Frankly, I approach our subject tonight with a little bit of fear and trepidation, at least
a sense of inadequacy.
I sort of feel like a fellow who's gone to the mountain and is returning home and trying
to describe the mountain with a spade full of dirt that he brought back with him.
When we talk about the spiritual nature of God, we are talking about a subject that is
too immense for any human tongue to ever frame, let alone try to put that picture of God's
spirituality into one message.
But with God's help tonight, we want to at least be suggestive in our covering of this
subject of the spiritual nature of God.
In John chapter 4, we have the record of our Lord Jesus Christ with His disciples traveling
through Samaria.
They had been in the area of Judea, and it says that He left there and went back once
more to Galilee.
His ministry in Judea had not been well received, and He headed back to Galilee where He was
more accepted by the multitudes.
And it says in verse 4, now He had to go through Samaria.
This was a must that He do this.
It was a must perhaps for two or three reasons.
On the one hand, He had an appointment to keep with a lady who needed spiritual help.
As a result of that appointment with that one person, there was a whole village that
turned to the Lord and believed in Him.
I think too that perhaps Jesus went through Samaria because He purposely wanted to show
His disciples the foolishness of their prejudice against the Samaritans.
I suppose most of you know who the Samaritans were, but for those of you that may not, it
might be helpful to be reminded that the Samaritans were half-breeds.
They were a race of people, the result of intermarriage between Jews and Assyrians.
When the northern kingdom of Israel was invaded and conquered by the Assyrians in 722 BC,
the king of Assyria deported thousands and thousands of Jews that lived through that
siege.
He replaced them in their homeland with citizens of Assyria and other parts of His empire.
He did this to defuse any possibility of a rebellion there against Him by the conquered
Jews.
The result of these people being imported was intermarried between them and the Jews
in the northern kingdom of former Israel.
This intermarriage produced what were called Samaritans.
When the southern kingdom of Judah returned from its captivity in 539 BC, they found the
Samaritans to have very little in common with them.
By this time, the intermarriage of the Assyrians and the northern Jews had been going on for
a number of generations.
The religion that they worshiped, though somewhat similar to the Jewish faith, was mingled with
the worship of Baal and other false deities.
These returning Jews, when they got back to Jerusalem, had little to do with these half-breeds
to the north.
The hostility between the two groups never ceased.
When they attempted to rebuild the Temple under the leadership of God's people, the
Samaritans tried to oppose the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem.
And down through the centuries, up until the day of our Lord Jesus Christ, the tension
between these two groups, the Jews and the Samaritans, continued to exist.
I think it was for that reason that Jesus had to go through Samaria.
I believe that he wanted to show the rather spiritually arrogant Jews of his day that
they had no reason for their pride.
It says he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had
given to his son Joseph.
Jacob's well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the
well.
It was about the sixth hour.
And then the appointment takes place.
It says when a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, Will you give me
a drink?
His disciples had gone into town to buy food.
The Samaritan woman said to him, You are a Jew, and I am a Samaritan woman.
How can you ask me for a drink?
For Jews do not associate with Samaritans, was the implication of her statement.
And John says so.
Jesus answered her, If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that asks you for a drink,
you would have given him, and he would have given you, living water.
In this conversation, our Lord now probes her curiosity and suggests that there is such
a thing as living water.
And so politely, though perhaps skeptically, she says, Sir, you have nothing to draw with,
and the well is deep.
Now today the well is about seventy-five feet deep.
We know not, of course, how deep it was then.
But you had to have some kind of pot or bucket to get the water.
And she says, Where can you get this living water?
Her curiosity was aroused, and yet she did not understand that Jesus was talking about
something that was immaterial.
She says, Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from
it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and herds?
Jesus answered, Everyone who drinks this water, undoubtedly pointing to the well, will be
thirsty again.
But whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst.
Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal
life.
Now, undoubtedly by this time, the woman is becoming a little more illuminated.
And she says, Sir, give me this water so that I won't get thirsty and have to keep coming
here to draw water.
Now our Lord is offering to her spiritual water, eternal life.
She indicates, not understanding fully what he means, that she's interested in that water,
that she wants it to drink.
Our Lord knows that he cannot give that water to a person who is not really prepared for
it.
She needed to have a confession of her sins before she could be ready for the water of
life.
And so kindly but revealingly, Jesus told her, Go and call your husband and come back.
Her reply was, I have no husband.
And then Jesus said, You are right when you say you have no husband.
The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband.
What you have just said is quite true.
Well, you can imagine how this must have struck this lady.
She says, Sir, I can see that you are a prophet.
That was rather obvious, wasn't it?
