Answering your child's questions: What does God look like?

Once upon a time, I was helping my 5-year-old brush her teeth, and she asked, “Does God have teeth?” 

“What do you think?” I replied, intrigued. 

“I think he does,” she said matter-of-factly. Then she spat, wiped, and went off to her bedroom. 

Since no one has ever seen God (John 1:18), how would you answer that question? 

So what does God look like? 

The Bible talks about God walking (Genesis 3:8), God seeing (Genesis 16:13), God listening with his ear (Isaiah 37:17), God creating with his hands (Isaiah 29:23), and winning victory with his arm (Psalm 98:1). 

Notice how descriptive these Bible verses are—the focus is less on God’s looks and more on his character: God is with us, God is Creator, God is powerful, etc. 

Are they just metaphors? Could God look more like a sunset than a human? 

What about the times in the Bible when people saw God—like when Moses saw God’s back as he passed by on the mountaintop (Exodus 33:18–23)? Or the fourth man in the fire with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego (Daniel 3:25)? Most would say that those men (and Elijah and Isaiah, who had similar experiences) actually saw God the Son in that moment—not God the Father. An early visit from Jesus before He was born. 

But then it gets a little confusing because when God passed Moses by on the mountain, he told Moses that “no one shall see my face and live.” Yet plenty of people saw the face of Jesus and lived. So what face was he talking about? Does God the Father have a face other than the human face of Jesus? 

It’s reasonable to assume that when God made us in his image and likeness (Genesis 1:26), that meant both looks and personality. The words image and likeness are two completely different words in the original Hebrew, and while one of them does indeed mean inner nature, the other is the root word for our modern word photograph—meaning the way something looks on the outside. 

Did Jesus already have a shape with arms, legs, and a face even before he was born as a human, as suggested by all the early visits from him in the Old Testament? 

Perhaps. Or perhaps that’s not the point.