Seeing God

The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave Him to show to His bond-servants, the things which must soon take place; and He sent and communicated it by His angel to His bond-servant John,  Revelation 1:1  NASB

Revelation – Abraham Heschel notes a crucial distinction between the prophet and the apocalyptic visionary.  “The prophet hears, the apocalyptic visionary reads.  In apocalyptic vision, the image takes the place of the voice.”[1]

The task of the prophet is to translate the words uttered by God’s voice to his own voice, from the language of divinity to human language, because ‘you instruct man according to his capacity to comprehend.’  In contrast, the apocalyptic visionary sees before him the words in the heavenly book, and he has nothing else to communicate but what his eyes see, without change or addition.[2]

In other words, what matters to the prophet is correctly transmitting what he hears from God to the people.  But the apocalyptic visionary can’t do this because no one can transmit what he sees to another person.  All he can do is convert his personal experience of a vision into words that he then communicates.  He reads the vision, converting it into another form of communication.

This is the challenge of the mystic.  His experience of God is entirely private.  It is his experience alone, and in order to be shared, it must be converted from a private, visual experience into something that can be communicated to others.  As soon as that conversion takes place, it is no longer a private, visionary experience.  Now it is shared in a common language and is therefore subject to analysis and examination.  The prophet, on the other hand, has already done the work of transforming what he hears into human language.  His message is not a private one because it is transmitted in the human tongue.  He is the vehicle of communication, not the translator.

Why, then, is there a constant desire in the religious world to enter into a mystical experience?  Heschel points out that human beings have some innate desire to see God.  But the Scriptures tell us that it is not possible for men to see God and live.  At least that’s what we typically believe.  Heschel approaches this problem by noting that the Hebrew “shall see” (yir’eh) and the Hebrew “shall be seen” (year’eh) are written identically.  The difference is in the vocalization.  He points out that in some crucial verses (Exodus 34:24, Deuteronomy 16:16, Psalm 42:3) the vocalization of the verb ensures that we read it as “shall be seen” rather than “shall see.”  But this is only tradition.  The text itself does not demand this reading.  Accordingly, Rabbi Ishmael taught that seeing God was strictly impossible, but Rabbi Akiva taught that seeing God was only contingently impossible, that is, that the yetzer ha’ra stands in the way of truly seeing God and if it could be conquered entirely, this contingent barrier would be removed.

Why should this matter to us?  We constantly struggle with the yetzer ha’ra.  The possibility of completely conquering the evil tendency is but a pipe dream for us.  Except . . . there is a man who did overcome completely the yetzer ha’ra and therefore was able to see God.  This fact helps us understand the depth of the Messiah’s intimacy with the Father—and gives us hope that one day we too will see the Most High.  Maybe John got there too.

Just think about that!

Topical Index: see God, mystic, apocalyptic, prophet, yir’eh, year’eh, Revelation 1:1

[1] Abraham Heschel, Heavenly Torah as Refracted through the Generations, p. 294.

[2] Ibid.