A God with a Body — Chapter 8

What Dake meant by “spirit,” what he meant by “invisible,” and why Israel saw no form

The Claim on the Table

Try to picture this. An entire nation stands at the bottom of a mountain. The mountain is on fire. God speaks out of the flames. Everybody hears it.

Forty years later, Moses circles back to that story. He could have told them to remember the thunder. He could have told them to remember the fire. Instead, he tells them to remember something they did not see.

Go back and read that a second time. The place where God did the most talking is the very place where Israel is told to remember that they saw nothing. No shape. No outline. No figure at all. And Moses tells them exactly why God arranged things this way. If you never saw a form, you will never be tempted to carve one.

Now lay that verse beside one of the books that shaped a generation of Pentecostal preachers.

God’s Plan for Man is Dake’s fifty-two-lesson course. It runs roughly a thousand pages. Lesson Four is titled “The Truth About God,” and it stretches from page 49 to page 66. It is the fullest treatment of God’s nature that Dake ever put in print.² And right there in the middle of the lesson, he comes out and says it.

That is the claim this chapter has to deal with. God the Father has a body. Not a figure of speech. Not a poetic way of saying something else. A real body, with real parts, a certain size, in one place at a time. And Dake says the proof is so plain that trying to interpret it would only get in the way.

I want to be honest about him right here at the top. Dake was not sneaking this in. He told you flat out what he believed, and he told you why. He thought the preachers of his generation had turned God into a fog. He wanted a God who was real, personal, and solid. I get that. I share part of it. The God of the Bible is no abstraction. Dake was right to push against that kind of thinking.

Most people who own a Dake Bible have never sat down and read Lesson Four all the way through. That is not a knock on them. It is a thousand-page course, and nobody’s life has room for all of it at once. But the notes in the margins of the Study Bible grew out of these lessons. The lessons say plainly what the margin notes simply take for granted. So this is where we need to look.

I am going to keep this chapter on one question. Does God the Father have a body? I am not going to argue here about how many separate beings Dake sees in the Godhead. Chapter 6 lays that out, and Chapter 7 answers it. I am not going to argue about whether a God with a body can be everywhere at once. That is Chapter 9’s job. Heaven as God’s material address belongs to Chapter 16. Right here, we are looking at the body itself, and at the two words Dake had to redefine in order to make the whole thing work. Those two words are “spirit” and “invisible.”

We will do this the way the book always does. His pages first. Then the Scriptures.

Why It Matters

You might wonder why the shape of God is worth a whole chapter. That is a fair thing to ask. Let me answer it before we get to the evidence.

Start with worship. Moses does not treat the no-form memory as a footnote. He treats it as a guardrail. Israel saw no shape, so Israel had no business making one.³ Every idol in the history of the world starts the same way. Somebody decides he knows what God looks like. Once God has an outline, He can be drawn. Once He can be drawn, He can be carved. The second commandment is not just a rule about art supplies. It is a rule about the imagination.

Now think about prayer. If God has a body, He is in a place. And if He is in a place, He is not in the other places. I am saving that argument for the next chapter, because it needs its own space. But you can already feel the tension. Think about where you were looking, in your mind, the last time you prayed at two in the morning.

Then think about Bethlehem. The New Testament treats the moment God took on a body as the turning point of the whole story. “The Word became flesh.” That sentence is news. It can only be news if it had not happened before. A Father who already had a body of His own makes the manger a smaller event than John says it is.

And then there is size. This is the part that catches most readers off guard the first time they run into it. Dake’s God is of ordinary size. He says it in print, and we will read the passage below. Sit with that for a moment. A God of ordinary size is a God you could stand beside. A God you could, at least in theory, measure with a tape.

It matters for one more reason, and this one is personal. The people I am writing for did not dream up a new doctrine of God. They inherited the old one. Their statements of faith say God is spirit and everywhere present. Their worship songs take it for granted on every line.⁴ I have never heard a congregation sing about the height of God. But I have heard, in a thousand services, that He is here. Right here. Filling the room.

So this is not a fight about decoration. Wherever you come down on the shape of God, you have come down on the doctrine of God.

Dake in His Own Words

Everything that follows comes from Lesson Four, quoted word for word. I have included the page numbers so you can check every line yourself. Where the scan broke a word, I fixed the break and noted it in the footnotes. Nothing else has been changed.

Exhibit 1: A Personal Body, Like Every Other Person

Dake opens Lesson Four with definitions. That is one of his better habits, and he deserves credit for it. He wants you to know what the words mean before the argument gets going. Here is how he defines the terms that carry the whole rest of the lesson.

