God is Spirit. Jesus Christ said so in John 4:34, and He ought to know. Still, it’s an enigmatic thing to say, is it not? We’ve already defined “spirit” as nonphysical, or immaterial. And, of course, we’re in over our head. We don’t even understand all about our physical being much less our spiritual component. But that doesn’t mean we do not possess one. We do; we most definitely do. If you’ve any doubt about it now, it will be dissolved when you die.
Being a body and spirit duality, we are said to be “in the image and likeness of God.” We have a spirit because God is Spirit, and, in that, we are, in some fashion, like Him. When Christ said God is Spirit, in John 4, He is also asserting an amazing implication of this spirit-being God, and it is simply this: The spirit precedes and is superior in every way to the physical. All that is physical, including the stellar heavens, stars, earth, planets, universe if you will, plus any and all physical entities known or unknown were all created by that which, of course, preceded them and was spirit, not possessing itself any physicality. Yet, this Spirit-being called God brought into being all that was physical.
We all know about physical people doing things, making things, etc. But the staggering concept set forth by Scripture is that of Spirit creating all that is physical. This is precisely what is required by God being before all things and, thus, bringing all things into existence. The nonmaterial God who has always been, dwelt as that Being in eternity before and without anything physical ever having been brought into existence. Then, He created materiality, including space and time, neither of which existed before God created them because they were not needed. That which is pure spirit does not inhabit time or space. Those are needed only by that which is physical, and God is not physical. Christ said so. God is Spirit. Remember John 4:24?
Of course, this is all really awesome to contemplate, yet what else can we expect in dealing with an awesome God. Consider now, before there was anything…no earth, no heavens, no angels, no beings of any kind, and no matter, neither time nor space had ever been, yet there was God, the uncaused first cause. And He existed from eternity past in the form of Spirit, immaterial, nonphysical, in His Spirit existence. Then, when He has said to in the beginning created the heavens and the earth, materiality came into being along with time and space to accommodate that material substance. This requires the primacy and superiority of the spiritual over that which is physical. Spirit precedes matter, and Spirit is responsible for it.
CC-05-03
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