S4 E3: God is Spirit

Season 4 of Spirit-Led Hope is covering the Doctrine of God, or theology, from a Spirit-led perspective. In this episode, Glenn begins to discuss the nature of God, with an emphasis that God is spirit. Glenn points out our limitations in fully understanding God, and how the human spirit helps us to understand God in addition to our intellect.

This episode has a transcript. If your podcast player does not support transcripts, please go to the Transcripts section of https://spiritledhope.com/ . These transcripts have been edited for accuracy and are typically of higher quality than those produced automatically by many podcast apps.

Season 4 is part of a long term goal to study systematic theology from a Spirit-led perspective. If you want to know more about systematic theology, or expand your study, Glenn is using the following text as a helpful framework to make sure the main topics are covered:  Foundations of Pentecostal Theology, by Guy P. Duffield and Nathaniel M. Van Cleave.  The book is published by Foursquare Media and Glenn is using the Second Edition published in 2016.      

Transcript

S4 E3 TRANSCRIPT 

GOD IS SPIRIT

INTRODUCTION

Hello everyone and welcome to Spirit-Led Hope. My name is Glenn Erichsen, and in this episode, we are looking at:

     GOD IS SPIRIT

Over the next several episodes, we are going to humbly take on a task that can never be fully accomplished. We are going to try and understand the nature of God, and what God is like. 

In my youth, I did a lot of cross-country hiking in the Cascade Mountains not far from where I live. In a way, this episode is like the beginning of a cross-country hike in the mountains. Part of our journey will be on trails which are easy to follow. In other places we will encounter unclimbable sheer rock faces. But wherever we go, we will see spectacular views…sometimes up close, and sometimes far in the distance as we seek to know God better.

One of the first challenges we face is to find a way to talk about God. When we look in the Bible, there is no one place that formally lays out a description of God or his nature. What we do see, is that God consistently reveals himself over the totality of Scripture, and then God gives us the fullest revelation possible in Jesus. After the resurrection of Jesus, we then see the New Testament writers, inspired by the Holy Spirit, pointing us to Jesus so we might know God, and not just know about him. But the Old Testament teachings about the nature of God are still valid and important.

In this Season, we are not going to follow the conventional way that scholars like to present God. If you study systematic theology, you will find that scholars like to categorize what the Bible says about God. For example, a very common approach is to list the attributes of God unique to himself, and to separately list those attributes that we share with God. Another typical approach looks at the names of God presented in the Bible. These names and lists of attributes help us to understand the nature and character of God.

Over the course of the next several episodes, we will look at those things, but not in such a structured approach. As a reminder, I am using the book, “Foundations of Pentecostal Theology,” by Duffield and Van Cleave as a doctrinal foundation, but I will deviate from the method of presentation they use. I will also be adding additional material not found in that book.

And this seems, at least to me, natural to do, because we are looking at the Doctrine of God from a Spirit-led perspective, and we are learning in podcast-sized pieces. Both of these affect the structure of our approach. Because I produce one episode at a time without the foreknowledge of upcoming episodes, I am interested to see how this all works. You can let me know what you think by sending me comments. I suspect this Season may end up looking more like the A.W. Tozer book, “The Knowledge of the Holy.” A.W. Tozer has been an important influence in my life, and that book “The Knowledge of the Holy” is another useful resource for you if you want to deepen your relationship with God.

GOD IS SPIRIT

Well, let us get into the topic for this episode and look at “God is Spirit.” And right away, we run into one of those unclimbable cliffs because the Bible does not define for us what “spirit” is. And yet, Scripture does tell us that God is spirit. When Jesus was talking to the Samaritan woman at the well, he said:

“But an hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and in truth. Yes, the Father wants such people to worship him. “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in Spirit and in truth.”

