Katzpur
Not your average Mormon
John 4:24 states, "God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth." This one statement, more than any other, is used by Christians of various denominations to prove that God is an immaterial being whose invisible essence fills the universe. Since there has been an ongoing debate taking place on the "Genesis 1" thread on this topic, I thought I'd like to explore this single verse in greater depth. Here are my thoughts. I'd be interested in yours:NetDoc said:Jesus told us that GOD IS SPIRIT. If we are created in his image, then it is a SPIRITUAL IMAGE.
(1) If God is a spirit, and if we are created in His image, are you saying that we are spirits, too? Its true that each of us has a spirit. You could even say that we are spirits. But we are not only spirits. We are spirits inhabiting physical bodies. You believe that God is a spirit without a physical body, but thats not what the scripture states. It states only that He is a spirit, and according to your own reasoning, having a spirit and being a corporeal being are not mutually exclusive.
(2) Is God a spirit or is He spirit? Since the Greek has no indefinite article, either statement is as accurate as the other. God is described elsewhere in the scriptures as light, but this time the translators chose to omit the indefinite article. Had they translated the Greek to read, God is a light, would you argue that this is a definition of who He is, and that this definition precludes His being something else at the same time? I believe that, as the Bible says, God is love, light, and spirit. I also believe, as the Bible says, that He has an image in which we, His own offspring, are created and a form in which His Son, Jesus Christ, walked the earth.
(3) You accept the doctrine of the Trinity, while I accept the doctrine of the Godhead. Either way, both of us believe that the third person of the Trinity/Godhead is the Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost. Now according to my belief, the Holy Ghost is a personage of spirit only. This is what makes Him unique. Anything that God does that requires Him to function as a spirit (i.e. to be everywhere at once, or to dwell in our hearts) is done by the Holy Ghost (who is, Himself, also God). It is entirely possible that God is spirit is speaking of the Holy Ghost since it is through the Holy Ghost that we are able to worship and commune with God. We are told we must worship Him in spirit because it is through the Holy Ghost that He communicates with us and we with Him. If God the Father and the Holy Ghost were both spirit beings only, what would the Holy Ghosts role be? What purpose would He serve within the Trinity/Godhead?
(4)The Greek word, pneuma, which is translated here as spirit can and is (elsewhere in the Bible) translated as life. Thus, God is life, is an accurate translation of the phrase. In many respects, this translation makes even more sense than the translation, God is spirit, because our Savior ascended into Heaven with a physical body, and presumably still has it. (If God is spirit and Jesus Christ has a body of flesh and bone, does this make Him something other than God?) Each of us has a spirit which, when death occurs, leaves the physical body behind. Without the spirit, the physical body is nothing but inanimate flesh and bones; it no longer has life. Because Christians believe that, through the atonement of Jesus Christ, they may attain eternal life in Gods presence, the word life is truly an accurate description of the most significant of His many attributes.
It appears to me that the belief in God's incorporeality is based almost exclusively on this single verse. In all honesty, I am continually amazed that, given the huge number of verses which describe God as having a human form, this single verse is the one that most Christians insist on taking literally and refuse to consider from any other perspective than the very one-dimensional one they were raised to believe.