God # 4

Question: What do you mean by saying that God is a person? Does God have a body, or is He merely an invisible Spirit?

When we say that God is a person, we do not mean that He has hands and feet and legs and eyes and a nose. These are marks of bodily existence, not of personality. When we say that God is a person, we mean that He is a Being who knows and feels and wills and is not merely a blind, unintelligent force. Jesus said in John 4:24, "God is [a] Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth". In Colossians 1:15, we read that God is "invisible" or unseeable.

But while God in His eternal essence is unseeable, He does manifest Himself in visible form. For example, we read in the ninth and tenth verses of Exodus 24 that Moses, Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, and seventy of the elders saw the God of Israel. It is also clear from a study of the different passages in the Old Testament where "the angel of the Lord" is mentioned that it was God Himself who manifested Himself in this being. (see for example, Genesis 16:7; Exodus 3:2).

We are taught in Philippians 2:6 that Christ Jesus existed originally ("being originally,")  "in the form of God." The Greek word translated "form" in this verse means the outward form, by which one is visible to the eye. Beyond a doubt, the thought here is that Jesus Christ, in His original state, was seen by the angelic world in a form that was outwardly manifested as divine. We may safely conclude, from this and other passages of Scripture, that while God in His eternal essence is purely spiritual and invisible, He nevertheless manifests Himself in the angelic world and has manifested Himself from all eternity in an outward, visible form.

~R. A. Torrey~