Today we're going to delve into the nature of God. Just saying that sounds presumptuous—as if we, mere humans, can understand the nature of God. The fact is, we can't. All we can understand is what he reveals to us.
We are like people on an ocean liner passing over the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the ocean—eleven kilometers, almost seven miles straight down—and all we see is the surface of the water. As for God's nature, we only see the surface he chooses to reveal. But even from that, we can learn a great deal.
Let's start with the name he has revealed to us over 6,000 times in Scripture. Its meaning is unique.
"Hear, O Israel: YHWH our God, YHWH is One." (Deuteronomy 6:4)
Yehovah is one. Not three in one. One.
It is interesting that the fullest revelation of God's nature comes from the last of the inspired writings. John gives us three statements about God that form the foundation of everything we're going to explore in this series. God is Spirit. God is Love. God is Light. Today we begin with the first.
"God is Spirit, and His worshipers must worship Him in spirit and in truth." (John 4:24)
Notice it doesn't say that God is a spirit, as if He were one of many. It simply says He is Spirit.
The Greek word for spirit is pneuma. We get our English word "pneumatic" from it—your car rides on four pneumatic, air-filled tires. But that isn't quite what the Greek means. It isn't referring to air as such, but to air in motion—breath or wind. That's an important distinction.
To see why, consider how Yeshua uses the word when speaking with Nicodemus. Here's how the passage reads if we leave pneuma untranslated:
"Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the pneuma, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the pneuma is pneuma. Do not marvel that I said to you, 'You must be born again.' The pneuma blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the pneuma." (John 3:5-8)
Wind cannot be seen, but it can be felt—and it can be extraordinarily powerful. [show image of tornado]
The 2001Translation.org renders that last sentence this way:
"And that's how it'll be for everyone who has been born from the breath."
The Greek Septuagint uses pneuma the same way when translating Genesis 2:7:
"And Yehovah God formed the man from dust of the ground, and He breathed into his nostrils the breath [pneuma] of life, and the man became a living soul." (Genesis 2:7)
This is why Yeshua used breath as an illustration when helping his disciples understand how the spirit works:
"When He had said this, He breathed on them and said, 'Receive the Holy Spirit.'" (John 20:22)
Literally: "Receive the holy breath."
So when John tells us that God is Spirit, he is telling us that the Father is invisible, immaterial, incorporeal, and beyond our full comprehension. Like breath or wind, he cannot be seen—but he can profoundly affect us.
When we try to think of God, we naturally frame our thoughts with what we know. We picture in our mind's eye a being who has some form—because for us, everything exists somewhere, in some form. But if God has a body of some sort, what is it made of? And who made the material of which God is made? My consciousness exists within a body of flesh, but the matter of which I'm made already existed before I was born. God, however, is the source of all things. He cannot be made of something that predates him.
And if he has a body, then he must exist somewhere. But since God is Spirit, he doesn't reside in any one place. He inspired King Solomon to make this clear at the inauguration of the first Temple in Jerusalem:
"But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, the heavens and the heavens of the heavens cannot contain You. How much less this house that I have built?" (1 Kings 8:27)
To summarize what we've established so far: Yehovah exists outside of time and space, beyond our universe. He is Almighty—the creator of all things—yet he himself is uncreated and subject to nothing. He is without limits.
But does that mean he can do anything?
That would seem to follow, wouldn't it? And yet consider this:
"In the hope of eternal life, which God, who cannot lie, promised before time began." (Titus 1:2)
I can lie. You can lie. Does that make us greater than God? Of course not.
The reasoning trips on a subtle error. It treats "can lie" as though it were an added power—the way "can bench press 200 lbs" describes an advantage over someone who can only press 100. But lying isn't that kind of capacity. It isn't a power stacked on top of your other abilities. It is a defect—the capacity for truthful speech gone wrong.
God cannot be the source of truth if he can lie. And from this we arrive at a foundational principle: God must be God, and he cannot do anything that detracts from or diminishes his own godhood.
Now let's go a little deeper, because this is exactly where we begin to understand why the Word—Yeshua—came to be.
Yehovah God cannot do anything that would diminish him in any way. He cannot be subject to anyone or anything. All things are subject to him. And yet he is light, and in him there is no darkness—he is the source of truth and righteousness, not the lies and wickedness we associate with darkness.
But how does he communicate his light and truth to his human children?
John also tells us that God is love. That love motivates him to share his truth, his counsel, and his guidance with his human and angelic children. It motivates him to do good to all. But how can Almighty God love, communicate with, and guide creatures like us? It's not as though Yehovah can sit down with you for a meal. Scripture tells us that no man can see God and live. We can't even stare at the sun for more than a few seconds without risking blindness. What about the Creator of trillions upon trillions of suns?
Yehovah needed someone to bridge that gap. Someone who could exist both in his presence and within the universe he created. And so he begat a Son—the only Son begotten directly from the Father in this unique way.
"And the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us. And we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth." (John 1:14)
"No one has ever seen God at any time; the only begotten God, the One being in the bosom of the Father, He has made Him known." (John 1:18)
"For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, so that everyone believing in Him should not perish, but should have eternal life." (John 3:16)
"By this the love of God has been revealed among us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world, so that we might live through Him." (1 John 4:9)
Notice that all four of these statements come from the pen of the Apostle John. At the close of the appointed times, he was the one inspired to gather and sum up the truths that had been written before him.
We all acknowledge that Yeshua is the Son of God—even Trinitarians acknowledge this, though they prefer a title that never appears in Scripture: God the Son.
But rarely does anyone ask why Yehovah begat a Son. The short answer is this: to create the physical universe, God needed a means of doing so without in any way limiting himself. The Son—the Word, the Logos—was that means. But there is much more to it than that. Because John also tells us:
"Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love… And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them." (1 John 4:8, 16)
That is a much deeper subject—and one we will explore further in this series.
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