God is a Spirit

This week's questions

What is God? God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.

Question 4

Question 3 said that Scripture teaches first what we are to believe concerning God (last week). That first part of the catechism, Questions 4 to 38, now begins with God himself. The answer calls God a Spirit, and then lets three words, infinite, eternal and unchangeable, govern seven: his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth, the perfections the church calls the attributes of God. A story is often told that the Assembly could not find this answer until the young Scottish commissioner George Gillespie rose to pray and began with these words; the Assembly's records give it no support. Still, the answer reads well as a prayer.

God is a Spirit

The first proof text comes from a conversation at a well. A Samaritan woman asked Jesus whether worship belonged on her people's mountain or in Jerusalem (John 4:20), and he answered not with a place but with who God is:

God is Spirit, and His worshipers must worship Him in spirit and in truth.

John 4:24

The catechism's "a Spirit" follows the King James wording of this verse. Chrysostom, bishop of Constantinople, takes it to mean "that God is incorporeal; and that therefore He ought to be worshipped not with the body, but with the soul" Chrysostom. God has no body or parts; he is invisible, and no place contains him. Paul praises him as the King eternal, immortal and invisible (1 Timothy 1:17). That is why God is not to be pictured in images, as the catechism will teach under the second commandment (Questions 49 to 52). Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century Dominican friar, asked whether God is a body, cited this same verse, and answered: "Absolutely, it is true God is not a body" Summa Theologiae I.3.1.

Infinite, eternal, unchangeable

Infinite means without limit or measure. Even Job's friend Zophar, whose counsel God would later find wanting, knew that no one can "discover the limits of the Almighty" (Job 11:7), and the psalmist sings, "Great is our Lord, and mighty in power; His understanding has no limit" (Psalm 147:5). Eternal means without beginning or end. The second proof text is from a prayer of Moses that mourns how our days spring up like morning grass and wither by evening:

Before the mountains were born or You brought forth the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting You are God.

Psalm 90:2

Passing creatures find their dwelling place in the God who was there before the mountains. Unchangeable, God's immutability, means that he cannot become better or worse, and does not waver or take back his word. In the third proof text James calls him the Father of the heavenly lights, "with whom there is no change or shifting shadow" (James 1:17): the lights he made shift and cast shadows; their Maker does not. In January 1855 the young London Baptist pastor Charles Spurgeon preached on God's word through Malachi, "Because I, the LORD, do not change, you descendants of Jacob have not been destroyed" (Malachi 3:6), and offered it not as coldness but as comfort. Friends may fall away and fortunes fail: "Remember God is the same, whatever is removed" Spurgeon, The Immutability of God.

Because the three words govern all seven, God's justice, goodness and truth are each infinite, eternal and unchangeable. In another proof text the LORD passes before Moses and proclaims his name: compassionate, gracious, abounding in loving devotion and faithfulness, forgiving sin, and yet by no means leaving the guilty unpunished (Exodus 34:6-7). His justice is never without goodness, nor his goodness without truth. The Larger Catechism answers the same question with a longer list Larger Catechism, Q. 7, and the Belgic Confession (1561) of the continental Reformed churches calls God "the overflowing fountain of all good" Belgic Confession, Art. 1.

Christians today speak of ‘unchangeable’ in somewhat different ways. From the Fathers through Aquinas to the Lutheran and Reformed divines after the Reformation, the church long held that in his divine nature God knows neither change nor suffering; so the Westminster Confession calls him "without body, parts, or passions, immutable" WCF 2.1. On this view Scripture's words for his grief and compassion are human speech for how truly he deals with us. In the last century, though, a good number of theologians in several churches have said that God in his love shares the pain of those he made, reading Hosea's "My compassion is stirred!" (Hosea 11:8) in that light. Both sides confess that God never wavers in his faithfulness, and that the Son of God, in our flesh, truly suffered. What God is like, in the Christian Doctrine course, sets out these views and the other attributes; see also Does God change his mind? and Does God have feelings?

To ponder this week

Which word of Question 4 is hardest for you to believe about God in this week's circumstances, and what would trusting it change? John Calvin had little patience for "frigid speculations" about God's essence, and asked, "What avails it, in short, to know a God with whom we have nothing to do?" Calvin, Institutes 1.2.2 Question 4 is not a riddle but a place to lean. Take that one word into your prayers this week; Who is God? goes further.

Practice