Category: Theology 101
Communicable Attributes
G. Spirit, Person.
"God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth."
Secular cynics and agnostics believe that they have solid grounds for rejecting, or at least questioning, God’s existence. They say that sufficient empirical evidence is lacking, that is, He cannot be seen, heard, measured and tested. Implicit (and in some cases, explicit) in their argument is the presupposition that nothing exists outside of nature (or if it does exist, it cannot be known). In other words, anything above nature, or supernatural, is ruled out of bounds.
Scripture explains why God’s essence resists human scrutiny, namely, because He is a spiritual being. Man’s eyes, ears, etc. are incapable of perceiving spirit. Now, we do not know exactly what a spirit is, but whatever it is, that’s what God is.
The Scripture also speaks of God as Him. This is the masculine personal pronoun. This does not mean that God is male, but it does mean that God is personal, i.e. a person. (In this age of feminism, it is noteworthy that God is never referred to with either the feminine or neuter pronouns.) We must be careful not to assign human personality traits to God as if He were just a glorified man. Nevertheless, God is a self-conscious, self-aware person. Although not identical to human personality, there is analogical similarity between God’s personhood and man’s. As a person, God has the capacity to think, to will, etc. He is not a blind fate, or an impersonal force. He is a he, not an it.