Doctrine of God (Part 11): God as Personal Being

C.  God as Personal Being

1.  To sum up midway through our study of the divine attributes, You will remember I said that the God of the Bible is both infinite and yet also personal. We've been looking at some of the ways in which God is infinite. In this respect, there is a great chasm between God and the rest of creation including man and the animals and plants and inorganic material. We've seen that God is self-existent, necessary, eternal, omnipresent, and immutable. If we want to meditate on something that will expand our minds, think on God. To return to Charles Spurgeon's words with which we began: “The highest science, the loftiest speculation, the mightiest philosophy which can ever engage the attention of a child of God is the name, the nature, the person, the work, the doings, and the existence of the great God whom he calls his Father.”

God is an infinite being that stretches our mind beyond its mundane limits.

Now we want to turn to talk about God's attributes which he has in virtue of being a personal being.  When we come to talking about God as personal we find man as made in the image of God as being on God's side of the chasm. Then the rest of creation is separated from God and man in that the remaining creatures in the world are not persons in the way God and man are.

Many people that I've talked to don't have trouble conceiving of God as an infinite being. That seems intuitively correct.  But many people have trouble thinking that God can be both infinite and personal. They seem to think that somehow personhood excludes infinity – that God cannot be personal if he is also infinite. It seems to me that that is simply an unjustified assumption. God possesses all of the attributes of personhood that we do, whether these are intellectual attributes, emotional attributes, volitional attributes. But he possesses them to an infinite degree whereas we have them only to a finite degree. In that sense these attributes are communicable. They can be shared by both God and man to different degrees. Thus man is a person fundamentally because God is personal. It is because who God is that we are also persons.

2. Incorporeality

Let's take a look at the first of the attributes of God that we want to speak of in terms of his personhood. The first one is God's incorporeality. Let's look at some scriptural data pertinent to this attribute.

1. God is spirit. 1 John 4:24. Jesus says, “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.” So God is a spiritual being. He is not a physical being. He is a being which is spirit.

2. God is omnipresent. We don't need to look at these verses again but just refer back to what we already said. God is not spatially located in the way that a physical object is. Rather, God is omnipresent. That will entail his incorporeality.

3. God is indiscernible to the five senses. He cannot be perceived by the five senses. 1 Timothy 6:16, speaking of Jesus Christ, the Lord of Lords, “who alone has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light whom no man has ever seen or can see. To him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen.” God cannot be seen and never has been seen. Also 1 Timothy 1:17 says, “To the King of ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be power and glory for ever and ever. Amen.” So God is said by the Scriptures to be invisible. I think that would encompass not merely eyesight, but also being able to feel God or smell God or use any of the other five senses to apprehend God. God is not a physical object that is discernible by the five senses.

4. The Old Testament forbids making images of God. Exodus 20:4-5a, “You shall not make for yourself a graven image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them and serve them.” Here it is prohibited to make images of God that would be used in worship.[1]

Look at Deuteronomy 4:15-16 for the rationale behind this Prohibition:

Therefore take good heed to yourselves. Since you saw no form on the day that the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire, beware lest you act corruptly by making a graven image for yourselves, in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female.

So God is not to be portrayed in paintings, in statuary, in any sort of visual image. Any sort of image, however beautiful, however artistically inspiring, will diminish who God is by portraying him in some necessarily finite, limited, corporeal way. God is not to be pictured in any sort of way, according to the Scriptures.

5. At the same time, nevertheless, it is true that the Bible will often describe God in bodily terms. Psalms 18:6-10 gives us an example:

In my distress I called upon the Lord;
    to my God I cried for help.
From his temple he heard my voice,
    and my cry to him reached his ears.

Then the earth reeled and rocked;
    the foundations also of the mountains trembled
    and quaked, because he was angry.
Smoke went up from his nostrils,
    and devouring fire from his mouth;
    glowing coals flamed forth from him.
He bowed the heavens, and came down;
    thick darkness was under his feet.
He rode on a cherub, and flew;
    he came swiftly upon the wings of the wind.

Now here God is described by the psalmist in very graphic bodily terms. He has ears. He has nostrils. He is like a fire-breathing monster who rides on the cherubs through the clouds. At the same time that Israel is commanded not to make images of God yet you have these very physicalistic descriptions of God in the Psalms. We might well wonder what is going on here.