Instead of proceeding though with that, she tries to evade the point of conviction that
our Lord had placed upon her.
And so she brings up a spiritual argument.
Have you ever dealt with somebody that way?
That is, when you get close to the point where they feel convicted, you know, the heat's
on, the fire's burning inside, and all of a sudden they go this direction, or at least
try to, to sidetrack you or to evade the point.
So she brings up this argument.
Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must
worship is in Jerusalem.
But she brought up the age-old argument between the two groups, and that was the place of
worship.
This mountain that she refers to was Mount Gerizim.
It's well located right at the foot of Mount Gerizim.
Some of you may remember Mount Gerizim from the Old Testament.
Moses commanded the people in Deuteronomy chapter 27 and 28 that when they got into
the land, they were to go to Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal, which was just across a very
short and narrow valley, and they were to divide their congregation into halves.
The Levites were to be in the middle.
An altar was to be set up.
And the Levites, the priests, were to recite the law before all of these people.
And then there was to be an antiphonal response.
The people on Mount Ebal were to respond reciting the curses of God upon sin and disobedience
to the law.
The people on Mount Gerizim on the north side were to respond reciting the blessings of
the law upon those who would obey it.
That occurred.
And Mount Gerizim, because it was the place where the blessings of the law was pronounced,
became very important, particularly to the people who lived in that part of Israel.
And it was that part of Israel that later became the northern kingdom, etc., etc.
Mount Gerizim was always important.
And it still is today to the few Samaritans, the true Samaritans, that are still living.
There are some Samaritans, but because they intermarry, their number is reduced greatly.
And I think that there are probably fewer than 200 of them that are left alive on the
face of the earth today.
But that Mount Gerizim was significant to them.
To them it was the place where the blessing of the law was pronounced.
And of course they had little to do with Jerusalem, for that's where the Jews worshipped.
And there was this constant bickering between the two groups.
Where do we worship?
Jesus does not get involved in the argument.
And in that He gives us a good pattern to follow.
When people want to argue about religion, back off.
As someone has said, you may win the argument, but lose the soul.
So back off from an argument.
It doesn't gain anything.
But in verse 21, Jesus doesn't simply be quiet.
He says to her, believe me woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither
on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.
Now that was a significant statement for a Jewish rabbi to make.
He says, you Samaritans worship what you do not know.
Which was a rebuke to her and to their rather eclectic religion that drew from the Jews
and from the worship of Baal and the other pagan religions.
He says, we worship what we do know.
For salvation is from the Jews.
And of course that is true, the Messiah was to come through the Jews.
He says, yet a time is coming and now has come when the true worshipers will worship
the Father in spirit and truth.
For they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.
And then He says, God is spirit and His worshipers must worship Him in spirit and in truth.
The woman said, I know that Messiah called Christ is coming.
When He comes, He will explain everything to us.
Then Jesus declared, I who speak to you am He.
Isn't that a fabulous statement?
I think one of the most thrilling experiences I've ever heard, and yet it was disappointing
in a sense, was to be on a tour bus parked just outside the city of Sychar, which is
now called, near Shechem, which is now called Nablus in Israel, and to hear our Jewish guide
explain John chapter 4 as well as any evangelical preacher I've ever heard.
Went all the way down through this, to where Jesus said, I who speak to you am He, went
all the way through the story.
And I was thrilled to hear Him explain it in such a profound way and a clear way.
That night I said to Him, why is it after explaining the fourth chapter of John so well
as you did today, that you cannot see Jesus as your Messiah?
And He shrugged His shoulders and said, ah, He said, you were raised a Christian, I'm
raised a Jew.
And with that He walked away.
To Him it's a matter of a cultural thing, you see, more than a religious thing.
I the speak to you am He.
And what did Jesus say?
He said, God is Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.
Now what does it mean when it says that God is Spirit?
It means two things.
It means first of all that God is immaterial.
What does that mean?
Well it means that He does not consist of matter.
That is unlike you and me.
We live in bodies.
We are tied to bodies, and we are material and mortal.
But God is immaterial.
He does not consist of matter.
All matter that exists was brought into existence by Him, but He Himself is immaterial.
He is Spirit.
Now our Lord Jesus Christ is not in spirit form now.
He was before the incarnation when He took upon Himself flesh.
In Luke chapter 24, verse 39, Jesus appears to His disciples after His resurrection, and
He says to them, Peace be with you.
They were startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost.
The word is spirit, the same Greek word.
He said to them, Why are you troubled?
And why do doubts rise in your minds?
Look at my hands and my feet.
It is I, myself.
Touch me and see.
A ghost or a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see me have.
And so God the Son is today in a body, how be it glorified.
