Seeing God

Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they will see God.

That’s an amazing promise, seeing God. People in Jesus time thought that seeing God’s face was impossible to do, if they wanted to live. There’s stories about figures who cover their faces as God approaches and only watch God after he passes them. The whole point of the innermost portions of the temple was that their was only one person who was any where near worthy enough to visit God personally. Moses is described as literally glowing after his meetings with God. He’s so ashamed of the glow going away that he covers his face.
Jesus promise that the requirement to see God is simply that we be pure of heart is deceptive. I wonder if it initially would have seemed ludicriously easy. Today somebody might say “Just work this one day and I will give you a million dollars for this one day’s work.”
Of course, being pure of heart is much more difficult than it sounds. Jesus will later make that clear. But it was still revolutionary: no purification ceromonies, no journeys to mountain tops or the inner portions of temples, no carrying around an ark. Just purity of heart.

People throw this idea around: that God can hates sin and can not expose himself to it, that his very nature is the opposite of sin, and this is why we must purified through Jesus.
I don’t exactly disagree, but I think it’s an odd way to put things. It makes God sound like Superman, incredibly powerful yet possessed of this kryptonite-like achiles heel.
Expressing a similiar idea in this way makes it clear that we’ve got the achiles heel, not God. Sin (being unpure) is kryptonite to us, not God. It clouds our heart and makes us unable to see our creator… It’s not some after-the-fact punishment that God levied against us; it’s simply a result of our condition.
Is there a connection between being unpure, and entitlement? Thinking we are entitled to others bodies is a way to view sexual impurity. As for the other form of impurity: if we are serving because we want everybody to know how kind we are, we are in some sense acting entitled to people’s praise.
Maybe the result of sexual impurity is we don’t see God’s hand in arranging our marriage, in the devotion and affection of our spouse. By serving out of a need to be popular, we stop looking for God among the poor and opressed, we don’t see him there because we’re so busy basking in everyone’s praise.