Does God have a physical body?

"God is a spirit." He is the Being Who is spirit in essence. It is not merely that this is His character, as would be expressed if the phrase were "God is spirit." But God is a spirit. It refers to His being, to the Person. He has no bodily shape. He is not circumscribed like ourselves, and He is an omnipresent spirit, and therefore though in heaven, He is here, and we being spirit are in His presence.

Here we have the strength of Mr. Roberts' doctrine. How plain it is his, and that he goes to Scripture, as so many do, just to find "support" to it! What an inference, that if one cannot go from the Spirit, nor flee from the presence of God, that therefore "Spirit" and "presence" must be just the same thing! and, moreover, this must be an "irradiated energy breathed from the Father"! The trouble with Mr. Roberts is, that he is so absolute a materialist, that with him even God Himself must be material, and there must either be a material presence or none! To others than himself, it will appear that Mr. R. had better give us the grounds of such a conclusion from Scripture, rather than assume them. Similarly we all believe that the Spirit of God has made us, and the breath of the Almighty given us life. Does that prove that the Spirit of God is only breath? And if so, how?

When our Lord tells the woman of Samaria that "God is spirit" (John 4:24), He is teaching her that while the substance of God is immaterial and invisible, it is of the nature of spirit: He is not characterizing the spirit substance in God, not distinguishing it from the spirit substance in other spirit beings. There can be no doubt that the spirit substance of angels is not identical with the spirit substance in God, which is uncreated, underived, subsisting from everlasting to everlasting. Not so in angels. In them it is a created substance. But this distinction or difference is not the point in our Saviour's conversation with the Samaritan woman. He is emphasizing the fact that God being of a spirit substance, it is unsuited to worship Him with material things — with shadows. He should be worshiped in spirit and reality.

Here lies the solid ground of the appeal against idolatry. They saw nothing. God did not show Himself to them. He did not assume any bodily shape of which they might form an image. He gave them His word, His holy commandments, so plain that a child could understand them, and the wayfaring men though fools need not err therein. There was no need for them therefore to set about imagining what God was like; nay, this was the very sin against which they were so faithfully warned. They were called to hear God's voice, not to see His shape — to obey His commandments, not to make an image of Him. Superstition vainly seeks to do honour to God by forming and worshipping an image. Faith, on the contrary, lovingly receives and reverently obeys His holy commandments. "If a man love me," says our blessed Lord, "he will" — what? make an image of me, and worship it? Nay, but "he will keep my words." This makes it so simple, so safe, so certain. We are not called to work up our minds to form any conception of God. We have simply to hear His word and keep His commandments. We can have no idea whatever of God, but as He has been pleased to reveal Himself. "No man has seen God at any time; the only-begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he has declared him." "God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, has shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ."

Jesus is declared to be the brightness of God's Glory and the exact impression of His substance. He could say, "He that has seen me has seen the Father." Thus the Son reveals the Father; and it is by the word, through the power of the Holy Ghost, that we know anything of the Son; and therefore for any one to attempt, by any efforts of his mind or workings of his imagination to conceive an image of God, or of Christ, is simply idolatry. To endeavour to arrive at any knowledge of God or of Christ, save by scripture, is simply mysticism and confusion; nay more, it is to put ourselves directly into the hands of the devil, to be led by him into the wildest, darkest, and deadliest delusion.

Hence, therefore, as Israel, at mount Horeb, was shut up to the "voice" of God, and warned against any similitude; so we are shut up to holy scripture, and warned against everything which would draw us away, the breadth of a hair, from that holy and all-sufficient standard. We must not listen to the suggestions of our own minds, nor to those of any other human mind. We must absolutely and sternly refuse to listen to anything but the voice of God — the voice of holy scripture. Here is true security, true rest. Here we have absolute certainty, so that we can say, "I know whom" — not merely what — "I have believed; and am persuaded that he," &c.

