God Is A Spirit
God is a Spirit; and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.
John 4:24
The Bible declares God to be a Spirit. In the Gospel of John, Jesus is talking to a woman at the well of Sychar. He makes a straightforward statement about God; He says simply, “God is a Spirit.” Immediately you imagine a sort of cloudy vapor. But that is not a picture of God.
If I want to know what a spirit is, I can find out from these words of Christ after His resurrection: “Come and touch me and see, for a spirit has no flesh and bones such as ye see me have.” So I know that spirit is incorporeal—in other words, it is “unbody.” Spirit is contrary to body. Spirit is opposite to body. Spirit is something that is not limited by a body. Spirit is not changeable as a body.
The Bible declares that God is Spirit, that He is not limited to body: He is not limited to shape; He is not limited to force; He is not limited to boundaries or bonds; He is absolutely immeasurable and indiscernible to eyes that are limited to physical things. The Bible declares that because God has no such limitations He can be everywhere at the same time.
I was reared in a small Presbyterian church in Charlotte, North Carolina. Before I was ten years of age, my mother made me memorize the Westminster Shorter Catechism. In that catechism we were asked to define God. The answer we learned was, “God is a Spirit—infinite, eternal, and unchangeable.”
Those three words beautifully describe God. He is infinite—not body-bound. Eternal—He has no beginning and no ending. He is the one forever self-existent. The Bible declares that He never changes—that there is no variableness or shadow of turning with Him (James 1:17).
People change, fashions change, conditions and circumstances change, but God never changes. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
Our Father and our God, my finite mind cannot fathom Your infinite nature. My physical body cannot comprehend Your spiritual being. And my ever-changing mind cannot grasp Your never-changing ways. Still, I believe You are all these things. Help me to believe even more through Jesus, through whom I pray. Amen.
Billy Graham, Unto the Hills: A Daily Devotional (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2010).