6. Moreover (this is the next point), there are, in the Old Testament and throughout the Scriptures, visions of God described – so-called theophanies – where people see God. These are often in bodily terms. For example, Exodus 33:20-23. Here Moses is asking to see the glory of God. God says to him that he will show Moses his glory, but he says,

“But,” he said, “you cannot see my face; for man shall not see me and live.” And the Lord said, “Behold, there is a place by me where you shall stand upon the rock; and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.”

Here God describes himself as having a face and hands and even a back that Moses can look at! God is described in very human terms here as having some sort of a body that Moses is allowed to glimpse. But Moses cannot see God's face.

What are we to make of this scriptural data? On the one hand we have the clear prohibitions against any kind of images of God, and also the affirmation that God is omnipresent, that he is spirit – not of the order of material or physical things. Yet we also have these descriptions of God in very graphic bodily terms and these theophanies – these visions of God – in terms of bodily images.

In our lesson we have been thinking about the attribute of God’s incorporeality, or God’s not being a body. In our survey of the scriptural data concerning God’s incorporeality we saw that God is a spirit, that God is omnipresent, that God is invisible, and that images of God as corporeal objects are forbidden. In all of these ways the Bible goes to support the idea that God is an incorporeal being, not a material or physical being.

Nevertheless, we also saw that the Scriptures are filled with anthropomorphic descriptions of God. The Scriptures speak of God’s arms, hands, eyes, ears, and so forth. It is not simply that these bodily parts are attributed to God, but even activities like God’s seeing the distress of his people or God’s hearing their cry are anthropomorphic descriptions, since God doesn’t literally have eyeballs that receive photons and so give him visual images of things to see nor does he have eardrums on which sound waves can impinge so that he could hear things in that literal sense. The Scripture is replete with these sorts of anthropomorphic descriptions of God.

Moreover, we also saw that people sometimes experienced visions of God which are corporeal in nature. These are called theophanies. In these, God is usually seen in some sort of corporeal form, perhaps sitting on a throne for example.

So we’ve got scriptural data that on the one hand clearly implies and says that God is a spiritual being – an incorporeal being. Yet you have these corporeal descriptions of God in the Bible, and you also have these visionary experiences of God as a corporeal being. So how should we make sense of this material?

I think that the data that we surveyed demand that we think of God as incorporeal, as immaterial, non-physical. There is simply no way of getting around those clear biblical passages that indicate that God transcends matter and energy and has created all the material things there are. So he is not himself a material object that has a body. How do we understand then these anthropomorphic descriptions of God and these theophanies of God in corporeal terms? I would say that the corporeal descriptions of God in the Bible are metaphorical, not literal. They are not to be taken literally. I would give two arguments in support of this interpretation.

1. These descriptions serve a clear literary purpose. For example, when the Scriptures speak of the arm of the Lord, they are talking about God’s power. When they speak of God’s eyes, they are talking about God’s being all-knowing. When the Scriptures speak of God’s ears, it is talking about his attentiveness to certain persons. All of these corporeal descriptions have a literary purpose. In the New Bible Dictionary article on the word “face” this is especially well-described. This is how the New Bible Dictionary treats the term “face” when it is ascribed to God.

The Hebrew word is used in many English senses. The face of a person became synonymous with his presence. Metaphorically, determination could be shown by “setting one’s face.” Determined opposition was made by “withstanding someone to his face.” Intimacy and understanding were conveyed by the phrase “face-to-face.” This phrase has, of course, passed into English, as has also the expression “his face fell.”

Obviously, such expressions are not to be understood literally. It would be inept to think that the expression “his face fell” meant that his face dropped to the ground somehow. Rather, it expressed his being disheartened or disappointed in something.

The Unger’s Bible Dictionary also says with respect to God’s face:

Applied to God, it denotes his presence. In such phrases as “seeing the face of the Lord” or “the face of the Lord is set against them that do evil” or “their cry came before the face of the Lord” it is evidently all one with God’s manifested presence.

So a correct reading of the Scriptures makes clear their literary purpose and hence their metaphorical rather than literal nature.

