination of them is true. The first thing that we might want to notice is where does the Bible say that no one can see God and live? The answer is Exodus Chapter 33 Verse 20. There God is speaking to Moses and God says, "You cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live." So one could argue, for example, that the rule that no one can see God and live hadn't been instituted yet. And so God allowed people to see him without punishment, if you want to call it punishment. Without any negative implications anyway. Because he hadn't told them that they couldn't see him yet. That's one possible answer to the question. Another answer to the question is to remind ourselves of whose rule is it that no one can see God and live? And the answer is that it's God's rule. And if it's God's rule that no one can see him and live, then God is certainly able to grant exceptions to that rule. Adam and Eve saw God and lived to be sure. And others apparently did in the Old Testament, as well. If God could make exceptions for them, then there's no reason to think that God could not make exceptions for Moses and the elders of Israel, as well. So that's another possible answer to the question of how they could see God and live. I think maybe in this text, though, the answer that satisfies me the best is a slightly different one. And maybe we can get at it by asking the question: When the people saw Jesus, whom did they see? Well, the New Testament tells us pretty clearly. John 14 Verse 7 Jesus himself says, "If you really knew me, you would know my Father, as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him." Jesus says, in effect, "When you've seen me, you've seen the Father." In other words, "When you've seen me, you've seen God." Similarly, two verses later in John 14 Jesus says again "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. So how can you say 'Show us the Father?'" Jesus makes the point clearly that he is God incarnate. If you've seen Jesus, you have seen God. And of course, the people live. So there were clearly many people in Jesus' day who saw God and lived. How do we account for this? Well, throughout the Bible God reveals himself in a visual way to people. And when this is described in the scriptures, it's often described using terms like the glory or the face of the Lord or even a cloud like the cloud that we have in Exodus 19, which later in the Old Testament is called the ***shakinau, this cloud of glory which becomes an important theme in later rabbinical Jewish theology. But we won't bother with that. The point is that God reveals himself visually by using what we might describe as a mask, a way of being seen but not being seen or being partially seen. And so when one sees the glory of God, one sees God. But doesn't see God as he is in his fullness we might say. In the same way the ***panine, the face of God, is a way that God can sort of let people see him and yet at the same time not be overwhelmed by the power of -- and majesty of his presence fully revealed. Similarly, in Christ God has revealed himself to the world but clothed himself in manhood. So that when we see Jesus, we see a man. But we also see true God fully revealed there. In some ways, the incarnation then is a mask of God that both allows us to see him and prevents us from seeing him at the same time. So Jesus could say, "If you've seen me, if you've seen the incarnate Christ, you have seen God." So in the same way when Moses and the elders go up to see God, God could reveal something of himself to them, allow them to see him in one sense of the word. But not to see him fully. And you know, the book of Exodus is not trying to sort out that kind of philosophical or theological nicety at that point. It just says the obvious thing that in one sense of the word, they did see God. Now, what they saw when they saw God isn't spelled out in the text to us. And if we try to figure it out, we would be going beyond what God intends to reveal to us and ultimately asking a question that we can't answer. So I don't think that we need to press for those kind of details. At the same time, for several reasons that I've indicated, I don't think that we should be bothered by the idea that the text tells us that they saw God and lived. If nothing else, we should realize that the fact that it's mentioned in this way in the text reenforces that this is an exception to the normal rule. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***