Most of the reason we Christians are pretty sure John bar Zavdi wrote both the gospel with his name on it, and the letters with his name on them, is ’cause the same ideas and themes (and wording, and vocabulary) come up in them. Including today’s bible difficulty, the idea nobody’s ever seen God. John wrote it in both his gospel and his first letter.
John 1.18 NET - No one has ever seen God. The only one, himself God, who is in closest fellowship with the Father, has made God known.
1 John 4.12 NET - No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God resides in us, and his love is perfected in us.
The reason it’s a difficulty? Because people have seen God. In Exodus 24, we have this interesting little story:
Exodus 24.9-11 NET 9 Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and the seventy elders of Israel went up,10 and they saw the God of Israel. Under his feet there was something like a pavement made of sapphire, clear like the sky itself.11 But he did not lay a hand on the leaders of the Israelites, so they saw God, and they ate and they drank.
Wait, what?
Yeah, nobody bothers to read their Old Testament, so it stands to reason they’d utterly miss this one. Or any of the other God-appearances in the scriptures.
In the OT, on a regular basis, humans freak out when there was any possibility they’d see God.
Yeah, it was a rumor. And sometimes rumors are true. The L
Exodus 33.20 NET - But he added, “You cannot see my face, for no one can see me and live.”
Yet we have this story in the middle of Exodus, where apparently 74 people saw God, had lunch with him, and lived to tell of it.
And it’s not the only instance! Abraham had lunch with God too.
Whenever I point out this rather vast discrepancy, Christians flinch, then usually respond one of two ways. Either they dismiss the passages where people got to see God, or they dismiss the passages where seeing God should get you struck down. The authors of the bible must not really have meant what the text clearly says.
So John
Or nobody has literally seen God: The 74 Hebrew elders didn’t really see him. They saw the pavement beneath his feet, and that’s all. Somehow they knew his bronze feet
So if Christians were taught must be wrong must not be literal. Which idea would you rather was true? Embrace that one, and put aside t’other.
Both are right.
The way I tend to deal with these contradictory ideas, is to embrace both of them.
- When the writer of Exodus (for convenience I’ll call him “Moe”) stated the 74 Hebrew elders saw God, he totally, literally meant it.
- When John stated no one has ever seen God, he meant it.
Neither Moe nor John were trying to subtly attach some weird allegorical meaning to their writings. They were trying to express
Whenever I say such things, inerrantists tend to lose their tiny minds. “No!” they screech, “you can’t say one of them’s right in his experience, and the other’s right in his experience. That’s subjectivism. That’s relativism.
Says you. The only reason you say God isn’t like that, is because you aren’t like that. (Or you don’t think you’re like that.) You’re projecting. Don’t do that. God is perfectly free to define himself, through the scriptures, without your help. And for his own reasons, God permitted Moe to define him as someone who let 74 Hebrews take a peek… and permitted John to define him as having never been seen at any time.
You’re confusing God’s customized revelation to his kids—his adaptation of his message to the finite, limited understanding of each individual—with inconsistency. You might call it subjectivism, but it’s only subjective in the sense that each person subjectively sees God from a different perspective. Not that God actually is different to every person. God’s consistently the same. Our perceptions vary. God is still, and always, God.
And God’s never inconsistent in his character. But in his application and revelation, he varies from person and person. He’s not inconsistent; we are. The bible just happens to reflect our inconsistency. “Which of these guys is correct, Moe or John?” is actually the wrong question. Both are right.
Now deal with it. Don’t shove the inconsistency under the rug by reinterpreting one passage or the other as allegory. Deal with it. Try to understand God from the point of view that two very different ideas, almost contradictory ideas, happen to both be true at the same time. Hey, you can do it with
I remind you we Christians are always to take the bible seriously. Tweaking passages in order to make them “line up” properly does not do this. It treats one passage or the other as if it’s cancelled out, irrelevant, mythological, falsehood, too mysterious for our understanding, or never meant to be understood. It teaches us it’s okay to not take a part of the bible seriously. And that’s a dangerous ground to walk upon.
What Moe meant, and what John meant.
In the Exodus story, the L
This event took place at the end part, after God presented his covenant and they agreed to it.
While ordinarily seeing God would devastate them, God accommodated them. He appeared in a form they could look at without dying. Which of course he can do; he did it before with Abraham, and does it today through Jesus.
Now for John. In his gospel, he emphasizes how Jesus makes God known. We can’t fully know God apart from Jesus. Jesus
In John’s letter, God is love. This love is demonstrated by sending us his Son.
This focus on visibility is a bit overrated, y’know. The one thing Exodus clearly demonstrates is a visible God certainly doesn’t mean people are gonna be any more obedient, or have any more faith. The ancient Hebrews sucked at following God. Yet they saw his mighty works, and 74 of them even saw him personally. For all the good that did.
We Christians, on the other hand, have to make the effort to suck less at following God. We don’t get to see him till we obey Jesus, and love one another.