A good example of this is in 1 Peter 3:12: “The eyes of the Lord are upon the righteous, and his ears are open to their prayer. But the face of the Lord is against those that do evil.” Clearly, it would be inept to try to interpret those passages literally; that somehow the eyeballs of God are sitting on top of the righteous people or that the face of the Lord is up against those that do evil. Clearly the eyes and the ears and the face of the Lord here are meant as literary figures of speech.

2. The second reason I think that we should understand these expressions to be metaphorical is that if you take them literally then they would be inconsistent with each other because God is differently described in these anthropomorphic passages. In some passages, God is described as a fire-breathing monster,. which is surely not the way we are to understand God.

Moreover, we could ask the question, if we take them literally, then where is God? If God is a physical body, where is he? According to the Scriptures God fills heaven and Earth. Therefore he cannot be in any physical place. He cannot be somewhere. He cannot be a physical body.

Therefore I think it is obvious that we should understand these anthropomorphic descriptions of God in a metaphorical way rather than a literal way.

What then about the theophanies – the visions of God in corporeal terms? I think that we should understand these visions to be mental projections of the percipient’s mind. It is not as though he is seeing something external to his mind. Rather, God, in giving him a vision, has caused him to project a mental image. It is a projection of his own mind and therefore not something that is to be taken literally as real.

Visions of this sort are very common in the Bible. Let’s just look at the book of Acts to see several examples of New Testament visions. First, Acts 10:10-16. What we have described here is Peter’s vision of a sheet being lowered from heaven that is filled with various kinds of animals. It says in Acts 10:10:

And he became hungry and desired something to eat; but while they were preparing it, he fell into a trance and saw the heaven opened, and something descending, like a great sheet, let down by four corners upon the earth. In it were all kinds of animals and reptiles and birds of the air. And there came a voice to him, “Rise, Peter; kill and eat.” But Peter said, “No, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean.” And the voice came to him again a second time, “What God has cleansed, you must not call common.” This happened three times, and the thing was taken up at once to heaven.

Here I think it is very evident that this is not a literal seeing of a sheet full of animals in the external world that other people passing by Peter’s house would have seen coming down from heaven. Peter was in a trance, it says, when he saw this. Therefore, we should not think that this is a huge tarpaulin of some sort filled with all of these clean and unclean animals bumping into each other and jostling to maintain their balance in this sheet being raised up and down. This is a mental projection that God has caused Peter to have to teach him a lesson about clean and unclean, preparing him for proclaiming the Gospel to Cornelius and his household, who would be regarded by Jews as unclean (being Gentile) and therefore not worthy to receive the Gospel. So God is giving him this vision to prepare for his proclamation of the Gospel to the Gentiles.

Turn back to Acts 7 for another example. Acts 7:55-57. This is Stephen’s vision of the exalted Christ as the Son of Man at his stoning. It says in Acts 7:55:

But he, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God; and he said, “Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing at the right hand of God.” But they cried out with a loud voice and stopped their ears and rushed together upon him. [And he was stoned.

Again, this was a purely private vision that Stephen alone had. The people standing around saw nothing. Stephen had this himself. Its non-literal nature is also evident in that he sees the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God, which is itself an anthropomorphic description of God that serves a literary purpose. That is why this vision is not counted among the resurrection appearances of Christ. This was not a resurrection appearance story. This was a visionary story. It was a vision of the exalted Christ that Stephen had that God caused Stephen to project.

Another example in the book of Acts comes in chapter 16. Acts 16:9-10. This is Paul’s famous Macedonian call to come and preach the Gospel in Macedonia. It says in Acts 16:9:

And a vision appeared to Paul in the night: a man of Macedonia was standing beseeching him and saying, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” And when he had seen the vision, immediately we sought to go on into Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.

Here, again, God causes Paul to have this vision of a man in Macedonia inviting them to come and preach the Gospel there. It is a visionary seeing.

Finally, Acts 22:17-18. Here Paul is recounting his experience of coming to faith in Christ. After his baptism he says in Acts 22:17: “When I had returned to Jerusalem and was praying in the temple, I fell into a trance and saw him saying to me, ‘Make haste and get quickly out of Jerusalem, because they will not accept your testimony about me.’” Here Paul is, again, in an entranced state, and he has a vision of Jesus warning him to get out of the city. This is not another resurrection appearance of Christ. This is not a bodily, corporeal appearance of Christ. This is an entranced vision of Christ which Paul has that serves the purpose of warning him to get out of Jerusalem.