Look at what that definition does. It puts God the Father in a single list with angels and people. Every person in the universe has a body. God the Father is a person. So God the Father has a body. The logic is clean. And it is exactly what he intended.

Notice the word “house.” For Dake, a body is the outward form in which the soul and spirit live. So God’s soul and spirit live inside God’s body. On this account, God is a being with an inside and an outside.

A few pages on, he tells you what is in that body. I want you to read this one for yourself, because any summary I could write would sound like I am exaggerating. It does not sound like an exaggeration once you see the words on the page.

That is not a devotional remark. It is an inventory. Back, front, heart, hands, fingers, nostrils, mouth, lips, tongue, feet, eyes, eyelids, voice, breath, ears, face, hair, head, arms, loins. And he finishes the list by saying he has not named them all, because God requires every single one of them “to be a person with a body.”

This was not something he tossed off. Dake advertised it early. Back in Lesson One, where he lists things his course promises to prove, he tells the student that God “has a spirit body, a personal soul, and a personal spirit,” that He eats, sits, walks, and rides, and that He “can do anything that man can do.” He even flags the payoff: “This will be proved fully in Lesson Four.”⁶ He carried the teaching into his prophecy work, too. In Revelation Expounded, written earlier in his career, he says that in the new creation “God the Father, Himself, will be in visible form before men,” and that the text “will not permit an interpretation of invisible dwelling.”⁷ This was not a passing idea. It runs the full length of his working life.

Exhibit 2: Men Have Seen It

A body that nobody has ever seen would be a strange kind of body. Dake knew that, so he brought witnesses.

The list goes on. Joshua, Gideon, Manoah and his wife, David, Job, Isaiah, Amos, Ezekiel, Daniel, Stephen, and John are all called as witnesses. In every case, Dake reads the account as a straightforward, physical sighting of God’s own body.

He knew this was not what the mainstream taught. He quotes the standard position right on the same page, word for word, from the doctrine books of his day. He tells us that God is described there as “incorporeal, invisible reality,” with “no body or parts like human beings,” and that the bodily language of Scripture is treated as “figures of speech and mere human expressions.”⁹ He states the position honestly. Then he answers it in nine words: “Such statements are foolish and unscriptural, to say the least.”

His own verdict comes on the next page. He does not leave anything to the imagination.

Exhibit 3: Of Ordinary Size, and in One Place

If God has a body, the body has to have dimensions. Dake follows that logic as far as it goes. Here is what he says.

Ordinary size. One place at a time. Localized, the same way you and I are localized. Those are his own words, and they come from a section he titles “God is Omnipresent.” What he does with the word “omnipresent” after writing that sentence is Chapter 9’s business, and I will leave it there. For now the point is simpler. The body he has given to God is a body with measurements.

He draws the comparison the other way, too. Man is not just made in God’s image in some moral or spiritual sense. On Dake’s page, man is a scale model.

Read that sentence one more time. The only difference is scale. God is the larger version. We are the smaller one.

Exhibit 4: What He Means by “Spirit”

Here is the hinge of the whole system. One verse stands right in Dake’s path, and he knows it. Jesus told a woman at a well that God is Spirit. If that word means what the church has always understood it to mean, the body doctrine falls apart on the spot.

So Dake redefines the word. He does not dodge the verse. He changes what “spirit” is made of.

Stay with that, because the whole thing turns on it. For Dake, a spirit is not a being without a body. A spirit is a being whose body is made of a finer grade of material. Spirit names the substance, not the absence of substance. It is a kind of matter, thinner than ours, governed by higher laws, but matter all the same.

Once you let him have that definition, John 4:24 stops being a problem and starts being a data point.

In other words: the verse tells you what God is made of. It does not tell you whether He has a shape. He handles Luke 24:39 the same way. When Jesus says a spirit does not have flesh and bones, Dake replies that Jesus only meant spirit bodies are not made of earthly flesh and bone. He did not mean they have no bodies at all.¹⁴

This is the same-words method at full strength, and it is worth calling out. Dake keeps the church’s sentence and swaps the church’s dictionary. He can say “God is Spirit” all day long, and mean the opposite of what the church has meant for two thousand years. Chapter 5 explains the method. Appendix D collects the vocabulary.

Exhibit 5: What He Means by “Invisible”

One more word stands in Dake’s path. Paul calls God invisible more than once. Dake has to deal with it, and he does, in a section of Lesson Four titled “The Invisibility of God.”