John 4:23-24 CSB

Jesus also emphasized the aspect of spirit when he talked to Nicodemus. Nicodemus was asking Jesus some questions and Jesus said:

“Truly I tell you, unless someone is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” “How can anyone be born when he is old? ” Nicodemus asked him. “Can he enter his mother’s womb a second time and be born? ” Jesus answered, “Truly I tell you, unless someone is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. Whatever is born of the flesh is flesh, and whatever is born of the Spirit is spirit.”

John 3:3-6 CSB

And, of course, that is leading up to the very well-known John 3:16.

It is from verses like these that we understand a relationship with God is a spiritual one. God created us with a human spirit, and it is our spirit which is somehow joined with the Holy Spirit when we place our faith and trust in Jesus.

But none of that tells us what God’s nature is when we say he is spirit. What we are often forced to do is to say what spirit is not.

For example, when we say that God is spirit, we mean that God is eternal, he is invisible, and he is not limited to anything physical. He is not bound by a physical body, or even limited to what we understand as space and time. And this is beyond our full comprehension, because we do have physical bodies which do reside in space and time. It is very difficult for us to think outside of the space and time framework because our brains are part of it.

So, we do the best we can, and we see this even in the way the Holy Spirit is described in Scripture. One of the common words for the Holy Spirit used in Old Testament Hebrew is the word for breath or wind. In New Testament Greek we see the same thing.

For us, the wind or our breath is something invisible that seems to have no form or physical structure. But we can see that things are blown around by the wind often with great power. So the wind, or our breath, seem to give us a workable idea of what spirit is. Of course, we know that wind is made up of physical air molecules, and we can see our breath when it is cold out. But wind and breath still give us a helpful way to think about spirit.

And that is how it is going to be throughout the Bible. There will be expressions used that give us an idea of what God is like, but they will never fully capture the true nature of God. 

When it comes to “God is spirit,” we also encounter some other difficulties. And these stem from Biblical verses which use “anthropomorphisms.” Anthropomorphisms are expressions which describe God in human terms to make him more understandable and relatable. But they are not actually describing God as he is.

For example, Isaiah, in one of his prayers, asked God to see what was going on by opening his eyes and inclining his ears to hear. That does not mean that God has physical eyes and ears. But it is a way that we might pray knowing that God, as spirit, in some way hears and sees us, even if he does not have physical eyes and ears that look and act like ours.

To make things even more complicated for us, is the fact that God, in the Old Testament, occasionally appeared on earth in human form. When God appears in a physical form like this, we call it a theophany. In Genesis, you will see an example of this where God appeared to Abraham.

But if God appeared in physical form, and spirit is non-physical, how does that work? Well, just because God is spirit, that does not mean he is unable to, in some way, present himself to us physically…he is God after all. This is hard for us to think about, but it is not illogical. I think, obviously, the greatest example of God doing this, is the incarnation, where Jesus took on human form to be like us.

In our lifetime, we will never be able to fully understand the mechanism by which Jesus could be fully God and fully human. It is one of the great unknowns in the Christian faith. I like how Paul expresses this to Timothy. He says:

And most certainly, the mystery of godliness is great:

He was manifested in the flesh,

vindicated in the Spirit,

seen by angels,

preached among the nations,

believed on in the world,

taken up in glory.

1 Timothy 3:15 CSB

When we encounter these difficult concepts about God, like God is spirit but he can manifest himself physically, we often try to find some way to reason it out. For example, when I think about God manifesting in physical form, I start thinking about multiple dimensions…and maybe you do too.

My thinking goes something like this…imagine a flat 2-dimensional square sheet of paper. That piece of paper can know nothing about anything above it or below it. As a 2-dimensional object, it is limited to flat.

But now, consider a 3-dimensional cube. That cube can be made by stacking a bunch of 2-dimensional square sheets on top of each other. In other words, a 2-dimensional object is contained within a 3-dimensional object. The lower dimensions are contained in the higher dimensions. This means that part of a 3-dimensional object can be seen in a 2-dimensional world, but a 2-dimensional object can never extend itself to see into the full 3-dimensional world.

