Is God a Gorgon?

"But," He said, "You cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live."
-Exodus 33:20

The title of this entry is a little tongue-in-cheek.  It plays off of my first perception when I read this verse as a kid.  Here, God is telling Moses how He will show the man His glory, and yet not show him His face.  No one can see the face of God and live, I thought.  So, would someone die if they saw the face of God?  Admittedly, the first image that crossed my mind when I pictured a God with a man-killing face was this:

Okay, so obviously, God is not Medusa!  I do not believe that His face is so ugly it would kill a man to look at it.  But what, then, does it mean when He says that no man can look at His face and live?  I've had that thought nagging in the back of my brain for a while now.

The first thing that occurred to me was that God is holy, and He is also very jealous of His holiness.  There are various examples of His jealous protection of His sanctity throughout the Old Testament.  For example, Uzzah was killed when he touched the Ark of the Covenant in 2 Samuel 6.  It wasn't that the Ark had a ten-thousand volt divine anti-theft device running through it, nor was it that the Ark was so horrible that just touching it could kill you: it was the holiness of the Ark being avenged by God.  The Ark was very special to God and was to be transported in a very special way, which God had clearly laid out.  David and his men chose to transport it by oxcart instead, and this violation of its holiness lead to a further violation when Uzzah touched the Ark, which God said not to do.  God was not overreacting to some arbitrary standard, He was protecting His Holiness and the Holiness of His things.  A human parallel might be to think of a woman protecting her decency.  If you pat her rump and you're not her husband, she's liable to slap you across the face...because she's protecting the sanctity of her body.

Certainly the same might hold true for the matter of God's face.  Indeed this seems the most likely situation.  A woman would be disinclined to let a pervert live if she caught him trying to peek in her shower.  How much less would the Holy God of all Creation expose His glorious face to sinful creatures of dust?  It is beneath His dignity to allow such, and anyone trying to "peek" on His glory would surely be killed for the offense.

Yet there is something more to this.  If God's only reason for not letting Moses see His face was all consuming jealousy for His holiness, then why are we encouraged (actually, commanded) to seek God's face (Psalm 27:8)?  I had no answer.  Seeing God's face seemed like a bad thing, and not to mention it being punishable by death.  That's not exactly something I want to seek after!  Also, what of the atonement of Christ?  Had He really made me clean and pure in His eyes if He still couldn't stand to let me look at Him?

These questions rattled around in the back of my brain for a long while, until an unexpected connection caused them to settle.  I mentioned in previous post how I'd been playing this online strategy game called Astro Empires.  It was a persistent multi-player strategy game, meaning that when you log off, your virtual empire is still visible to all the other players online, who can hurt it or help it as they please.  At one point (two or three months ago--I've been procrastinating on writing this post), I became quite involved in the game.  I joined a guild with other players online and made some friends there.  My little empire burgeoned and prospered.  It was an idyllic era--though of course, it was all just a game!  Then, unexpected developments occurred in my real life, not only demanding my attention but also promising good things to come.  Seeing this, I decided to quit Astro Empires.  I wrote farewell messages to my friends, and revealed the secret locations of my best bases and worlds to one of them--willing them to him, in a way--before deleting my account and vanishing from the Astro Empire's universe forever.  This is a little like death, isn't it? I thought.  [It was late at night when I did all this, so you will pardon the odd tack my thoughts took, I hope.]  I decided that, in fact, it was.  I was dying to Astro Empires.  I was leaving it's universe forever, along with the people in it and the "possessions" which I'd had.  But I was not the least bit sad to be "dying" so, for I was going to something greater, more worthy, and with a far greater reward.  If this is what dying is really like, dying and going to Heaven, I thought, then it's not so bad.  When my time comes, I imagine I will willingly let go and die to this world, so that I might live with my God in the next.

This brought me to a new way of looking at that verse.  I can point to no scripture which backs it up.  It is not so much an interpretation as a thought, so take it for what it's worth!  But what if God really wanted us to seek His face, but just wasn't willing to show it to us yet--not simply out of holy jealousy, but also because He knows what effect it would have on us?  What if God in His fully glory was such an overwhelmingly beautiful sight that, were a man to catch sight of Him, he would immediately die?  That is, he would instantly recognize God as the greatest, most worthy, and most rewarding thing in the universe--more rewarding, more worthwhile, and greater than life and the universe themselves--, and would thereby immediately resign all the trappings of this life in hope of gaining life with Him?  And would that not be Heaven if that hope was answered?  Would it not be Hell to have it denied?  Perhaps this is what it means to have a God whose face we can--as yet--not see.