“God is a Spirit,” our Lord declared to the woman at the well. That is His divine nature. A body was prepared in the womb of the virgin Mary which God the Son took into union with His divine Person; but that body, like our bodies, was not pre-existing. He was “made like unto his brethren,” and it is certain that we were made in our entire human natures. We should not think that God is like creation. Paul told the Athenians, “We ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device” (Acts. 17.29). God’s nature is infinite, and all of creation is finite; so in that respect, if there were no other, creation differs fundamentally from the Creator.

God is undivided, pure spirit. We are not to assume that the Persons in the Godhead are parts of God. That which has parts admits the possibility of division, and there is no division within the Godhead, nor can there be any. Besides, if the Son of God were but one part of God, and “in him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily,” what of that fullness is left for the other parts?

God is not a God of passions. It is true that He is portrayed in the Scriptures as having emotions, but we must understand that this is the usage of what theologians call “anthropapathic” language, or that which describes God as having man’s emotions so that our limited minds can have some understanding of His nature. Man has passions. Our anger, our love, our desire, our hatred – all of them ebb and flow. We are full of compassion one moment and unconcerned the next. God does not have changeable passions, but attributes. He is a God of love, and that love is absolute and unvarying. It does not change, and indeed cannot change. God’s holiness cannot grow, for it is already as perfect as it can be; it cannot decrease, for to decrease in holiness would be for God to become imperfect. For God to have changeable emotions would make Him the most fearful of beings, much as the heathen viewed their gods. Jupiter or Zeus might change, and that possibility kept their subjects in fear. The heathen gods had human-like passions, but to portray Jehovah as having the mutability of humanity is to make him like us, and God is as far above us as the heavens are above the earth. “God is” what He is. We cannot strictly say that He “was” or that He “will be,” nor can we say that His attributes ebb and flow.