Exodus 33:20-23 And he said, You can not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.… If God had revealed all His glory — if He had not put the shadow of His hand upon Moses, if He had not revealed merely His skirts, as it were, as He passed by — Moses would have been overwhelmed. And this explains to you what is often said in Scripture, "No man can see God and live," — not because God would destroy the man, but because the glory would be so intense that it would overwhelm him. Moral grandeur may be overpowering, and we learn in history that there have been cases where mental emotion has struck dead the physical economy. A celebrated American astronomer was watching the transit of Venus over the sun's disk; he believed that that transit would take place at a specified moment; and when he saw the shadow of the planet appear on the disk of the sun, such was his excitement or gratification, that he fainted away from excess of joy. Sir Isaac Newton was so overcome by the sense of the magnitude of his discoveries, or of the extent of what he saw in consequence of the great principle he had laid down, that from excess of feeling he was unable to carry out his own grand calculations, and others had to do it for him. Now, if excess of knowledge, of joy, or prosperity, have these powerful effects upon the human frame, we can conceive that too grand an apocalypse of God would be unbearable now; just as the eyeball would be blinded by excess of light. But you can conceive what a splendour and majesty we shall behold when we see God, not through a glass darkly — the smoked glass or lens through which we look at great brightness — but we shall see Him face to face. And what a change will have passed upon us when we can bear to look upon Deity and not shrink! (J. Cumming, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: And he said, Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.WEB: He said, "You cannot see my face, for man may not see me and live." |
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