Introduction
One of the reasons Jesus came to earth is so that we can know what God looks like. Jesus is God, reveals God to us, and brings us to Him. It is only through Jesus that we get to see the face of God and live.
What does God look like according to the Bible?
In the Bible God is first described as spirit and doesn’t have a physical body like we humans do. John 4.24 tells us that “God is spirit.”
Since God created the universe, that also means He’s not made up of the same stuff that He created. So God being spirit means He’s not made of matter.
But just because He exists differently than we do doesn’t make Him any less real or any less personal. God is more than “energy” and is more than a personification of the universe. He often describes Himself as a loving father. One example is from Psalm 68:5, where God is described as “a father to the fatherless”. There is a personal element here that mere energy or the universe itself doesn’t have.
Why is it hard to describe God?
There is an obvious mystery here. Why is it so hard to describe God? One of the reasons for this is that we often use comparison to help understand new things.
Imagine you are travelling to a different country with a different language and culture. You find a restaurant and sit down and attempt to read the menu. You see some items offered that you haven’t had before. You ask the server about it, “what’s it like?” They might respond, “It’s like chicken, but more fatty, slightly more gamey.” Then you’d have a pretty good idea of what to expect.
But imagine you’ve never had chicken before. You wouldn’t have anything to compare. You’d just have to try it and see what it was like, on its own terms.
This is similar to describing God. God isn’t a “really good” version of human beings. And we certainly are not gods. Describing something where we have no comparison is a difficult task!
It’s a bit like trying to describe what the colour blue is to a blind person. How would you even start? It’s a difficult task. How would you describe God?
In the famous Sistene chapel painting, Michaelangelo depicts God as an old man with a grey, flowing beard - this is likely the origin of modern culture’s understanding of what God looks like.
How is God described in the Bible?
That’s why the Bible has many ways of describing God, of using metaphors to talk about who He is, what He’s like.
Psalm 79.11 talks about God having a “strong arm” to defend those who have suffered injustice. Now we just saw how God is spirit, how can He have an arm?
Genesis 6.8 says that Noah found favour in the “eyes of the Lord”. How can He have eyes if He is spirit?
Isaiah 40.11 speaks about how God carries His people “close to His heart”. So does He have organs with blood pumping through arteries and veins?
These are all examples of using what we know to describe a God beyond our experience. It’s called anthropomorphism. These are not attempts to describe God physically, but to describe His being. Who He really is.
Throughout the Bible, God is described as good, as powerful, and present with us.
Is God male or female?
If God is spirit, that means He is without gender, unlike human brings. God created gender, as Genesis 1.27 teaches: “male and female He created them.”
God is most often described using masculine pronouns by us and by Himself. There are also a few times where there are feminine pronouns used as well. But, like with God’s eyes or His arm, these are metaphors for His being, not His physical body.
Christians often use male pronouns for God because that’s how He describes Himself to us, not because He’s male or female.
What colour was God in the Bible?
This is also helpful with regard to what colour God is. If He is Spirit, He doesn’t have skin that get be pigmented. Because He doesn’t have skin at all!
We bring up Jesus’ appearance later, but given where He was born, He was likely darker-skinned with darker features. We can at least say with at least significant certainty that He wasn’t white, unlike many paintings and illustrations!
What is God's appearance?
There are times in the Bible when God makes His appearance known. The theological term is theophany.
So, what does God look like during these appearances?
In Genesis 18, God appears as three men to Abraham. We’re not told much about these three men, but Abraham recognised immediately that this was some kind of appearance of God.
In Genesis 32, Jacob spent the night wrestling a man that was an appearance of God. What must that have been like! During this divine wrestling match, the man touched Jacob’s hip and Jacob had a limp for the rest of His life.
In Exodus 3, God spoke to Moses through a burning bush. In Exodus 13, God showed Himself to be a pillar of cloud and fire, Isaiah in Isaiah 6 saw God as a King with His robe filling the very large temple.
These are all very strange stories, but isn’t this what we would expect? If God is completely different from us, when He shows aspects of Himself to us, it would be weird.
There are places where God is described as mundane and not especially attractive. In all the places where Jesus is described, be it the New Testament or the Old Testament, Jesus is described as an average person.
Has a person ever seen God?
There are places in the Old Testament where people have seen God. In Exodus 24.10, we’re told that the leaders of Israel “saw the God of Israel”.
Of these, probably the most famous story is when Moses asks to see God in Exodus 33. In verse 20 God tells Moses that He must not see His face, “for no one may see me and live.” Moses is able to see a part of God.
The Bible does speak of every human seeing God at the end of their life. In Revelation 22, we read that we will “see His face.” Now, this is something that humans have feared, and we are guaranteed to be in front of God, to see Him and see His face.
Can I see God's face?
Why this fear of seeing God’s face? Why is God’s face something that we can’t seem to bear? And what does it mean for God, who is spirit, to have a face to look at to begin with?
Let’s first acknowledge the mystery. We won’t be able to have all the information we need to make have comprehensive knowledge about God. But we don’t have to know everything in order to know some things. And it turns out, the “some things” that we can know are more than enough to keep us busy for millennia!
There is something about the face of God that gets to His innermost being. It’s similar to when we look at each other in the eyes. To gaze at someone’s face and for them to gaze back is a wildly personal and intimate thing.
To be close to God requires the same kind of perfectness, holiness, and goodness that God Himself has. To not have those qualities leads to death. God’s goodness is so powerful that to be in His close presence without that same goodness leads to death.
It’s like the surface of the sun. If a human was to approach it, we would get burned up. If another sun came near our own sun, the results would be different.
We will all see God’s face. For some, this is something to look forward to, for others, something to fear.
But there are many, many stories of people seeing the face of God and not getting burned up. These are the stories we have of Jesus of Nazareth, especially as told in the gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
What did Jesus look like?
Many, many years before Jesus was born, his physical body was described in Isaiah 53.2: “He [Jesus] had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him."
The son of God was actually an average-looking guy. Given the place where He was born, He likely has dark features (very unlike a blond-haired, blue-eyed, fair-skinned images of Jesus out there!).
More important than His physical features is who He is. Hebrew 1.3 says that Jesus Christ is the “exact representation” of God’s being. In other words, Jesus is the perfect image of God. The first chapter of John’s gospel tells us that Jesus is eternal, is God, and has come into our world as one of us to give us the light of life.
The Bible says in John 1.18: “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.” So nobody has seen God, the Father, but Jesus, who is God, makes Him known.
One of the reasons Jesus came to earth was for us to see God. Without Jesus, being close to God means we get destroyed, burned up, and it ends in death. But Jesus, God Himself, has come to bring us to the Father. So that we not only can see the image of God in Christ face-to-face but the Father Himself. And if we are with Jesus, we get to see God’s face and not die, but live. We get to live because Jesus has the light of life.
Conclusion
So we can’t know everything about what God looks like, but He has given us all we need in order to know Him. The Bible makes it clear that God is spirit and is personal. We learn from the Bible that to look on God’s face can be a horrible or a delightful thing. Through Jesus Christ we get to be able to know God, to see Him as a delight, and to look forward to the day when we will see Him face to face.