The two essential facts about the character of God are his holiness and his love.  His holiness is beyond our power, not merely to understand, but even to imagine; for it is complete separateness from the faintest shadow of evil such as we can never attain to in this life.  For even when we are not committing actual sin in thought, word or deed, we have an inner disposition towards it.

St John says that “…God is light and in him there is no darkness at all” (NRSV, 1 John 1:5) and those who have seen the vision of God in this life have been conscious, above anything else, of light – blinding in its streaming purity.

But to mortals and sinners like ourselves such a sight would be too dazzling for us to see anything except our own failings and defects.  We need to have the nature and being of God screened by human flesh and lived out in a human life; and all that we have in the Person and life of Our Lord Jesus Christ, God the Son made man.