PCEA

God is a Spirit

We learned in our last article that only the Scriptures can give us a true knowledge of God. And the Scriptures tell us that God is a Spirit. This is what Jesus told the woman of Samaria as He spoke to her at the well of Sychar: “God is a Spirit”(John 4:24).

That may seem disappointing, because we may think of a spirit as an imperfect being, a being who lacks a body, and so eyes, ears, hands and feet! This is a great mistake. A spirit is the perfect unit of existence. A body is very useful to us in our present mode of existence, but even so, it is sometimes a great hindrance. It restricts us to time and place, and often burdens us with weakness and pain. There are even times when we feel we would like to be rid of our bodies, so cramping and burdensome they have become. It is the spirit of man that speaks like this: the body is a limitation to it, and restricts its powers and movements.

Pure Spirit

God is pure spirit in the sense that He has no physical parts or passions. But there are no restrictions or limitations about Him. He may not have eyes or ears, hands or feet, as we know these bodily members, but He sees and hears, He moves and feels in a much higher way. All His perceptions are immediate and complete. Though the Scriptures speak of God’s eyes going to and fro throughout the whole earth, it just uses human organs to suggest what is much more than human. It means that God has perfect vision, clear, immediate and all-penetrating. Similarly, when Scripture says that God’s hand is not shortened, it just means that His powers are without limit, far-reaching and far-lifting.

But the fact that God is a Spirit places limitations on us in that we cannot see God with our physical sight. Our spirits can deal with Him, and have the sensations that are analogous to sight, hearing and feeling. It stands written more than once that “no man has seen God at any time”, and we shall never see God except through our spiritual faculties.

Infinite Spirit

God is infinite Spirit. There we leave the experience of man far behind. Infinite spirit means that there are no bounds to the exercise of God’s powers. God is by His very nature unlimited. Time, as past or present, does not exist for Him: it is an eternal present. This may be the meaning of His revelation to Moses at the bush as the “I AM”. Similarly, space does not exist for Him. He is everywhere present at one and the same time.

This leads us to say that God is both above and within His creation. This is what we mean by God’s transcendence and His immanence. His transcendence means that God is external to the world, its Creator and Judge, directing, controlling and governing from “the habitation of his holiness”, embracing all things, and acting upon them in countless ways from without.

The immanence of God means that He is within all things, acting from within, from the centre of every atom, and from the innermost springs of life and thought, feeling and will. Our more recent knowledge of the structure of the atom gives point to this intimate relationship of God to all matter, organic and inorganic. “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17). Acts 17 illustrates both the transcendence of God and His immanence: in vv. 24-25 He is seen as the “The God who made the world and everything in it … gives to all mankind life and breath and everything”; and in vv. 27-28 we learn that “He is actually not far from each one of us, for ‘In him we live and move and have our being’”. For other examples of this juxtaposition see Isaiah 57:15 and Psalm 147:3-5.

It remains to be said that since God is infinite Spirit He is in every one of His attributes: the qualities attributed to His nature and character are all infinite. For this reason we cannot exalt one attribute over another, more love, more mercy, more grace than justice, righteousness and truth. As God is all love, so He is all justice; that is what we understand by the infinity of His nature and character.

As God in his relation to space is infinite, so in His relation to time He is eternal, in the sense that His existence had no beginning and can have no end. Thus to call it endless duration is misleading. As the Eternal Present he altogether transcends time: time is only an island in the ocean of eternity!