The Spirit of God

In John 4:24, Jesus told the woman at the well that, “God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in Spirit and in truth.” In First Timothy we are told that God is invisible, that meshes nicely with what Jesus said about God being a Spirit. Romans also warns us against making images of God, which, of course, makes very little sense since God is invisible. Part of the problem here is that we, as human beings, are generally very visually-oriented. We make a lot of choices based more on what we find esthetically pleasing, as opposed to being practical. We are told not to judge by the outward appearance, and yet, it is one of our oldest prejudices.

All through the Old Testament, there are references to the Spirit of God, starting in Genesis 1:2. When God was planning the flood, he referred to His own Spirit; Pharaoh proclaimed that the Spirit of God was in Joseph…God told Moses that He had filled Bezaleel with His Spirit, to devise cunning works for the tabernacle. In Numbers, when Balaam was hired with the intent of prophesying against Israel, it says that the Spirit of God came upon him. In Judges, the Spirit of the Lord came upon Gideon, and he blew the trumpet, and people began to follow Gideon. Also in Judges, Samson met up with a lion, and the Spirit of the Lord came upon him, and he rent the lion. In First Samuel chapter 10, in verse 6, Samuel the prophet prophesied that the Spirit of the Lord would come over Saul, and then, in verse 10, it happened. When Elijah was taken up, the sons of the prophets persuaded Elisha to let them go look for Elijah, saying that perhaps the Spirit of God has taken him up into a mountain. In Psalms 51, David even cries out for God to not take His Holy Spirit from him; that’s rather surprising, because most people think that the Holy Spirit is kind of a New Testament thing.

Sometimes people try to make God into a physical being, usually an old man with a long white beard, even though the passage in Romans referenced above talks about changing the glory of the uncorruptible God into the image of corruptible man. When you stop to think about it in those terms, it’s pretty obvious how wrong that is. Sometimes they even use Scripture to try to show why they believe that; for example, He appeared as a man to Abraham, His finger wrote on the wall in the Book of Daniel. Of course, it Psalms there is a reference to God’s feathers and wings; that doesn’t exactly fit the standard image of God. I think that we have to understand that what little God has chosen to show us, He showed us for a reason, and it doesn’t represent His actual image, because His image cannot be seen by human eyes.

Small wonder that God didn’t want us to make any graven images (Exodus 20:4, Leviticus 26:1, Deuteronomy 4:16, Deuteronomy 4:23, Deuteronomy 4:25, Deuteronomy 5:8, Deuteronomy 27:15). It’s kind of like making a diagram of the air. Oh, sure, we could make up a chart showing how much nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, argon and other trace elements are in the air, but it wouldn’t really communicate the essence of the air. An actual drawing of air, or of God, would be a lot like the infamous drawing of a ghost shoveling snow in a snowstorm with a white shovel. God is beyond our comprehension. No picture could do Him justice, and He’s invisible anyway; the closest we have is what we imagine Jesus Christ looked like, because He was God’s image.