The past couple of months have been very amazing. Writing has never been my field of expertise, not even speaking. My vocabulary is very limited, only a basket-full maybe. I never thought I’d be capable enough to do something as huge as this, but I believe that it’s God who has called me and qualified me to write and share about Him and His attributes. Knowing the one true God has been my heart’s greatest desire; making Him known helps in the process — a lot.
My previous blog posts are about God’s incommunicable attributes — these are the ones which He doesn’t share or communicate to anyone or anything else. They belong to Him alone.
Self-existence • Self-sufficiency • Eternity • Infinitude • Omnipresence • Transcendence • Immanence • Immutability
In the coming weekends, including this one, I’ll be sharing about The Attributes of God that describes His being:
- Immateriality
- Invisibility
- Spirituality
- Simplicity
God’s whole being includes all of His attributes, known and unknown. These attributes are never in opposition — they co-define each other. As we elaborate one, we cannot avoid mentioning the others.
I shall now begin with the divine attribute of the week — the IMMATERIALITY of God, also called the “incorporeality” of God. The immateriality of God simply means that He is not composed of any kind of matter, material, or substance. Unlike us or any other created things, His existence is non-physical.
WHAT IS GOD MADE OF? God’s immateriality, often stirs debate, especially when influenced by facts and knowledge about science and philosophy. “If God is immaterial, what is He made of?” Well, to begin with, God is self-existent; therefore, He was not made. He was not created. The divine essence is entirely a spirit, and a spirit cannot be flesh, bone, and blood.
There are several passages in the Bible which describe God as someone who has body parts such as hands (Heb.10:31), arms (Num. 11:23), feet (Isa. 66:1), a mouth (Matt. 4:4), eyes, ears, and a face (1 Pet. 3:12). Here, we must understand that when speaking about Himself, God uses words, terms, or languages that our limited minds can accommodate.
Even the writers of the Holy Scriptures, especially those who saw God, described Him by just comparing Him to something they had already known and seen because what they saw was wholly different from anything they had ever seen before, something which they had no word or term or language to describe. One excellent example is when the prophet Ezekiel saw visions of heaven and God:
SO WHAT IS REALLY GOD LIKE? HOW DOES HE LOOK? We all know that man was created in the image of God (Gen. 1:27); but this doesn’t mean “in the exact image.” God is distinct from all of His creations. To think of man being in the exact image of the Lord is to rob Him of His uniqueness and transcendence. However we visualize God in our minds, that’s not how He is. For we imagined that image based on the created; God is not created.
THE IMMATERIAL GOD AS FLESH AND BLOOD. But the immaterial God came into the world in flesh and blood as Jesus Christ, without sin and without losing His oneness with God — to provide further revelations about the Father, to sympathize with men, to serve and be an example to them, to be the sacrifice for the sins of the world, to save those who believe Him and accept Him as Lord and Savior.
There’s so much more to knowing the Lord than trying to prove His existence, His composition, His origin. God’s nature is beyond understanding and His being is highly unfathomable. He can never be known by intellect. He is Spirit — therefore, He can only be known spiritually. The intelligent questions this necessary truth, but the believer worships His incomprehensible majesty in spirit and in truth.
“God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.” John 4:24, ESV
This is an updated edition of an article originally published on thegodiknow.home.blog
Featured Image by Vero Photoart
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