Question:
Answer:
You ask an important question. In John 1:18, John proclaims, “No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known” (John 1:18). And God conveys to Moses, “‘But,’ he said, ‘you cannot see my face; for man shall not see me and live’” (Exodus 33:20).
Here, Scripture speaks of seeing God in his divine essence. And yet God divinely accommodates himself to give us a glimpse of his divine personhood. In that light, in the same biblical book and regarding the same relationship between Moses and God, Exodus 24:9-11 should be read as a complement to Exodus 33:20, not a contradiction:
Then Moses and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel went up, and they saw the God of Israel; and there was under his feet as it were a pavement of sapphire stone, like the very heaven for clearness. And he did not lay his hand on the chief men of the people of Israel; they beheld God, and ate and drank.
Thus, Moses and his confreres were privileged to have a more intimate encounter than most had in Old Testament times. Ditto with Job 42:5, in which Job proclaims, “I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee. . . .”
And even more so in New Testament times, beginning with the Incarnation, when God became man in the (divine) person of Jesus Christ, and thus his Mother, foster father Joseph, and the apostles and others were blessed to have intimate, everyday communion with him (John 1:1-3, 14; see CCC 464-69).