The God of what is called "Modern Philosophy" is "The Absolute," and by "The Absolute" is generally meant a cold abstraction and not a clear, definite and warm personality Who loves, grieves, suffers, and Who works intelligently for others. And oftentimes the God of modern philosophy is not only "_in_ all things" but _is_ all things and all things are God. Such a God is no God at all. Whereas the God of the Bible, as we shall see as we proceed, is a Divine Person who exists apart from the world which He has created and Who existed before the world He created, Who bears definite relations to the world He has made and Who works along definite and clearly revealed lines. So we come face to face with the question, What sort of a Being is the God of the Bible, the real God, the one true God, the God of Christianity, the only God Whom we should worship and love and obey? The Kaiser also talks much about God and his followers are fond of saying, "Gott mit uns," but if any one will carefully study the Kaiser's utterances it becomes plain that he does not mean by God the God of the Bible, the Christian God, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
First of all +"God is Spirit."+ This we read in our first text: John 4:24, +"God is Spirit."+ You will note that in your Bible, both the Authorised and Revised Versions, you read, +"God is a Spirit."+ But there is no indefinite article in the Greek language, and wherever it is necessary in the English translation to fit the English idiom, it has to be supplied, and it is supplied, in this case. But there is really no reason for supplying it here any more than there is for supplying it in 1 John 4:8 and translating, +"God is a Love,"+ or in 1 John 1:5 and translating +"God is a Light."+ The preferable translation is as I have given it: +"God is Spirit."+ This is a definition of the essential nature of God. What does it mean? Our Lord Jesus Himself has defined what is meant by "spirit" in Luke 24:39, where He is recorded as saying after His resurrection: +"See My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself; handle Me, and see, for a spirit not flesh and blood, as ye behold Me having."+ It is evident from these words of our Lord that _spirit_ is that which is contrasted to body. That is to say, spirit is incorporeal, invisible reality. To say, "God is Spirit" is to say that God is essentially incorporeal and invisible (cf. 1 Tim. 6:16), that God in His essential nature is not material but immaterial and invisible, but none the less real. This thought is also found in the very heart of that revelation of Himself which God made to Moses in the first division of the Old Testament. For example, we read in Deut. 4:15-18: +"Take ye therefore good heed unto yourselves; for ye saw no manner of form on the day that Jehovah spake unto you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire; (16) lest ye corrupt yourselves, and make you a graven image in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female, (17) the likeness of any beast that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged bird that flieth in the Heavens. (18) The likeness of anything that creepeth on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the water under the earth."+ This is a plain declaration way back fifteen centuries before Christ, of the _spirituality_ of God in His essential nature. God is essentially invisible spirit.