Someone has said that man’s most ultimate and deepest loss is the lost face of God. By the same token, when God would reveal himself to his people as Redeemer, he instructs Moses to pronounce upon them the following benediction:
The Lord bless thee and keep thee: The Lord make his face to shine upon thee, And be gracious unto thee: The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace (Num. 6: 23 f.).
In this context, Emil Brunner, in a beautiful figure, compares God in the act of revelation to “a tall man, (who) stoops down to a little child and lowers Himself upon His knee, so that the child may look into His face” (Offenbarung and Vernunft, Zurich, 1941, p. 413). For the same reason, he also feels, the Bible, when it would represent the final revelation of God to man, that consummation of personal meeting, speaks of a seeing “face to face” (ibid., p. 185).
This is indeed the end of all revelation, to see the face of God. But this final disclosure, this eschatological revelation, has already broken in upon man in the person of Jesus Christ, “...in whom dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” (Col. 2:9). God, in himself, is the invisible One, whom no one at anytime has seen or can see; but he has shined in our [p.57] hearts, Paul tells us, to give the light of the knowledge of his glory in the face of Jesus Christ (II Con 4:6). “He that hath seen me,” said Jesus, “hath seen the Father” (John 14:8, 9). Because God is personal, the final revelation of himself is a person.
Paul K. Jewett, “Special Revelation as Historical and Personal,” Carl F.H. Henry, ed., Revelation and the Bible. Contemporary Evangelical Thought. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1958 / London: The Tyndale Press, 1959. pp.45-57.
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