The Undiscovered Country

God's Impossible Invisibility

I listened to a song on the way home last night, and one line said something about God being invisible.

I wrinkled my nose at it, because God is not invisible. Sure we may not know what he looks like, such as the color of his eyes or the shape of his nose. But we do see the work of his hands in all things around us. The first is to look at our own eyes, our own nose. We can study the shape of the hand, how all the muscles, tendon and bones move effortlessly on our part, but it's their sheer complexity that guarantees the grace and beauty of movement of our own creations.

Do we really need to see God's face in order to finally believe he exists or at least is not invisible? After all, you've never seen my face. Yet you still believe I exist.

Besides, by looking at all of God's creation from the ever-expanding universe to even the unimaginable complexity of a living cell, how can we see God in a form we'd understand.

Can a protozoa -- if it could achieve complex thought -- see the face of the person studying it under a microscope? Would it even comprehend what it saw? Or would the human be too large for the single-celled organism to see the whole person, and call it as such?

Are we not that protozoa when compared to God? So even while we beg to see God's face, he cannot show us. We simply wouldn't comprehend it.

A friend of mine reminded me of a scripture passage that dealt with the very question of God's supposed invisibility:

"But God shows his anger from heaven against all sinful, wicked people who suppress the truth by their wickedness.They know the truth about God because he has made it obvious to them. For ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see his invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse for not knowing God." -- Romans 1:18-20 (NLT)

Well, actually God did show his face once. His name was Jesus.