Spirit

Yeah, worked at NASA and everything. Could never get enough of space. I watched the 1969 moon landing on TV when I was eight years old, and I knew from that moment that I wanted to be an astronaut. His eyes lose their focus on your face, and as the minutes pass in silence, he looks out the subway window at the blank tunnel wall.

What was it like?

Like something out of a movie. You know that movie Interstellar?

Yeah, you know that movie Interstellar. You feel like you catch a whiff of baby powder just thinking about it. But you just nod.

At some point in that movie, they say that if you get close to a supermassive body ’ s gravity, well, time will slow down. And you sit

there, and you look back at the earth, at all of the blue and green, and maybe there ’ s a picture of someone in your pocket, like a loved

one that you haven

't seen in a while, and you wish, maybe, that you could stay there forever, suspended in this weird limbo between time and space and matter.

And you know, it made me think about things that I hadn

’t before. Like how we can look back at this earth, this little blue and green blob, in the middle of a tiny solar system in the middle of a tiny galaxy in the middle of a galaxy cluster in the middle of a supercluster in the middle of an ever-expanding, ever-changing, ever-eroding universe, and think that we are nothing more than a speck of dust?

It made me wonder how we can stand in this doorway, in this insignificant room that we call life, and not believe in something more. In something outside of time and space. In something powerful enough to grasp this universe, shaping it, moving it, holding it in the palm of a hand.

There are shivers wracking your frame at his words. You stay silent, slouched a little in your seat now, and before your eyes, there ’ s the blur of the tunnel beyond the subway window. It shakes you a little, imagining someone you haven ’t thought about in a long while—the feeling of a small fist in your hand, a warm presence on your lap. Maybe, you think to yourself, he ’ s somewhere in the ether. Maybe, you think to yourself, there was someone waiting for him on the other side of that black hole, larger than the limitations of the universe, reaching out to take him home. And something settles over you that feels a lot like peace.

God is Spirit

JOSH ANUMOLU

God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth. — John 4:24

When we say that God is spirit, we are not referring to the third person of the Trinity. Yes, one of the three persons of the Trinity is “the Holy Spirit, ” but we are referring to the fact that one of God’ s attributes is that He is a spirit—spirit by nature—in essence immaterial and cannot be contained or considered to be physical or material; rather, He transcends them in the spiritual world, in a mysterious way that we cannot understand.

While God is a being, He is not a human being. God has reason, morality, consciousness, and self-consciousness. In fact, the Bible speaks to the idea that these attributes find their ultimate expression in God.

But the spirit-ness of God presents a fundamental dilemma for humans in relating to Him.

How can humans relate to God at all? If God is spirit and humans are physical, how can we relate to each other? How can man know God? How can our existences ever intersect?

I' m glad you asked.

The whole of the Bible and Christianity with thousands of years of history and philosophy is dedicated to delving into this question, but for starters, it is essential to know who man is. Christian and biblical doctrine teaches us that humans are not solely physical, but that part of what it means to be human is to have a rational soul, which is spiritual.

In the creation account of Adam in Genesis 1, Jewish/Hebrew scholars have pointed out that Adam ’ s name comes from the Hebrew המדא (adamah), a noun meaning “ ground” from its reddish color (Strong ’ s #127), as Adam was brought forth from the earth and his blood was red. This implies that to be human is to be physical and biologically living. And the first syllable of Adam ' s name comes from āleph, which has connotations of being animal-like (it' s closely related to the word eleph, meaning ox). Yet the verb DMH, of which Adam ' s name is also composed, means to think—clearly contrasted with the natures of animals and inorganic matter. Adam, whose name literally means man, connotes that to be human is to have a physical body combined with a rational soul.

The aforementioned question and the difficulty it poses is also why the incarnation and works of Jesus Christ are wonderful and paradoxical beyond belief. The fundamental tension between God and us are in part metaphysical; how can a non–physical, eternal, spiritual holy being relate to physical, temporal, carnal, and yes, sinful beings?

The answer lies in Jesus Christ’ s dual nature.

Jesus Christ—God the Son, the divine Logos—became incarnate when He was conceived in the Virgin Mary, yet prior to that event in the human timeline, He did not have a human nature. Christians celebrate Christmas because of the miracle of the incarnation—the second person of the Trinity assuming humanity in addition to divinity.

“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who was tempted in every way that we are, yet was without sin ” (Hebrews 4:15 BSB). Jesus is our High Priest, the one through whom we access and relate to God. Christ is the representative of righteousness for all mankind, and for those who specifically approach God in His name, we have the confidence of being granted pure standing and of our requests in His name being granted (Zechariah 3, 1 John 5:14).

As Christ is described,

"He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation: for by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones, or dominions, or rulers, or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together " (Colossians 1:15–17 NASB).

And as the Athanasian Creed affirms, speaking about Jesus: “Although He is God and human, yet Christ is not two, but one. He is one, however, not by His divinity being turned into flesh, but by God' s taking humanity to Himself. He is one, certainly not by the blending of His essence, but by the unity of His person. For just as one human is both rational soul and flesh, so too the one Christ is both God and human.

So through Jesus the fundamental paradox that arises from a God who is spirit is resolved! It is only through Christ who is both fully man and God that all things can be reconciled to God.

In John

’ s Gospel we read the following exchange between Jesus and someone who was marginalized as a woman (gender), a Samaritan (ethnic, racial, cultural), and a serial adulterer (religious).