When the Israelites turned from serving their Creator to worshiping idols, God rebuked them with these words:
As the thief is ashamed when he is found, so is the house of Israel ashamed . . . saying to a stock, Thou art my father; and to a stone, Thou hast brought me forth (Jer. 2:26–27).
And if it is shameful foolishness for a man to believe that his origin was from a wooden or stone image that he himself had made, how much more foolish it is to believe that a living, thinking human being could emerge from the non-living chemicals of a primeval soup! Surely the readers of these words will not be guilty of such unreasoning credulity as that! “Know ye that the Lord he is God: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture” (Ps. 100:3). “For the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods” (Ps. 95:3).
Pre-Incarnate Appearances of God to Man
Since God is omnipresent, He is necessarily invisible, at least in the essential triune glory of the godhead. Yet He had created man in His own image, for fellowship with himself, and therefore He somehow must reveal himself to man in a form of manifestation accessible to the human senses (sight, hearing, touch) — that is, in effect, He must appear in the form of an angel, or even as a man.
God is also omnipotent, and therefore He can do this whenever and however He so wills. To actually become man’s Redeemer and Savior, however, He must do more than appear as man, He must be a man, able to suffer and die for man’s sin, and then also to defeat death and rise from the dead as a glorified and immortal man, yet still physically a real man. Here we encounter the amazing event of God’s eternal Son becoming incarnate forever as the Son of Man.
One of the most familiar passages in the Bible — familiar because of its frequent appearance on Christmas cards and in Christmas sermons — is also one of the most profound and mysterious passages in the Bible. I am referring to Isaiah 9:6–7.
For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.
The mystery is how a mere child, born like other children, could also be “The everlasting Father.” The very words seem to constitute, in the modern parlance, an “oxymoron,” that is, an impossible contradiction in terms.
The same mystery is evident in that other very familiar Christmas verse, Micah 5:2:
But thou, Bethlehem Ephrata, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall He come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting.
That is, how could a Babe be “brought forth” (note verse 3) from a mother in Bethlehem when He had already been “going forth” from everlasting?
Then, consider also the wondrous prophecy of the virgin birth, “which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet [that is, in Isa. 7:14] saying,” as proclaimed by the angel in Matthew 1:23:
Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call His name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.
God himself — “with us” — in the guise of a virgin-born child! How can such things be?
God himself had told Moses: “There shall no man see me, and live” (Exod. 33:20). Similarly, the apostle Paul spoke of God as “dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto; whom no man hath seen, nor can see” (1 Tim. 6:16).
Indeed, the very concept of an everlasting, omnipotent God who created the mighty universe seems impossible to grasp by mere mortals, especially by those astronomers and cosmologists whose whole careers are spent in studying the universe and trying to understand its origin and nature. Surveys have shown that only a very small percentage of scientists in these fields are active in any kind of church. Their very purpose in life seems to be to try to explain not only the presumed evolution of the universe, but even its very existence, without God! The big-bang theory, with its initial period of supposed “inflation,” increasingly involves the assumption (at least by those who think about origins at all) that our universe simply evolved out of nothing, by means of a “quantum fluctuation in the primeval state of nothingness,” or some such strange notion.
Such explanations are considered by secular scientists to be preferable to believing that “in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). While it is true that one cannot prove that God created, neither can anyone prove that the universe created itself. At least the concept of Almighty God as Creator presents a reasonable First Cause, able to account for the complex of myriad effects that comprise the cosmos, whereas the assumed primeval nothingness explains nothing! Creationists, therefore, have a reasonable faith, based on good evidence, whereas cosmic evolutionists have a highly credulous faith, based on the omnipotence of “nothing.”
It may, indeed, be true that we cannot actually “see” God, for He is “the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God” (1 Tim. 1:17). Christ himself said that “no man hath seen God at any time” (John 1:18). And to those in this scientific age who stress that the scientific method requires “observability,” this may seem to be a problem.
But the fact is that God has been seen by men! Enoch and Noah both “walked with God” (Gen. 5:24; 6:9), and “the Lord appeared unto Abram” (Gen. 12:7; 17:1; 18:1), as well as Isaac (Gen. 26:2). Also, Jacob testified: “I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved” (Gen. 32:30).
Scripture also says that Moses was a man “whom the Lord knew face to face” (Deut. 34:10). During the period of the conquest and the judges, there were several occasions when “the angel of the Lord” appeared to men and was recognized as the Lord himself (note the case of Gideon and also that of the parents of Samson, for example — Judges 6:22; 13:21–22). The patriarch Job could say, after deliverance from his sufferings: “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee” (Job 42:5).
Much later, the great prophet Isaiah testified: “I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up” (Isa. 6:1). Ezekiel also saw that “upon the likeness of the throne was the likeness as the appearance of a man upon it. . . . This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord” (Ezek. 1:26–28).
Still other occasions are recorded in the Old Testament when the Lord appeared to men, either in a vision or “face to face,” as well as even more times when He “spoke” audibly to men. As would be expected, numerous skeptics throughout the centuries have said that this was one of the Bible’s “contradictions.” In many places, they say, the Bible says that no man can see God, whereas in other places it says that many men did see God.
This superficial discrepancy, of course, is beautifully resolved by the wonderful truth of the triune godhead, and was specifically clarified by the Lord Jesus Christ, when He said:
No man hath seen God at any time: the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him (John 1:18).
That is to say, whenever the omnipresent, invisible God has deigned to appear to men, He has done so in the person of His eternal Son, who is “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15).
Since the Son is, indeed, “in the form of God . . . equal with God” (Phil. 2:6), He too is omnipotent and can surely assume the form of an angel or of a man or even of a burning bush (note Exod. 3:2–6), when He so wills. Thus, men have on occasion in the past actually seen God. It was not God in His essential triune glory, of course, but, rather, God declared and manifested as God the eternal Son, forever “in the bosom of the Father” (John 1:18), yet eternally “going forth” (Mic. 5:2) to manifest the godhead.
All such appearances of God to men were what are called “theophanies,” or pre-incarnate appearances of Christ. The English word “theophany” is from two Greek words meaning “God appearing,” and