“God is Spirit”

“God is Spirit”
In conversation with the woman at the well, Jesus
stated that ‘God is Spirit’1. In context, he seems to
be affirming that God is not bound to our physical
places or outward practices of worship because he is
‘more than’ or ‘other than’ a being bound in time and
space, as we are.
The mysteriousness of God’s ‘essence’ may simply
reflect a humbling reality: it is beyond our
comprehension. Just as it is impossible to run a
modern media program in a old Commadore 64
computer, the ‘data’ regarding God’s essence simply
cannot be processed by our human minds.
But God does do two things…
He gives us the glorious privilege of being bearers of
his ‘spirit’. When we are ‘born again’, we are ‘born of
the Spirit’2. Some of the ‘essence of God’ is planted
in our lives as the Holy Spirit comes to dwell within
us. And God desires that spiritual nature to be
nourished so that it may grow and change us.
Secondly, God reveals himself to us in his actions,
names, attributes, etc. In the Mideast, a name was
seen as an expression of the nature of the thing
designated. Names and attributes of God are given
by God himself to disclose a measure of the Divine
Being. While we cannot put them all together like a
jigsaw puzzle and declare, ‘This is God!’, they do
they give more than enough data for our minds to
‘crunch’. We certainly have all the insight that we
require to love, worship and serve3.
1 John 4:24 (TNIV) or ‘a Spirit’
2 John 3; Colossians 1:27
3 “They are merely toying with frigid speculations whose mind is set on
the question of what God is, when what it really concerns us to know is
rather what kind of person He is and what is appropriate to His nature.”
John Calvin, Institutes I.2.2.

http://www.kortrightchurch.org/pdf/DDD%20-%20Sept%2024-29,%202007.pdf