John’s Gospel says plainly that no one has ever seen God.

That’s because God is Spirit, and Spirit is invisible.

Not invisible like radio waves or oxygen; you can measure those. God is ​“unbodily personal power,” invisible, immeasurable, unmeasurable—which is a terribly inconvenient kind of Being to bet your life on in a very visible and measurable world.

Even though God is invisible, the Apostle Paul says that since the beginning, something of God — the qualities of God — can be ​“clearly seen” in nature. I take that to mean that deep down everyone knows (but many ignore) that Someone is responsible for the Milky Way and the milking cows, and that creation alone is enough for us to have no excuse not to at least lift a ​“Thank You” and live a decent life.

Thankfully, God was kind enough to self-disclose beyond creation.

First, God chose a people and interacted with them. Over time, they wrote those interactions down. Still, the picture of God in those texts is veiled, and it’s not hard to see how someone reading the Hebrew Scriptures alone might get the wrong idea about who God is.

So God disclosed more.

See, once upon a time — true story — this human came into the world, a radiant person living a radiant life. People said they’d never seen anything like him, never heard anybody talk like that before. They knew he came from God. A handful of women and men even followed him around day and night, worked with him, watched him under stress. They soaked up the life and light streaming out of him. Finally, one of them couldn’t take it anymore and asked what they all wanted to ask, what their hero Moses had asked long ago: show us the Glory, show us God — show us because we have this great gnawing in our soul to see and touch Whoever it is that made us, this great hunger that the created order and the old stories have only fed with crumbs. Make the invisible Father visible, and it will be enough. 

And then the man replied with something outrageous, something that can get a person killed. 

You’ve seen the Father. 
You’re looking at him right now.

Whether they believed it at that moment or not, in time they came to believe it deep in their bones. This man was God visible, God tangible, someone they’d gladly bet their lives on. Until now, every place they’d squinted to see God — in nature, in ancient stories of mercy and wrath — were only distorted shapes in a dim room. The life in this man threw open the blinds. Ah! So this is what God looks like — generous and true, through and through. 

“No one has ever seen God. It is the only Son, himself God, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.” — John 1:18

Father, thank you for not leaving us in the dark. Thank you for showing us what you look like — you look like Jesus, the most beautiful person we’ve ever encountered. We long to look like you, too, by looking more like him. Help us walk in the Way that increasingly makes it so. Amen.