What does it mean that God is spirit?

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.

"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.

To show the perfect suitableness of this, the Lord appeals to the fact that God is a Spirit. Since this is the essence of His being (not material at all), it surely follows that material forms of worship are nothing to Him: it is the spiritual reality that counts. Worship of the Father must be in spirit and in truth. Wonderful is the fact that the Son has revealed this.

God is Spirit. The Son—the second Person (in mention) of the Trinity—is Spirit. Where the Scriptures refer to the Spirit of God, it invariably means the Holy Spirit; for example, “The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” (Gen. 1:2) and “The Lord GOD and His Spirit hath sent Me” (Isa. 48:16). So apart from this, we should not speak of a Divine Person having a spirit, as it might appear to indicate that the Divine Spirit is only a part of the essence of His eternal Person. His inscrutable, eternal Person is essentially Spirit. In the Incarnation the Son took manhood into His Person—true manhood consisting of a human body, a human soul and a human spirit.

But this fact refutes the irrationalism of idol (or image) worship of God. For it is in the immaterialism of his nature that man is thus God's offspring. His soul and spirit only are from God's inbreathing; and in this he stood alone here below. Therefore, as urged, "we ought not to think the divine is like gold or silver or stone, graven by man's art and thought." The sculpture of these material substances by man's skill and imagination only adds absurdity to absurdity. For the material was but a creature of God; and the shape given to each was man's fancy and manufacture. "God is a spirit," and so can be omnipresent, as man's conscience bears witness to His penetrating energy throughout all mankind, unless stupefied by sin and infidelity, which drown thought of Him. But He is behind all ineffaceably, though Satan poses as the god of the world, deifying men's lusts to gratify them, and the pride of deceased ancestors, and the powers of nature above and below, as he works by demons who personate the various national divinities which are but names to deceive.

It is true that God is not in material form, but it is an all-pervading Spirit, “who only has immortality [that is inherently], dwelling in the light which no man can approach to; whom no man has seen, nor can see” (1 Tim. 6:16). But it is also true that God is not impersonal. He is a Person from whom everything proceeds, and by whom everything is sustained. But if we are to know God, it is clear that it can only be by revelation. All our knowledge of His nature comes through the Scriptures. Creation will tell us of His “eternal power and Godhead” (Rom. 1:20). But creation cannot reveal His heart. It cannot tell us that “God is love.” But revelation will tell us that God is perfect and yet will ever hear the real cry of need.

(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 Name of the Holy Spirit proves Godhead, for God is spirit (John 4:24). The Spirit of God is the essence of God.

"God (θεὸς) is a Spirit (πνεῦμα)." The word θεός in latest philological research has been connected with "breath," "spirit." See article GOD in Hauck's "Encyclopædia," vol. 6, p. 780.

The word which stands for "spirit" in the Old Testament is (ruach), in the New Testament, (pneuma). They are words precisely of the same significance. Both are derived from words which mean "to breathe,"* and in their primary sense therefore signify "breath," or what is a kindred thought, air in motion, "wind." From this as the type of viewless activity, its meaning of "spirit" most evidently and easily derived. The comparison between the two is what the Lord makes in John iii. 8, where like same word pneuma is both "wind" and "spirit": "the wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh or wither it goeth, so is every one that is born of the Spirit." Here manifestly the thought is of invisible activity beyond control; the effects are manifest, the power which produces them unseen and uncontrollable. In the formation of language, where that which can be conceived of only gets its name from that which is recognized by the senses, what more simple than that pneuma, originally breath or wind, should give its name to the power that, omnipresent in its activity acts unseen and uncontrolled? Hence "God is Spirit,"† the third Person of the Trinity, whom Scripture represents as the immediate mover, both in creation and in new creation, is preeminently the "Spirit of God."