These kinds of visions are well known in the Bible. When we read these stories of theophanies – seeing God – these are visionary experiences, mental projections of the percipient, that God causes them to have in order to teach them some significant lesson.

These theophanies of God serve the purpose of manifesting God’s glory. Look at Exodus 33:18. This is the story we read in our last lesson of Moses’ asking to see God and God granting him a sort of diminished vision of God’s glory. This is in Exodus 33:18: “Moses said, ‘I pray thee, show me thy glory.’” Then God says, I will do so but you shall not see my face; you will only see my back. And he gives him a diminished vision of the glory of God. This serves the purpose of manifesting God’s glory to the percipient. Compare what the author of the book of Hebrews says about Moses’ experience in Hebrews 11:27. Speaking of Moses it says, “By faith he left Egypt, not being afraid of the anger of the king; for he endured as seeing him who is invisible.” That is an interesting expression, isn’t it? God is invisible, the author of Hebrews affirms. He cannot be seen. But Moses endured as seeing him who is invisible. He had had this vision of God. He was strengthened and was therefore able to endure as though he had seen God himself, who cannot be seen because he is invisible.

Another example would be Isaiah 6:1-3 where Isaiah sees God in his glory in the temple:

In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and his train filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim; each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said:

“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory.”

Here, again, God’s holiness is manifested in this corporeal vision of God upon a throne that Isaiah receives. It is a manifestation of God’s holiness that causes then, of course, Isaiah to feel conviction of his own sin and inadequacy.

Finally, for a New Testament example, look at Revelation 4. The whole chapter here is a vivid vision of God in the throne room. We won’t read the whole chapter, but as you look at Revelation 4 you see that John sees a throne in heaven and he sees someone sitting on the throne. This person, he says, appeared like jasper and carnelian and around the throne was a rainbow that looked like an emerald. So this person looked like a sort of mineral object as though it were a person that was made out of some kind of precious mineral that reflected the light. “From the throne issue flashes of lightning, and voices and peals of thunder” and so forth. Then around the throne are these creatures full of eyes in front and behind. They had these strange appearances. These living creatures then fall down before the throne and they cry “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come!” Then they describe how the elders cast their crowns before the throne singing “Worthy art thou, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for thou didst create all things, and by thy will they existed and were created.” Here you have a vision that John has of God on his throne described in corporeal terms, very vivid with all of these strange creatures and so forth. This serves to declare the glory of God – his holiness and his greatness as the creator of all things. These theophanies serve the purpose of manifesting God’s glory and holiness and greatness to those who receive them.

So I think that we are not to understand these visions literally. The whole book of Revelation in particular is just full of these sorts of images. Think of the lamb that is full of eyes all over him slain before the foundation of the world. These other sorts of creatures and monsters and so forth. The whole book is just replete with rich imagery that shouldn’t be understood in a literal way. Particularly, the idea of God’s throne is not something that should be thought of as a physical object upon which a humanoid being sits. The New Bible Dictionary says that the throne of God symbolizes dignity and authority. The one who sits upon the throne is the one who is invested with dignity and divine authority. Similarly, to be at the right hand of the person on the throne doesn’t mean to be seated literally at this person’s hand, but that is a position also of authority.

2.b Practical Application of God’s Incorporeality
We’ve been talking about divine incorporeality, that is to say that God is not a material body but rather is spiritual. We come now to some practical application of this attribute to our lives. What practical difference does it make (or ought it to make) that God is incorporeal? Three things come to mind.

1. Most fundamentally, it means that that which is ultimate is not material. The importance of this, I think, is hard to overestimate. That which is ultimate in life is not material. Rather, ultimate reality is spiritual, specifically personal. God is a personal spiritual being. So ultimate reality is personal and spiritual.