The point urged here is, that when they came and stood, as far as any then could stand, in the presence of God, they had seen no similitude of Jehovah. What a guard this was against the misuse of outward forms! God Himself did not disclose Himself by an external creature-shape. Jehovah their God did not make Himself visible to them by a similitude. Consequently there is here a heavy blow struck at the tendency towards idolatry. For when severed from Christ then those ordinances only became a snare to men. Still more since Christ: misused ordinances are practically the same thing in principle, as Galatians 4 teaches. This was guarded against from the first by the fact that no similitude of God was vouchsafed. "Ye came near and stood under the mountain; and the mountain burned with fire in the midst of heaven, with darkness, clouds, and thick darkness. And Jehovah spake to you out of the midst of the fire: ye heard the voice of the words" — because they were called to obey — "but saw no similitude; only ye heard a voice. And he declared to you his covenant, which he commanded you to perform, even ten commandments; and he wrote them upon two tables of stone." And then comes the exhortation to beware of corrupting themselves by idolatries, by the likeness of any creature. This is pursued to the end of the chapter, with the institution of the cities where the manslayer might find refuge.

Two things, based upon the revelation which was being made, characterised this worship; the nature of God, and the Father's grace. The worship of the true God must be a worship "in spirit and in truth." God's nature required this; God is a Spirit; and the worship would not be according to what God is, if it were not "in truth," for what is false is not according to what He is, and the revelation of that which He is has come in Christ, who is Himself the truth, for "grace and truth came by Jesus Christ." The law given by Moses told what man ought not to do, and the Lord knew well how to find in this law that which man ought to feel; to love God and his neighbour. But the law does not reveal what God is, it reveals what man ought to be. Now here was God fully revealed in the world, who, rejected as Messiah, object of promise, leaves His special connection with the Jewish people, although it had been (outside that which was earthly and legal) established by Himself, and comes to reveal Himself in the Person of the Son, substituting God amongst men, in grace, for all the forms in the midst of which, hidden behind the veil, He forbade all men to come near Him - to reveal Himself I say, to all this ignorance, which worshipped she knew not what, and where there was no answer whatever to the needs of the heart. It was the Father seeking true worshippers in spirit and in truth, according to His own nature fully revealed; for "God is a Spirit, and they that worship him, must worship him in spirit and in truth." But grace precedes; the initiative is with God; He comes Himself to seek such worshippers. We have seen that it was the gift of God; but God is Light, and He reveals Himself. It is, we have also seen, God revealed in goodness, but the conscience reached by the light, and God giving that which springs up unto everlasting life.

(1) God, a Spirit. Of the nature and attributes of God as thus revealed in the Trinity, the four Gospels furnish us with abundant material. "God is a Spirit" (John 4:24); "No man hath seen God at any time" (John 1:18). These and other scriptures declare the spirituality of God as contrasted with man His creature, or the universe His creation.

The apostle Paul tells us that God dwells in light — unapproachable light (1 Tim. 6:16). He is the invisible God (Col. 1:15; 1 Tim. 1:17; Heb. 11:27). No man has ever seen Him. It is not possible for man to see God in His essential Godhead. Man's constitution makes him able to see only what is within the range of his vision — not the invisible.

One of the essential attributes of God is His Invisibility; He is aoratos: Col. 1:15; 1 Tim. 1:17, etc. This, when applied to Him in His Essence must mean, not only that He cannot, but may not be seen; "Whom no man has seen, nor can see" (1 Tim. 6:16). Not even Moses could have looked on the face of God and lived. If God is to reveal Himself to the creature, it must be by an interpreting medium.

Now God cannot be seen. Scripture says that “God is light” and that God dwells in unapproachable light, and no man has seen Him or can see Him. That was true then and it is true now and for ever. God in His absolute character as Creator, as Father, Son and Spirit—ONE GOD dwelling in unapproachable light—cannot be seen, just as my neighbour has never been seen.