The God Who Sees
Hagar named Him El Roi–the God who sees me–when she was fleeing through the wilderness, pregnant and abandoned, with nowhere to go and no one looking for her (Genesis 16:13). She was a slave, an Egyptian, a woman, a surrogate who had served her purpose and become inconvenient. Every social category she occupied rendered her invisible to the people who should have noticed her distress.
But God saw her.
There is a difference between being seen and being watched, between attention and surveillance, though we often confuse the two. The Psalmist writes that God searches and knows us, that He discerns our thoughts from afar, that there is nowhere we can go to escape His presence (Psalm 139). This sounds comforting in worship songs but feels oppressive when you’re trying to hide. Because mostly, when I think about God seeing me, I think about God seeing my failures. The moments I should have been patient and wasn’t. The times I chose comfort over courage. The ways I have been small and petty and self-protective when I could have been generous.
….The gulf between who I present myself to be and who I actually am when no one is looking.
The Hebrew word for “know” that appears throughout the Old Testament, yada, implies intimate, experiential knowledge, not just intellectual awareness. God doesn’t simply observe our behavior from a distance; He knows us the way you know someone you have lived with, loved, fought with, reconciled with. He knows us the way you know your own body, your own thoughts, your own patterns.
This should be terrifying. And sometimes it is. But there’s something in the grammar of this seeing that complicates the surveillance narrative.
When Scripture talks about God seeing, it often uses verbs that imply not just observation but response, not just noticing but caring about what is noticed. God saw the Israelites’ misery in Egypt, and the seeing prompted action (Exodus 2:25). God saw Leah’s unloved status, and the seeing resulted in blessing (Genesis 29:31). The seeing is never passive; it always leads somewhere.
Here’s what troubles me most about being seen by God: I cannot reconcile how a perfect, holy God looks at me…at any of us…and sees something worth preserving. Not just tolerating, not just forgiving, but actually delighting in. Scripture insists that God delights in His people, that He rejoices over us with singing (Zephaniah 3:17), that we are precious in His sight (Isaiah 43:4). These are not verses about God’s begrudging acceptance of flawed creatures but about His actual pleasure in our existence.
The theological problem is this: How does perfection look at imperfection and see beauty?
How does holiness encounter sin and respond with anything other than rejection? The answer Christianity gives is substitutionary atonement: that God can see us as righteous because Christ’s righteousness has been credited to our account, that our sin has been dealt with through the cross so God no longer sees it when He looks at us. This is good theology. It is also, if I’m honest, insufficient to explain the specific texture of divine delight that appears throughout Scripture.
God seems to have looked at people with pleasure before the cross… before the theological mechanics of atonement were in place.
He looked at David, a man after His own heart, who was also an adulterer and murderer. He looked at Abraham, counted him as righteous, even though Abraham spent significant portions of his life lying about his wife and taking matters into his own hands when he got tired of waiting for promises to materialize. God looked at Jacob…Jacob the deceiver, Jacob who manipulated his way into a blessing that should have been his brother’s…and not only saw him but wrestled with him, renamed him, made him the father of the twelve tribes (Genesis 32:22-32). The wrestling itself is significant: God engaged with Jacob not after he had become holy but while he was still fundamentally himself, flawed and cunning and desperate.
God doesn’t just see humanity from heaven: The Word becomes flesh and dwells among us (John 1:14), which means God experiences what it is to have a body that gets tired, hungry, frustrated. He experiences what it is to be misunderstood, betrayed, abandoned. When Jesus looks at people, He sees them with eyes that have experienced human limitation. He looks at the woman caught in adultery and sees not just her sin but her terror, her humiliation, the systems that brought her to this moment while the man she sinned with walks away unnamed (John 8:1-11). He looks at the Samaritan woman at the well and sees not just her checkered relational history but her thirst for something more than another husband, another attempt at being known (John 4:1-42).
The Greek verb blepo–to see, to look–appears throughout the Gospels, but Jesus often uses a different verb: horao, which implies not just seeing but perceiving, understanding. He sees beyond the surface to what’s actually happening beneath. When He looks at the rich young ruler, Scripture says He loves him (Mark 10:21): present tense, active voice, even as the man turns away because the cost of discipleship is too high.
This is what undoes me about being seen by God: that the seeing includes both complete knowledge of my failures and genuine affection anyway. Not affection despite knowing me but somehow affection that exists alongside the knowing, that isn’t diminished by it.