What that implies therefore is that the locus of value is persons. Value is invested principally in persons, whether these be divine persons of the Godhead or human persons created in his image. By contrast, things have value only in relationship to persons. This is the distinction between something’s having intrinsic versus extrinsic value. Persons have intrinsic value. That is to say, they are ends in themselves. They are intrinsically valuable in and of themselves. Things have only extrinsic value insofar as they serve the ends of persons. So, for example, a person is intrinsically valuable, created in God’s image. It doesn’t matter how gifted that person is, how useful he is to society. That person is intrinsically valuable simply because he is a person. By contrast a material thing like a whiteboard or a podium or a hammer has extrinsic value in that they serve purposes of human beings and therefore have a value insofar as they serve us. But if there were no human persons in existence these things would have no value. Their extrinsic value would simply evaporate. Therefore, persons are the locus of value. They have intrinsic value as opposed to mere extrinsic value.

Think of what that implies. That means that one person is worth more than the entire material universe put together. You are worth more in God’s sight than the rest of the entire material universe taken together. What an incredible thought

How, then, ought we to conduct ourselves in life? It means that we need to love people and use things, not vice versa. Of course the temptation for us sinful persons is to love things and use people. That is an utter inversion of the proper order of things. Rather, we ought to love persons as intrinsically valuable and use things which have extrinsic value, but not to use people for our ends and to devote our lives to loving things. What are the two greatest commandments that God has given in Scripture? They are to love the Lord your God with all your soul, with all your strength, with all your might, and to love your neighbor as yourself. It is loving persons (whether divine or human) that comprise the whole moral duty of man.

This fact that God is incorporeal, that ultimate reality is spiritual, I think is revolutionary and ought to affect the way we live in a very fundamental way. That leads to my second point of application.

2. It implies that therefore we ought to have a spiritual focus in life and not a material focus. Our focus in life should be spiritual rather than material. Look at Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6:19-21. I think these ought to be the theme for all of us as Christians. Jesus says,

Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

Our focus should not be on these material things but rather on spiritual things. That focus will then guide our lives. So in Matthew 6:33 Jesus sums it up by saying, “Seek first the Kingdom of God and its righteousness and all these things shall be yours as well.” Our primary focus in life should be on seeking the Kingdom of God and the righteousness that belongs to it, and then to trust God for our material needs.

The author C. P. Snow once remarked that the worst thing that could happen in the world would not be worldwide famine. He said the worst thing that could happen in the world would be there would be worldwide famine, and we in the West would watch it on television. That remark, I think, is very convicting. When you think of the material prosperity that we enjoy, we need to ask ourselves, “Are we focusing on material prosperity and accumulating goods, or are we doing what Jesus said – laying up treasures in heaven rather than these transitory things?” Where are our hearts? They should not be on material things but on spiritual things and on the Kingdom of God.

3. This implies that our most important needs are not physical but rather are spiritual. Paul gave the following advice to his disciple Timothy in 1 Timothy 4:7b-8. He said to Timothy, “Train yourself in godliness; for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come.” Here Paul doesn’t say that bodily exercise has no value, but what he does say is that compared to godliness bodily exercise or bodily training is of secondary importance. Bodily exercise, being fit and healthy, holds promise for this life, but godliness, he says, has promise not only for this life but for the life to come, which will be everlasting life. So we need to train ourselves in godliness.

Similarly, in 1 Corinthians 9:25 Paul makes this athletic comparison: “Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath [an Olympic wreath, a garland], but we an imperishable.” We train ourselves in godliness because we have an imperishable reward in the life to come. Now think of how much time we lavish upon our physical bodies. Working out. Trying to eat right. Dressing sharp. The whole cosmetics industry. Hair salons and nail salons. We do so much to try to make our physical body be in appearance all that we would like it to be. But how much time by comparison do we spend on our soul? On nurturing our spiritual self, our spiritual lives? Do we exercise this same sort of rigor and discipline that the athlete does in his bodily training when it comes to training our souls in Bible study, in prayer, in corporate worship, in other spiritual disciplines? I think that we need to remind ourselves that ultimately our most important needs are not our physical needs. We shouldn't neglect those, but nevertheless we need to attend to our spiritual needs and the nurture and care of our souls because this is going to have promise for the life to come.

So I think you can see the fact that God is spirit and not corporeal is just a fundamental factor in the Christian world and life view and ought to impact how we live.