DOES GOD HAVE A BODY?

Colleen Tinker, Feature

By Colleen Tinker

 

Again this week I’m sharing a response to a letter we received a couple of weeks ago. The letter asked very good questions about the Trinity—questions which are not surprising given our deceptive, tri-theistic, Adventist understanding of the Godhead.

Essentially the letter asked: does the Father have a physical form, or is he just a sentient bundle of energy from which a physical manifestation called the Son performed creation? Is the Holy Spirit actually a third person, or God Himself just working among us?

Below is our response to these questions about the nature of the Trinity.

 

A mystery

The mystery of the Trinity cannot be fully explained. It is a mystery which we have to agree to hold loosely because we are not equipped to fully understand it. We are bound by time and three dimensions, and God gives us life in Him and ushers us into eternal life where these mysteries are real, but we are still bound in a mortal body and cannot fully comprehend them.

The Lord is One (Deut. 6:4). Both Testaments are full of this truth.The New Testament, however, reveals the mystery more clearly by identifying three Person who comprise, or express, the One God. They are not just various manifestations of God; they are distinct Persons, and we see them clearly at Jesus’ baptism: we hear God’s voice, we see the Son, and we see the manifestation of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove. There are Three who are One. They share SUBSTANCE. All the attributes of God are equally in each of them, all the time.

Nevertheless, the Persons of the Trinity all have roles that differ from each other, and Jesus is God the Son whom the Father sent to take on human flesh and to bear the sins of the human race and to die the required death for human sin that His own law demanded.

The Holy Spirit is another One…in John 14 through 16 Jesus teaches much about the Holy Spirit whom He and the Father would send after He returned to the Father. Jesus speaks of the Holy Spirit as a separate person, and He refers to Him as “HE” in John 14:16-18: “I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever; that is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not see Him or know Him, but you know Him because He abides with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.”

Jesus often speaks as if the Spirit and the Father are separate, which they are, and yet as if they are indivisible from Him—which they also are. He continues in John 14:19–21: “After a little while the world will no longer see Me, but you will see Me; because I live, you will live also. In that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you. He who has My commandments and keeps them is the one who loves Me; and he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and will disclose Myself to him.”

He even says in John 14:23, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our abode with him.” 

 

Acting together

There are three Persons, and they all act together for our salvation, sanctification, and perseverance. We cannot separate them from each other because they all share the work of our salvation, but they are separate persons with separate roles. 

John 4:24 is clear that God is Spirit. God does not have a body. Jesus did not have a body before becoming incarnate. His incarnation (the word means taking on flesh…carne is “meat”) was the mystery that shook the universe: God the Son took a body and became one with His creatures. But GOD is Spirit. 

Jesus clearly articulates that the Holy Spirit is a different One from Him and from the Father, and His job is to teach us truth and to testify of Jesus (Jn. 15:26-27). Jesus said He would “teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you” (Jn. 14:26). 

The New Testament surprisingly reveals that all three Persons of the Trinity are at work in every facet of our salvation and growth. For example, 1 Corinthians 12:4–6 names all three as equipping us with spiritual gifts: “Now there are varieties of gifts, but THE SAME SPIRIT. And there are varieties of ministries, and THE SAME LORD. There are varieties of effects, but THE SAME GOD who works all things in all persons.” 

Isn’t that amazing? All three Persons of the Trinity are involved in gifting to us our gifts of the Spirit! They are equally involved and represented by our gifts.

Now look at Ephesians 3:18 where again we find all three mentioned together, working in us by means of their different roles: “…for through Him [the Son] we both [Jews and gentiles] have our access in one Spirit to the Father.”

And there’s the Trinity again—at work in us to make us new people, alive in Christ, with full access to the Father because of the Spirit uniting us in the body of Christ!

Or see Ephesians 3:14–19: “For this reason I bow my knees before THE FATHER, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His SPIRIT in the inner man, so that CHRIST may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of CHRIST which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of GOD.”

We are not told how the Trinity “works” or exists. God is outside physical dimensions, and we are limited to three dimensions plus time. We are not permitted to understand. Yet we are ushered into the unknowable reality through our new birth, and the three Persons of God are all at work concurrently, in our salvation, in our sanctification, in God’s sovereign will and plans. 

 

Our life and identity

Even though we are limited by our mortality, the eternal triune God makes us alive with His life, seals us with His Holy Spirit, reconciles us to God, and hides us literally with Christ in God. God is Three-In-One, and we are His adopted and born-again heirs. 

He is not one “energy ball” with projections. He is One Being but in Three Persons, all of whom share their work. 

The Holy Spirit IS GOD as fully as is the Father and the Son. He indwells us when we believe and makes us one with the triune God. In fact, while the Holy Spirit seals us, the Father and the Son also make their dwelling in us!

The Body of Christ, the church of believers who have been born again, is real. We are Jesus’ body because we are transferred into His kingdom, made alive, and indwelt by His Spirit!

The Persons have distinct roles, but they share one WORK and PURPOSE and WILL. They also share SUBSTANCE. Each one has every attribute of God in Him.

“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deut. 6:4). 

