Why did you stop at verse 14 and did not continue to include verse 18 ? - John 1:18
I tend to be verbose and have to exercise myself to be concise.
Now I'll look at your point about after verse 14.
Doesn't it say that No man has seen God at any time ________
Yes.
And now it is YOUR turn to continue.
No one has ever seen God; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him.
This was was a very bold thing for John to write under divine inspiration. Surely, John knew of instances of
people seeing God in the Hebrew Bible. Now John says we must forget about those seeings of God.
They are ALL superseded by the manifestation of God through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
Seeing God is seeing Jesus walk, eat, sleep, talk, work, be crucified, rise from the dead, ascend to Heaven again.
This seeing of the life of the Jesus transcends, supercedes all the seeings of God recorded in the Old Testament.
In his letter John continues that truth.
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we beheld and our hands handled, concerning the Word of life
(And the life was manifested, and we have seen and testify and report to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was manifested to us);
That which we have seen and heard we report also to you that you also may have fellowship with us, and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ. (1 John 1:1-3)
The uncreated divine Eternal life - the eternal Person is manifested in the total life of the man Jesus - the God-man Jesus.
People saw Jesus. Saw Jesus and lived - please see Exodus 33:20; 1st John 4:12; John 6:46
I appreciate any passages you recommend to me.
If your point is that Jesus could not be God because men saw Him and lived, you underestimate the power, extent, and effectiveness of
of God's redemption.
You will notice that in the Old Testament this power of redemption ALLOWING men to see God and live is PRE-FIGURED in cases.
You should understand that Christ is the centrality and circumference of the whole Bible.
So the seeing and living of say Isaiah when he saw God is a precurser to God's redemption allowing us to approach the infinite holiness, glory,
and righteousness of God. For example -
Then I [Isaiah]
said,
Woe is me, for I am finished! / For I am a man of unclean lips, / And in the midst of a people of unclean lips I dwell; / Yet my eyes have seen the King, Jehovah of hosts.
Then one of the seraphim flew to me with an ember in his hand, which he had taken from the altar with a pair of tongs.
And he touched my mouth with it and said,
Now that this has touched your lips, / Your iniquity is taken away, and your sin is purged. (Isa. 6:5-7)
The same with Jacob, the mother and father of Samson, the 70 elders who accompamied Moses to see God on Mt. Sinai.
You should now consider all these instances to foretell of Christ, Christ, Christ and His efficacious redemption.
Then we must go even further. His full salvation will save us to the uttermost. That is to match Him to be His collective
Bride and Wife- conformed to His image. We shall be like Him for we shall see Him even as He is.
Don't let me get too verbose. So much needs to be written about this.
Plus, according to Psalm 90:2 God has No beginning.
Yes. And the Word who was God became flesh. God the uncreated Creator took up the created man.
Man without contraversy is a created item.
(Gen. 1:26)
So the God-man Jesus Christ is the Creator and the creature.
Do you know what the word
"mingle" means? It means to combine two or more things
so that they remain distinguishable in the combination. In Jesus Christ we see the mingling of God and man.
We discern in Him both the uncreated Creator and the creature - the created human.
I will stop this post here. Your other point is not ignored.
