The guest on Margaret Throsby’s morning interview the other day was a psychologist by the name of Paul Ekman who specialises in the study of “micro-expressions”. The theory goes that the human face, far from being a mask behind which you can hide your true feelings, in fact reveals your deepest emotions, even if those expressions last only for a 1/25th second and are imperceptible to all save the rare few who can or have been trained to detect them.
So it is true again. The face is the person. And faces are the primary way we know each other.
Which brings me to my question: have you ever imagined what God looks like? In the Old Testament, the Israelites were forbidden from making images of God lest they idolize the image rather than the living God. But what of the monoliths in our mind? Should we curb our imagination too for fear it will lead us into sin?
Are we left, like the orphan Judy Abbott who catches a glimpse of the shadow of her parting benefactor – a long legged man – at the beginning of the novel and proceeds to write hundreds of letters to her beloved, “Daddy Long Legs”?
Not so, for we have much more. We know His name – LORD – not invented by man but declared by God himself. We know that, for a time, He took on flesh and became a human, specifically, a Jewish man in the first century. And we know his name, Jesus. We have His words. We know His face is no longer hidden from us in anger. And we know with certain hope that, though we see in part, then we shall see face to face.
So, when I close my eyes, clasp my hands, bow my head, and pray to Him, what do I see? Most of the time, it is a sea of black against my own self-conscious voice. But sometimes, not often enough, I imagine His countenance, benevolent and lovely, and majestic.
Who do you see?
"And after my skin has been thus destroyed,
yet in my flesh I shall see God,
whom I shall see for myself,
and my eyes shall behold, and not another.” Job 19:26-27a
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