On Being Seen by Others
I suspect my craving to be seen by other people is a distorted echo of the deeper need to be seen by God, the way hunger for counterfeit intimacy echoes the hunger for the real thing.
We spend enormous energy trying to be visible to others: crafting social media presence, seeking validation through achievement, building identities that we hope will make us noticeable, memorable, worth paying attention to. We hunger for someone to look at us and see not just the surface but the complexity beneath, to know us fully and remain anyway. But human seeing is always partial, always filtered through the seer’s own needs and limitations and biases. The people I most want to see me are also the people least capable of seeing me clearly, because they’re looking for something from me—usefulness, entertainment, affirmation of their own worth. Even the best human seeing is transactional in ways we don’t want to admit.
This is why being seen by others is never sufficient: We keep seeking it, keep arranging ourselves to be more visible, more interesting, more valuable. But human attention is finite and conditional, and the moment we stop being useful or entertaining or convenient, the seeing stops.
God’s seeing is different not just in degree but in kind. He sees without needing anything from us, without being limited by His own wounds or insecurities or agenda. His seeing is not transactional. It does not depend on our performance or our usefulness or our ability to be interesting enough to hold His attention.
I keep returning to this question: How does a perfect God look at something flawed and see beauty?
Maybe the answer is that God sees us the way an artist sees a work in progress. Not as finished products to be judged but as beings in process, becoming something we are not yet. But this feels too neat, too easy, and doesn’t account for the specificity of affection that appears in Scripture. Or maybe God sees us the way you see someone you love: aware of their flaws but not defined by them, able to hold both their failures and their fundamental goodness in the same glance. But this seems to reduce God to human categories of love, to suggest that divine affection works the same way human affection does, just on a larger scale.
Here’s what I think might be closer to the truth:
God sees us not primarily as sinners who occasionally do good things, but as image-bearers who are broken. The fundamental category is not sin but imago Dei…the image of God stamped into our being at creation, marred but not erased by the fall. When God looks at me, He sees the reflection of Himself, however distorted.
He sees creativity because He is creative. He sees the capacity for love because He is love. He sees justice and mercy and beauty and truth not because I have generated these things independently but because they are echoes of His own nature, planted in me by virtue of being made in His image.
The sin is real. The brokenness is undeniable. But it is not the primary reality. The primary reality is that we bear His image, and when He looks at us He sees something of Himself looking back, however dimly. This is why He can delight in us even while being fully aware of our failures. Not because He overlooks the sin but because He sees something more fundamental than the sin, something that the sin has damaged but not destroyed.
What I Think All This Means
Hagar’s encounter with El Roi happens at a spring, which she names Beer-lahai-roi: the well of the Living One who sees me. She returns to this well later in her story, when she is again in the wilderness, again facing impossible circumstances (Genesis 21:14-19). The well becomes a landmark, a place she can return to, a reminder that once God saw her and that seeing changed everything.
I think this is what it means to be seen by God: not a one-time experience of being noticed but an ongoing reality that we return to when we need to remember we are not invisible, not forgotten, not abandoned even when everything feels like abandonment.
To be seen by God means to be known completely–every failure, every small victory, every moment of courage and every moment of cowardice–and to be loved anyway. Not loved despite being known but loved in the fullness of being known, which is different.
It means that when I am most convinced of my own worthlessness, most certain that I have disqualified myself from divine attention through repeated failure, there is a God who sees me the way He saw Hagar: not primarily as someone who failed or sinned or fell short, but as someone who matters, whose pain is worth noticing, whose life is worth preserving.
This year I have felt unseen by the people I thought would notice, unappreciated by those I served, invisible in my suffering. But El Roi sees. He sees not just my failures but my faithfulness, however flawed. He sees not just my sin but my image-bearing, however broken. He sees me showing up for my son, trying to be brave in a courtroom where I had no business representing myself. He sees the exhaustion and the doubt and the moments when I wonder if any of it matters.
And somehow…inexplicably, unreasonably…He looks at all of it and sees something worth preserving, worth calling good, worth loving.
Maybe this is grace: not that God overlooks our flaws but that He sees them fully and chooses to see more. That His seeing includes both the brokenness and the beauty, both the sin and the image, both the failure and the faithfulness. That He looks at us the way He looked at Hagar: not as problems to be solved but as people who matter, who are worth the attention of the God who sees everything and chooses to look at us anyway.
This is what I am learning to trust: that when I feel most unseen, most invisible in my suffering and my service and my ordinary faithfulness, there is still El Roi. The God who sees me. The God who has always seen me. The God who will not look away.
