Matthew 5:8 says, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." Here, seeing God is a great reward in the kingdom. According to the clear view in the New Testament, to see God is to receive God into us. If seeing God is merely an objective seeing of God and nothing else, that means very little. But seeing God is to receive God, and this means that God comes into us as our element to renew us, to transform us, because God's coming in adds the divine element into our being. This divine element works on us and in us to renew us, discharging all our old element. Eventually, our entire being becomes new. This is transformation.
Second Corinthians 3:18 says, "We all with unveiled face, beholding and reflecting like a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord Spirit." First we behold God, that is, see God; then we reflect Him and are transformed. In our seeing God we are being transformed into His glorious image, from one degree of glory to another. This is from the Lord Spirit.
The God whom Job saw was also the Spirit, but at that time God was still in His original state. God had His divine element with His divine attributes, but He did not have anything related to incarnation, humanity, and human living. According to 2 Corinthians 3:18, the God whom we are looking at today is different, for He is much richer in His ingredients. Hence, the more we look at Him, the more we receive His ingredients into our being as our inner supply to work on us, to discharge the old, and to make us new. This is to transform us into God's image.
Seeing God should issue in the transformation of our being into God's image. I do not believe Job had such a realization when he saw God. It is a fact that his sufferings did issue in one thing—he saw God. It is hard to say, however, in what way Job saw God, whether in a physical way or in the way of a spiritual revelation.
Our way of looking at God today is altogether a matter in the spirit. The God whom we may look at is the consummated Spirit, and we can look at Him in our spirit. Sometimes we are too busy or too careless to take the opportunity to look at the Lord. In our morning watch, even if only for fifteen or twenty minutes, we have time to be with the Lord, time to remain in the Spirit. At such a time we may pray-read His word, talk to Him, or pray to Him with short prayers. Then we will have the sense that we are receiving something of God's element, that we are absorbing the riches of God into our being. In this way we are under the divine transformation day by day.
Our Christian life is a life not of changing outwardly but of being transformed from within by having the divine element added into our inner being to replace our old element. This is altogether by our looking at the processed and consummated God, who is the all-inclusive Spirit.
By reading Job's final word in chapter thirty, we can realize that Job and his friends were walking on the way of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They were not in the realm of endeavoring to see God in order to learn of Him and especially to receive Him so that they could be transformed with His element and essence to be made the same as God in life and in nature. We all need to see a clear comparison between the way taken by Job and his friends and the way revealed in the New Testament.