Colleen Tinker
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5 comments

  1. I read this and I just wanted to make a comment. In the part ‘Acting Together’, you said, “Jesus did not have a body before becoming incarnate.” I looked up Strong’s Concordance these verses, Genesis 18:1-3 and here is what I found. “And the LORD (Jehovah, noun-Deity) appeared (raah, parse (Niphal) to appear, present oneself, to be visible) unto him in the plains of Mamre and he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day.” Genesis 18:1. “And he lift up (nasa) his eyes and looked and lo (raah. parse (Qal) to see) three men (enowsh- masculine noun, mortal man, mortan man, person, mankind) stood by him: and when he say them (raah, parse (Qal) he ran to meet them from the tent door and bowed himself to the ground.” Genesis 18:2. Continue on to read Genesis 18:8 and you will read that Abraham prepared a meal for the three me and they ate it. Seems to me, one of the men was pre carnate Jesus and the other two were angels. So yes, Jesus did have a body which could be seen and could eat just like after His resurrection. In Genesis 1:26 it says, “Let us make man in our image”. Blessings.

    1. Anne, the fact that Jesus likely appeared as the pre-incarnate Christ prior to His incarnation does not mean that he had a permanent, visible body. He took on a form that could be seen, just as those angels did. But Angels do not have bodies, and God does not have a body.

      Hebrews 1:14 defines angels this way: “Are they not all ministering spirits sent out to render service for the sake of those who will inherit salvation?”

      They are “spirits”, not physical bodies. God allows them to take visible shapes that can interact with us when He asks them to, but that is not their natural state nor their stated nature. They are spirits.

      Likewise, John 4:24 defines the “substance” of God this way: “God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.”

      In other words, God is SPIRIT, not visible body. We who are physical humans have spirits as well; that is the part of us that worships God as He designed us to worship, just as Jesus stated in the text above.

      God made us in His image not physically but spiritually. Adventism never told us that God made us in His image SPIRITUALLY. God is Spirit, and that identity and nature applies to the entire Trinity. If we say that Jesus had an eternal body, then we make Him less than or not fully God. God is Spirit; the three Persons of the Trinity all share the exact same substance and nature.

      The miracle of Jesus’ incarnation is exactly that: God who is Spirit took on—and he did so for the rest of eternity future—human flesh just like His human creatures.

      The Bible does not ever say that Jesus had a body before His incarnation, just as it never says angels have bodies. Adventists don’t really have trouble imagining angels being invisible but able to take on physical shapes when necessary, yet they cannot comprehend the idea that Jesus also took on physical form prior to the incarnation when necessary. It would certainly not be harder for Jesus to take on a temporary form than for angels to do so!

      We are made in God’s image by having will, personality, conscience, and spirit. God does not have a body, even though Ellen White said He does. (And she said that the Father had a form like the lovely Jesus had.) The Bible never describes God as physical.

      Significantly, however, Mormonism says God the Father and the Son both have bodies.

      Jesus was never an angel nor a physical creature before He emptied Himself of His glory and took on human flesh; the fullness of deity dwelt in Him bodily. He is a singularity, an unrepeatable miracle. God who is Spirit, our Creator, took on a human body in order to pay for human sin and redeem and reconcile us to Himself!

      God, who created us and loves us, appeared in history to humans in visible forms that functioned and interacted with His creatures…just as angels have sometimes done. But bodies are not the natural state of either angels or of our triune God!

  2. I was shocked when I first found out that Adventism teaches that God has a body—a physical body like a mam’s. (Of what skin color, by the way? If he has a form “like the lovely Jesus” then I guess he appears Jewish.) What I really can’t get my head around is the idea that if God has always had an anthropomorphic body, then God did not design the human body. He discovered it, in himself, and copied it in men and modified it for women. The design, then, was not his idea, but was rather a form that existed from eternity past. Where did it come from? What is the origin of the blueprint for the human form? Why five fingers on each hand? Why thirty-two teeth? It is impossible to believe in the self-existence of anything physical.

    You must either be able to show that such a morphology is “necessary”, meaning that, due to the very nature of deity itself, it could not have been anything different than what it is, or you are left to believe it is arbitrary. Moreover, since physical objects require physical space, it means that dimensional space was not created by God either, but is as eternal as he. This teaching destroys divine simplicity. The true God is without body or parts. He is a single essence, not made of components, and is thus necessarily spirit. (The three divine Persons are not “parts” of God, as if each made up one-third of the whole divine essence.) The true God is immense (immeasurable, not bound to a location in space), omnipresent, invisible.

    Finally, a comment on the incarnation. God, in the person of the Son, did on occasion assume visible, even human, form prior to the incarnation. But the incarnation was more than God taking on a human form or even a human body. In the incarnation, God took on human *nature.* This was not a mere matter of appearance. Here, the second person of the Trinity *became* human. He had a human soul. Thus, the second Person has two natures: divine and human. In respect to his divine nature, he is still spirit, immutable, immortal, invisible, omnipresent, impassable, and simple—the same yesterday, today, and forever. In respect to his human nature, he has a physical, flesh-and-bone body. That is, at least to me, as much a mystery as the Trinity itself!

    1. Thanks for your great post, Fuller1754! And thank you for articulating the mystery and amazing truth of the incarnation so clearly.

      You make such great points!
      Colleen

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