And maybe, there is something like that going on with God. Maybe he is multiple dimensions greater than us. He can insert himself into our physical world, but we are unable to extend ourselves into his spiritual world. That makes him invisible to us.

Having ideas like that can be useful in helping us think about God, but they can also be misleading and, in some cases, harmful. They can make us think about God in the wrong way. In the example I just gave, thinking about God as having more dimensions than us, still means that he has the dimensions of time and space. And we have already said that spirit is not bound by time or space. So that example paints an incorrect picture of God, even if it might be a little helpful.

Later in this Season, when we talk about the Trinity, we will see that bad analogies about God can have severe consequences. So, we must be careful whenever we try to simplify God to understand him.

By now you can probably see that if you do not like logic or philosophy, thinking about the nature of God can make your head hurt!

TAKING COMFORT IN THE MYSTERY OF GOD

And you might wonder, why is God so complicated? Why doesn’t he just make it so we can understand him fully? The answer is simple…because we are created beings, we will never have the capacity to understand him as he really is. Never.

If we could understand God fully, we would be God. The Bible makes it clear that we can only understand God so far. And it must be this way if the Creation account is true, and God created us.

When I was younger, I enjoyed reading about Greek mythology. If you read the stories about the Olympians, you will see that gods like Zeus and Hera act like humans. They fight, they have petty jealousies, they have sexual affairs, they are not good gods. It is clear, from the stories about them, that they are fabricated from the minds of humans. You and I would have no difficulty, right now, making up a story about a god or goddess equivalent to the Greek gods. In fact, we could imagine ourselves living as one of the Greek gods. Why? Because the source of the Greek gods is the human mind.

But that is not true about the God of the Bible. He is so far beyond us that we struggle to describe his nature. Here we are in the first episode which talks about God’s nature, and we cannot even fully describe what it means when we read that God is spirit. 

And I am incredibly comforted by this. This inability to fully describe God is one of the indicators to me that he is not a fabricated story. And while we cannot fully understand God, God made it possible for us to know enough that we can choose to enter a relationship with him. He did that through Jesus, who became flesh like us, and showed us what God is like in the way we could best comprehend him.

A SPIRITUAL CONNECTION

I want to finish this episode by highlighting what Jesus made possible. So far, we have been talking about “God is spirit.” And I have emphasized that we are physical beings while God is spirit. 

I briefly mentioned this earlier, but it is also important to recognize that when God created us, he gave us a human spirit. Every human being has a spirit…a non-physical part associated with them. Unfortunately, because of sin, we are all born with a dysfunctional spirit. So dysfunctional, that the Bible describes us as spiritually dead.

But that all changes when we put our faith and trust in Jesus. When we do that, the Holy Spirit renews our human spirit, and we are now able to grow in a spiritual relationship with God. And this is remarkable, because now we have the capacity to more fully understand God and come to know him. Many of the things that are impossible to comprehend about God, become less daunting. They are still impossible to fully comprehend, but they make more sense because the Holy Spirit is communicating with us at a spiritual level…in addition to an intellectual level.

It is also this Spirit-to-spirit connection that allows us to live a Spirit-led life. If that concept is new to you, please listen to Season 1. What I really want us to see as we finish this episode, is that even though God is far beyond us because of his spiritual nature, he created us in his image with a spirit. And when sin broke the human spirit, Jesus sacrificed himself so that we might enjoy what humans once had, today…an intimate and personal relationship with God.

CLOSING

Well, that got us started on our discussion about the nature of God. In our next episode, we are going to look at the goodness of God.

As always, you can send me comments, suggestions, or questions, by email at glenn@spiritledhope.com, or simply use the Contact Form at spiritledhope.com. That is spiritLEDhope.com. You can also send me an anonymous text message by going to the show notes and clicking on the link with your smart phone.

I look forward to hearing from you.

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As you think about the nature of God:

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope, by the power of the Holy Spirit.  

Until the next episode, take care.

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