What does it mean that God is spirit?

It refers to His being, to the Person. He has no bodily shape. He is not confined as we are, and He is an omnipresent spirit, so that though He is in heaven, He is here, and we, being spirit, are in His presence.

It stands to reason that no one has ever seen God. We can take account of a thing if it is twenty miles long or wide, and if it is a solid substance that can be weighed. But can we imprison the wind to measure it, or say where the light ends? God is a Spirit; and heaven, and the highest heaven cannot contain Him. He is everywhere present throughout this vast universe, greater than all He has created, not subject to change or break-up.

It is in the immaterial side of his nature that man is God's offspring. His soul and spirit alone come from God's inbreathing... The sculpting of these material substances by man's skill and imagination only adds absurdity to absurdity. For the material was itself a creature of God; and the shape given to each was man's fancy and manufacture.

How perfectly in keeping with all His truth it is that, in those days of partial revelation, of type and shadow, God should have most jealously guarded the idea of His infinitely glorious being from any likeness or representation, so common among the surrounding nations.

In their place He put nothing of earth; only spirit and truth was to mark all worship — it was to be according to the nature of God.

He is emphasising the fact that, since God is of a spirit substance, it is unsuitable to worship Him with material things — with shadows. He should be worshipped in spirit and reality.

This is not a matter of choice, but of necessity. But apart from the working of the Spirit within us, and apart from that truth which Christ has expressed in His life and in His death, we cannot worship Him in this way. How simple, yet how solemn!

Worship must be "in spirit," the very opposite of being "in flesh," as ritualism supposes. It must be "in truth" (that is, in godly recognition of all that God is as perfectly revealed in Christ, for "truth" connects itself with the knowledge of God), in contrast to being "in nature" or "in reason," as rationalism supposes.

It is a necessity of His nature, and of theirs too, since believers have become partakers of it by His grace... If you are true worshippers, see to it that your worship is, according to His will, "in spirit and truth," not in forms or falsehood.

The law had tied people down very strictly to a holy place where Jehovah's name was set; hence the long dispute between Jew and Samaritan. He lifted her thoughts to God who is a Spirit, revealing Him as Father.