He is in a body.
But God the Father, God the Holy Spirit are still in their essential form, Spirit.
They are not in matter.
They are immaterial.
Now it is true that in the Bible God speaks about having ears and eyes and hands and His
arm.
There are numerous passages that speak of these, like the hand of the Lord is not shortened
that it cannot save.
The ear of the Lord is open to the righteous.
His eye is upon them, says the Bible.
But these expressions are what are called, are you ready for this?
I hope I can even say it, anthropomorphic.
What does that mean?
Well, it means that though God is Spirit, He describes Himself in human terms so that
we can understand better what He is like.
It does not literally mean that God has an earlobe and an ear canal and those other bones
in here that are part of our hearing system.
It doesn't mean that God has five fingers or that He has an arm literally.
But God uses that kind of terminology so that we can understand that He does see and He
does hear and He does take powerful action.
There are cults that teach that God has a body.
In fact, the Mormons teach that.
We talked a little bit about one of their doctrines this morning.
They also teach, and I quote them, the Father has, capital F, God the Father, the Father
has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man's.
That is their teaching.
But that is in contradiction to the Word of God, which says that God is Spirit, the very
words of the Lord Jesus Himself.
Now that not only means that God is immaterial, but it also means that He is invisible.
That is, He cannot be seen by human eyes except that He somehow reveals Himself.
Now we're here at Luke 24.
If your Bible is like mine, if you turn over a page or two, you come to John.
And in John chapter 1 verse 18, we have these words.
It says, No one has ever seen God, but God the only Son who is at the Father's side
has made Him known.
Now I'm particularly interested in the first part of that sentence.
No one has ever seen God.
In the Old Testament, God said, No one may see me and live.
And yet isn't it curious that as God describes His relationship to Moses, He says that He
spoke to Moses face to face as a man speaks to his friend.
Does that mean then that Moses saw God?
I think that the phrase face to face is not best understood that way.
It is a phrase that means intimacy.
That's the significance of it.
In other words, God spoke in intimate words to His servant Moses like you would speak
to your very best friend.
No man has seen God at any time.
Doesn't mean that God hasn't appeared.
God has.
But what it does mean is that no one has ever looked upon the essential nature of God.
We have only been able to see God as He has desired to make Himself seen.
Richard de Haan in his book The Living God gives this helpful statement.
So infinitely glorious is God that in order for Him to communicate with men, He must condescend
to shield, to clothe, to encase Himself as it were in some visible form, and thus protect
His creatures from destruction, even as the bright light of a welding torch is covered
to prevent it from blinding the eyes of the onlooker.
So God contained His brightness that He might stoop to meet the needs of those whom He loves.
And so when God appears to us, He in some way encases Himself or covers Himself to shield
us from seeing His essential nature, for we cannot look upon Him and live.
Our Lord has appeared in three forms.
He has appeared as a human in the Old Testament in what are called theophanies.
An appearance of God is the meaning of that word.
In Genesis chapter 3 it says that God walked in the garden.
And I personally believe that that means that Adam and Eve knew God not as an invisible
immaterial being, but as a theophany that God appeared to them, and they related to
Him in that way.
And I think that's why it says that God walked in the garden.
Certainly God appeared as a theophany, as a man to Abraham.
For example, in chapter 18 of Genesis, three people come to visit Abraham.
They are on their way to Sodom and Gomorrah to destroy the cities.
And the Word of God clearly says that two of them were what?
Angels, and one of them was whom?
The Lord Himself.
The two angels went on down to Sodom and Gomorrah to oversee the destruction and the judgment
of that city and those cities of the plain.
But the Lord Himself stayed behind in body form, appearing as a man speaking to Abraham.
And then He appeared as a man when those three Jewish brothers were placed into that fiery
furnace, Shadrach, Meshach, and who?
Abednego.
All the boys and girls know that one too.
Now when the king looked in that fiery furnace that was heated seven times hotter than normal,
he saw the forms of four men, not three.
And he says that one of them was like the Son of God.
The Lord appeared there in body form.
Then the Lord appears in other ways.
The best way I know to say it is that He appeared in material form.
For example, Moses met Him on the top of Mount Sinai the first time, and the Lord appeared
how?
In a burning bush.
Not as a man, but there was a fire, and that's how the Lord appeared to Moses.
It was a fire that burned, but it didn't consume the bush.
It was the Lord appearing to Him.
And then later the Lord appeared before His people and indicated His presence.
During the day by a pillar of cloud and a night by a pillar of fire.
And so the Lord appeared there not as a man, but in material form.
But then the most wonderful way in which God has ever appeared to human beings is in the
person of Jesus Christ.
