This paper explores the theme of the vision of God in the latter prophetic visions of the throne room and temple and connects these to the beatific vision. Much of the contemporary scholarship has ignored or at least neglected the connection between the beatific vision and the prophetic visions in the latter prophets. This oversight is understandable in light of the general disfavor that biblical studies has had in using dogmatic categories placed “over” or read upon the biblical text. But there are good biblical-theological reasons for seeing these visions as proleptic and typological anchors pointing forward to the day that we would all see God (Rev 22:4). This paper makes that case. These theophanic visions, most often involving the angel of the Lord associated with the temple and/or throne, point back to Moses’s sight of God in the fire and on the mountain (especially Exodus 3, 24, and 33) and point forward to the day where God would be gazed upon by his people in full.
This paper develops in three parts: it begins by focusing on specific aspects of the visions of God in Ezekiel 1, 7, 10-11 and Isaiah 6, it then briefly connects these to the divine appearances of the angel of the Lord in Exodus 24 and 33-34, and finally it shows how passages such as 1 John 2 and Revelation 22 are the eschatological fulfillment of them. The paper argues that the visions in the latter prophets are canonically intended to be both the fulfillment of the Mosaic theophanies as well as typological of what later Christians have termed the beatific vision: that end time vision of God wherein we see God. Definitions and preliminary discussion about the state of scholarship on this subject will be provided throughout.