Seeing and knowing God
Some have conflated knowing1 the Lord with seeing him. While seeing someone is a component of knowing them, it by no means is the same as knowing them or even the most important part. Anyone who has cultivated a real friendship with someone they’ve only met online, and never seen in person, can attest that it is possible to know a great deal about what someone is like without ever seeing them in person. Meanwhile, you can see someone many times without even knowing their name, such as a person at work.
Knowing someone is not a question of knowing what they look like, but knowing what their character is like. To truly know a person requires you to accurately anticipate how they will think, feel, or act in all situations.
There is a broad range of depth of character, ranging from extremely shallow to exceptionally deep. The deeper someone’s character, the harder they are to know. With most people, you can come to understand a great deal about them in a short amount of time. While it is easy to learn the character of a simple person, you cannot know a deep person simply by meeting them.2 As God is the deepest being, it is astonishing that anyone believes they can know him just through meeting him.
How well you know the Lord has little to do with whether you have seen him or not. Our relationship with God is a function of how much of his character we have learned, which is determined by how thoroughly we live according to the portion of his character we already know about. While seeing him is something that has either happened or not, you can know him a lot, a little, or not at all.