I think John chapter 1 is one of the most fabulous chapters in all the Bible.
There is so much here.
He begins by saying, in the beginning was the Word.
And who is the Word?
Jesus Christ.
He is God's logos.
All that God wants to communicate to us is in His Son.
In the beginning was the Word.
And the Word was with God and the Word was God.
Three important statements.
The first indicating that He existed before creation.
When that which was characterized by the beginning occurred, the Word was.
He already was in existence.
What happened in the beginning?
Well in the beginning God created.
So He goes back before creation.
He is not a created being as some cults teach.
The Word was with God indicating that there is distinction of personality.
And yet it clearly says and the Word was God.
Or as John literally states, and God was the Word.
He was God.
And then in verse 14, he makes this amazing statement.
The Word became flesh and lived for a while among us.
Here the Word is, He tabernacled amongst us.
And when you speak about the tabernacle, you immediately think of the Old Testament and
that was the tent of the meeting where God would come down and meet with His people Israel.
Can you imagine what that was like?
As you read the description of that tabernacle or that tent, the inside of it was of exquisite
beauty, wrought with skilled hands of craftsmen that God directed and God enabled, but the
outside of it was very plain looking.
As you looked at the tent, it was just an ordinary plain looking thing.
And that in itself pictures the Lord Jesus Christ who in the inner sense was beautiful
in His perfection, in His deity, but to His outward appearance looked just like a man.
And the Word tabernacled amongst us.
When someone looked at Jesus Christ, they could say, there is God.
God has appeared to us in the person of His Son.
And what is the significance of all of this?
I would suggest just four of them very, very quickly and with these we close.
One implication of the spiritual nature of God is that idolatry is forbidden.
God absolutely without question forbids any material representation of Himself.
He said, you will not make unto me any likeness, any graven image as some quotations have it,
or some versions have it rather.
God absolutely will not have idolatry.
Anything material cannot represent that which is spiritual.
There is no proportion between the two.
There's no relationship.
And that's why idolatry is called sin.
It is impossible for the most skilled craftsman with the most imaginative mind to take a piece
of stone and to fashion the image of God in it.
It is a disgrace to the nature of God to attempt it.
It cannot be done, and then God forbids it.
And so we forsake idols.
What about pictures of Jesus Christ?
It was a privilege of mine to be an acquaintance of Mr. Solman who painted the head of Christ
that is so well known.
And he did a number of them, by the way, not just the one that is well known.
Are those wrong?
I hesitate to say categorically yes, but I would say at least that they are suspect.
Now what's wrong with them?
Because when we look at that picture or at that image that is made, it limits our concept
of God, and we suddenly begin to think of God like we are and bring Him down to our
level.
And ultimately it leads to thinking that God is subject to the same weaknesses and foibles
that all of us are subject to.
And that is why God forbids idolatry.
Implication or significance number two.
Man has a spirit.
There are those that see man only as an animal.
He is only a beast who evolved like the other animals of the earth.
But the Bible presents an entirely different point of view.
It says that man is a specially created thing and that one of the most important aspects
of him is the spiritual part of him, the invisible part of him.
It is that aspect of man that is in God's image, not the body, because God does not
have a body.
But it is His ability to reason, to decide, to think, to understand revelation of God
that makes him unique and in the image of God completely different than all of the animals.
Man has a spirit.
And the third implication sort of comes out of that.
It is that God can only be known through the spirit of man.
Turn over to 1 Corinthians chapter 2, and I will give you my proof text for this.
1 Corinthians 2, 14 says, The man without the spirit does not accept the things that
come from the Spirit of God for their foolishness to him.
And he cannot understand them because they are spiritually discerned.
How do we comprehend God?
It is only in the spirit of a man that God can be comprehended.
It comes through our minds, but it must go deeper than the intellect.
It affects our emotions, but it must go beyond that.
It must go into the very spirit, that inner core, the holy of holies, so to speak, of
a man, that God is comprehended.
The things of God are spiritually discerned, and that is why an unsaved person cannot understand
the Bible.
He cannot get a hold of God.
The whole thing is a mystery to him because the spiritual part of him is dead.
And that deadness affects his mind so it is blinded and darkened to the things of God.
Only when a person is saved and that spiritual part of him is quickened, and he is made alive
in Jesus Christ, can he then begin to understand God.
Of course, none of us can ever fully comprehend God, but we are called upon in the Bible to
begin to know Him.
And then there is a fourth implication, and that is that when we worship God, we must
worship Him in spirit and in truth.
That is what Jesus said in John 4.
The Father seeks such to worship Him.
It doesn't mean that we can become that ourselves, but what it means is that among His people,
God continually seeks to develop in us true worship.
