With respect to the promise that the pure in heart will see God (Matt 5:8), one scholar wrote:
The promise that anyone would ever see God seems strange in the light of other biblical testimony. 1 Jn. 4:12 said that no man had ever seen God. Israelites were warned to stay back from Mt. Sinai, with its smoke and fire, lest they should look and perish (Ex. 19:16-21). Moses was told that no one could see the Lord’s face and live (Ex. 33:20), even though the Lord’s presence would go with his people (Ex. 33:14). Nevertheless, after the commandments had been given, Moses, together with Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, and the seventy elders of Israel went apart from the people and saw the God of Israel (ויראו את אלהי ישׂראל). They saw God and ate and drank (ויחזו את־האלהים ויאכלו וישׁתו, Ex. 24:9-11). This took place at the festival at the top of the mountain covered with a cloud (Ex. 24:15-16). Moses also reminded the Lord that he was seen face to face (עין בעין נראה) and that his cloud stood over his people and that the Lord went before them in a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night (Num. 14:14). Isaiah was in the temple when the place was filled with smoke and he there saw the Lord (ואראה את־אדני, Isa. 6:1). Those who lived in the temple (i.e. the priests) were required to walk blamelessly in certain specified ways (Ps. 15:1-5). He who ascended the hill of the Lord was required to have clean hands and a pure heart (Ps. 24:3-4). Rabbis understood the passage, “Because in a cloud (כי בענן) I will be seen (אראה) on the ark cover” (Lev. 16:2), to refer to the cloud of smoke made by incense offered by the priest on the Day of Atonement when he entered the Holy of Holies. The incense was to be offered in such a way that the priest’s vision there would always be blurred by the smoke lest he “see God” improperly (Sifra 81b; JYoma I, V, 39a-39b; see also Ex. R. 34:1; RH 31a; Mekita Shirata 10:24-43). Philo insisted that even when he entered the holy of holies, the high priest could not see anything (Spec. I.72; cf. Ebr. 136; Gig. 52; Leg. 306). J.Z. Lauterbach, Rabbinic Essays (Cincinnati, 1951), 60-6, said, “It cannot be denied that the primitive notion was that the tabernacle, and later on the temple in Jerusalem, were the residences of God on earth and that the Holy of Holies within the temple was especially the place where He dwelt, and the ark-cover with the two Cherubim being, so to speak, His throne. The Rabbis often sought to suppress or modify these primitive beliefs, or at least, to remove from them the crude anthropomorphic elements, but they were not always successful. These primitive beliefs were retained by the people and echoes of them are found in the Talmud and in the Midrashim.” It seems then, that the experience in which Isaiah saw the Lord in the temple with the smoke and the fire was a situation much like that of the priests offering sacrifice and like that in which Ezekiel saw the likeness of the glory of the Lord in the temple (Ez. 10:1-2). Ezekiel said the throne held one whose appearance was like a man (אדם, 1:26). Both experiences were related to smoky, fiery situations in the temple, somewhat like that at Mt. Sinai when the leaders saw the God of Israel while the mountain was covered in a cloud (Ex. 24:9-16), and also the description of the Lord who was seen in the pillar of cloud [smoke] and fire caused by the burning fire at the tent of meeting (Num. 14:14).
After the wilderness wandering, the place where God could be seen was in the temple and there only by those who had clean hands and pure hearts. In Mt. 5:8, then, those who had pure hearts were promised that they could see God (τον θεον οψονται). In context of the OT promises that were expected to be fulfilled, the beatitude probably meant that those who had pure hearts would live to worship in the temple, where they, like Isaiah and the priests, could see God. (George Wesley Buchanan, The Consequences of the Covenant [Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1970], 74-75 n. 10, emphasis added)
So in the words of Jesus and the theology of the Old and New Testament, not only is there a belief that God is embodied and can be seen (something later Rabbis attempted to subvert), but also a promise that the “pure in heart” will see God, like Isaiah, in a physical temple. If all temple worship were annulled with the death and resurrection of Jesus, such does not make sense, unless temple worship and liturgies were part-and-parcel of the New Covenant as Latter-day Saint theology teaches.
