“Who is God?” is probably the hardest possible question to answer. If someone started talking about him from the first day of creation and didn’t stop until the end of time, they would still not cover every last detail about God. God is infinite: He has no limits and goes on forever in every direction! There’s not enough paper in the universe to write a book that explains everything about God. And even if there was, there isn’t enough time to write it all down!

So instead of trying to answer this question by listing everything there is to know about God, we’ll focus on what kind of being he is. A “being” is someone who exists. God, humans, angels – we are all examples of beings. We exist. We are real. So how is the being of God different from a human being?

John 4:24 says, “God is spirit.” A simple way to describe a spirit is “a being without a body.” A spirit being is just as real as you or me, but they don’t have a body. Like God, angels are also spirits. However, as we said, God is an infinite spirit. His being stretches forever far out into each and every direction.

God exists as surely as you and I do – he’s absolutely 100% real! But as a spirit, God is not made up of stuff you can see or touch. He doesn’t have a body. He doesn’t have skin or bones or a nose or even a hallux (that’s the fancy science word for your big toe). And because he isn’t made up of stuff, he’s invisible (1 Tim. 1:17). We can’t see him with our eyeballs. The Bible does describe a few special times God did something to make himself visible to his people. But most of the time, he’s hidden from our sight.

Human beings have often had a hard time with the fact that God is an invisible spirit. It’s frustrating not to be able to see or touch the God we worship! Sadly, God’s people have sometimes even made images, visible statues of our invisible God. But this is a terrible idea – it breaks the second of the Ten Commandments, which says, “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them” (Ex. 20:4-5). No statue of wood, stone, or metal could possibly compete with the greatness of our glorious – yet invisible – God!

Instead of trying to make our invisible God visible by building statues, God had a much better idea. He sent his Son into our world. Jesus took on a flesh-and-bone body and lived among us. He was every bit as human as you and me. Colossians 1:15 describes Jesus as “the image of the invisible God.” Jesus was God in human form, the visible God in a flesh-and-bone body, complete with two halluxes!

John 4:24; 2 Cor. 3:17; 1 Tim. 1:17