And worship has little to do really with ritual and ceremony.
They are not in themselves worship.
He says worship is in spirit.
That is, it is more inward than outward.
It must be done in truth as directed to the truth of God, by the truth of God and to the
truth of God.
It must be done sincerely without any pretense.
It is true that ancient Israel had forms and worships of worship and rituals that they
went through, but those were only a shadow of the reality that we have in Jesus Christ.
As one writer has said, Stephen Charnock, there is no need of a candle when the sun
spreads his beans in the air.
And by the way, I would encourage you, if you like to read kind of heavy things every
now and then, and something that will stimulate you, there is a two-volume set by Stephen
Charnock called The Existence and Attributes of God.
It has been reprinted recently.
He's a man who writes in the style of the seventeenth century, and I'll guarantee
you won't sit down and speed-read it.
But if you take time to wade through it and to think with him, you will be deepened in
your understanding of God.
There's something else about sin that's important to say.
You know, we are very aware of the sins that are external, the sins of the body, the sins
that we can see.
But could I suggest to you tonight that because God is spirit and we are spirit, and the spirit
part of us is most akin to the image of God, that it is the sins of the spirit that most
grieve God and are the most heinous in the sight of God?
Now we look at it the other way, don't we?
But I would suggest to you that it is the attitudes that we have and harbor, the thoughts
of our minds.
It is those inward things that are most offensive to a holy God because God is spirit.
Thus it behooves us to listen closely to the words of the apostle when he says, let us
therefore cleanse ourselves of all the filthiness of the flesh and the spirit, perfecting holiness
in the fear of God, 2 Corinthians 7.1.
I think Paul must have been thinking about the spiritual nature of God when he writes
1 Timothy.
Just turn there and we close with these verses.
Already Bob has suggested that the hymn we sang before the message was from 1 Timothy
1, 17.
As he begins his writing to Timothy he shouts this doxology, now to the King eternal, immortal,
invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever, amen.
And then as he concludes his letter to Timothy, he gives him a charge that he should flee
from sin and follow after righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, and gentleness, that
he should fight the good fight of faith.
And he says, I give this charge to you, Timothy, in the sight of God who gives life to everything
and of Christ Jesus who while testifying before Pontius Pilate made the good confession.
I charge you to keep this command without spot or blame until the appearing of our Lord
Jesus Christ, which God will bring about in his own time.
God the blessed and holy ruler and only ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone
is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light whom no one has seen or can see, to
whom, to him rather, be honor and might forever, amen.
With that doxology I'd like for us to bow in prayer.
The spiritual nature of God is more than just an academic subject.
And I hope that you've received more tonight than just facts about what God is like and
that you sense the awesomeness of God's person and that will draw you to worship Him in spirit
and in truth.
But as we consider what God is like and the fact that he knows all and is everywhere present,
it also is a time of examination of our hearts and if tonight there is sin in our lives.
And I want to focus now upon the kind of sin that is most grievous, the sin of attitude.
If there are attitudinal sins in our lives, impure thoughts, rebellious thoughts, selfish
ideas, self-pity, all of these things are sin and need to be confessed.
May God help us to do that, that we then may worship Him.
Father, we are struck with the awesomeness of our subject tonight.
And having just begun to understand your spiritual nature, I pray that there will be at least
some of us who will go on in our thinking this week, in our Bible study, in our meditation,
to probe further what this means and how it applies to us and what the implications are.
For all of us, I too would pray that you will teach us to worship you as we ought, in spirit
and in truth.
Grant this, I pray, in Jesus' name.
Amen.
Grateful for your presence tonight.
And again, I want to encourage as many of you as possible can to stay with us, even
if only for a few moments.
Come downstairs to get to know one another and also Bob and Cindy.
Bob, why don't you slip on out now, if you will, please.
And Cindy, I don't see you, but wherever you are, thank you.
If you'll go with him, go on downstairs.
We'll be down there in just a second.
Would you stand with me, please?
And let's bow together in prayer as we bring this service to its conclusion.
God, it humbles us that the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us, for we know what we're
like.
We thank you that even while we were yet sinners, that Christ came into the world and died for
our sins, so that we could be forgiven, made alive in Him, have eternal life, and dwell
forever with you in your presence.
Now, God, may that hope that we have be an encouragement to us this week in our pilgrimage,
and make us sensitive to people around who are hurting and empty and who need the reality
of life in Christ.
And give us the burden, the impetus, the courage to speak to them, to share with them the good
news about our Lord.
Make us a blessing this week to all of those around.
In Jesus' name we pray, amen.
Good night and God bless you each one.