Part of our knowing God better, is studying about what God is like and attempting to grasp His greatness. A very good place to start is an understanding that God is spirit, meaning that He is not bound by physical matter, nor does He have a physical nature. In John’s Gospel, Jesus says that “God is spirit and must be worshipped in spirit and in truth.” Acts records Paul’s statement that “God does not live in physical temples built by hands.” In a world that often mistakes the metaphoric example for reality, it is important to get the idea that God is other. He is not human, He is not bound by human-type logic or physicality, nor is He destructible like physical matter. He is other.
And yes, the Bible does speak of God’s hands and feet and other physical features, but we must, as Millard Erickson points out, understand these phrases as anthropomorphisms…or attempts to express the unexpressable through human analogies.[1] And, it does not mean that God can’t appear in physical form, but He is not of physical form, as Jesus clearly reaffirms in Luke 24 that a spirit does not have flesh and bones.
Ok, you might be thinking…Brett, why in the world is this so important? Well, here’s why. In biblical times right through to today, the doctrine of God’s spirituality is counter to idolatry, nature worship, and pantheistic thought. God is not restricted by the physical, or by geography, and cannot be contained, controlled, created, or manipulated. It is important to get this doctrine straight, lest we fall into the continued temptation to fit God into our conceptions, such as that of Open Theists like Clark Pinnock…who suggests that God may have a body and limits His foreknowledge.[2] Even further, Mormons, believe that God the Father and the Son have physical bodies, although the Spirit does not. Mormonism would contend that an immaterial body cannot exist.[3] These differences are in stark contrast to biblical Christian teaching and strike at the very core of God’s Sovereign nature.
The God who created you and me is above any other god, above any other idea that we might have of Him, and is the unmoved-mover of all things. He is other. Once we accept that idea, we can begin to recognize His right-ness and His claim on all things. Then, then, we gain a greater appreciation for the grace of His redemption plan through the gospel. Keep listening and checking out more SKOPOS online as we continue discovering more about the one, true, God.
[1] Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), 238.
[2] Ibid, 238.
[3] Ibid, 238. [James E. Tallmadge, A Study of the Articles of Faith, 36th ed. (Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 1957), 48].
