My son asked me the other day what God looks like. The easy answer of course is to say that God doesn't exist or that he can't be seen. Given the fact that I never like to live within politically correct points of view (this in not what the Bible teaches despite the opinions of apologists) I start to think about the question (it beats dwelling endlessly on the question of why superheroes never age and the like).
So what does the Bible really teach?
The proper starting point of course is Exodus chapter 24 which shuts up all the idiotic claims that God can't be seen with the human eye:
Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and the seventy elders of Israel went up and saw the God of Israel. Under his feet was something like a pavement made of lapis lazuli, as bright blue as the sky. But God did not raise his hand against these leaders of the Israelites; they saw God, and they ate and drank.
The Hebrew here is impossible to misunderstand - Moses and the elders saw God with their own eyes (and he looked like he was made of sapphire). The only way that Marqe the Samaritan gets around this is to say that this wasn't the highest God but his lieutenant 'the Glory' (= kavodah):
All that is above and below is obedient to the Glory ... a sapphire stone is a throne for the Glory
There are three other places where Marqe infers that Moses and the Israelites were in the presence of the Glory in spite of what the actual words of the Pentateuch says and of course everyone else who has ever studied these words fails to see what I get from this switch - Marqe was already proto-Marcionite. For when you turn this around, he is implying that there was a higher god than the God revealed in the Torah ...