There it is. “Invisible” does not mean unable to be seen. It means too far away to see right now. God is invisible the way a ship past the horizon is invisible. The problem is always distance and eyesight, never His nature. Dake adds that no one can say “with Scriptural authority” that God is the kind of substance that cannot be seen, and that God “will live among men in visible form for ever.”

He uses the same approach on the verses that seem to close the door hardest. John says no one has seen God at any time. Dake replies that the Greek word for “seen” there refers to full mental comprehension, so the verse is about understanding, not eyesight.¹⁶ Exodus says no man can see God’s face and live. Dake replies that Moses did see God face to face, and that the only thing denied was the sight of God’s full glory.

Then, a few pages later, comes something that surprised me. Dake lists God’s spirit faculties: mind, will, power, truth, faith, knowledge, wisdom, and more. Tucked into that list, between perfection and immortality, sits “invisibility,” with Colossians 1:15 and 1 Timothy 1:17 attached.¹⁷ Invisibility has become a faculty of God’s spirit. It is something He has, the way He has memory or willpower. It is no longer a description of what He is.

The Answer from Scripture and the Historic Faith

Now for the other half of the deal. Dake said he wanted to be judged by plain Scripture. Good. I am happy to use that standard. And I want to use it on the very passages he leaned on.

1. What Jesus Said God Is

Start where Dake started: the well in Samaria. A woman brings up the oldest argument in her part of the world. Her people worship on this mountain. His people say Jerusalem. Which address is the right one?

Follow the logic. Her question is about a location. His answer is about God’s nature. Jesus does not settle the fight by picking a mountain. He dissolves the whole question by telling her what God is. Because God is spirit, worship is not tied to any address any more.

That reasoning only works one way. If “spirit” named a finer grade of material with a certain shape and size, the woman’s question would still be standing there unanswered. A being of ordinary size has to be somewhere, and she would still need to know the address. Jesus’ sentence answers her only if it means what the church has always taken it to mean. God is not made of stuff. He is not measured. He is not placed.

Other parts of Scripture use the word “spirit” as the flat opposite of the material we are made of. Isaiah says it in one line, to a nation that was counting on cavalry.

Flesh and spirit are set against each other. Flesh is the kind of being you can count, measure, and kill. Spirit is the other kind entirely. Isaiah is not telling Judah that God has better horses in a finer stable. He is telling them that trusting in what can be weighed is a losing bet. On Dake’s definition, the contrast falls apart. “Spirit” would just mean upgraded cavalry.

The New Testament says it point-blank. God is “the King eternal, immortal, invisible.” He “alone has immortality, dwelling in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see.” Christ is “the image of the invisible God.” And John writes, as plainly as anyone could, “No one has seen God at any time.”²⁰ Look at the wording in Timothy carefully. Paul does not say “whom no man has seen.” He says “whom no man has seen or can see.” That is not describing a distance problem. That is describing God.

There is a turn here that caught me the first time I traced it. One of Dake’s proof texts for the body is John 5:37.

Dake is right that the Greek word there (eidos, “form, outward appearance”) refers to something visible. But the sentence is a denial. Jesus is telling His hearers what they have not seen. To read it as proof that God has a visible shape, you have to keep the noun and drop the “nor.” His other proof text has a similar difficulty. Philippians 2:6 says Christ existed in the “form” of God, using a different Greek word (morphē). But two verses later the same word describes the “form of a servant,” which plainly refers to a station in life, not a body shape.²²

2. The Mountain Where They Saw No Form

Go back to Horeb. Moses is making the same case Jesus makes, a thousand years earlier.

Deuteronomy 4 does not simply report that Israel saw no form. It repeats the point. Then it explains why God set things up that way. They saw no form, so they would not carve one. The passage runs straight from the empty sky to the second commandment without a break. The absence of a shape was not a quirk of the weather. It was the point of the whole event.

Now take Dake’s position and run it back through that chapter. If God really has a body with a face and hair and arms, and if Israel’s only problem was that their eyes were not up to the job, then Moses is warning them away from a picture that would have been basically correct. A carved figure of a man would have been the right general idea, just done at the wrong time. But that is not what Moses says. He says there is no form to carve.

I went looking for Dake’s treatment of this passage, and I want to be straight about what I found. In seventeen pages of Lesson Four, Deuteronomy 4 is not discussed. The only place in the entire course where Dake cites Deuteronomy 4:15 is on page 700, in a list about ways a believer might be corrupted after conversion.²⁴ The text that speaks most directly to his subject never shows up in the lesson about his subject. I am not saying that to score a cheap point. I am saying it because a doctrine built on “hundreds of plain Scriptures” ought to have room for the plainest one against it.

3. The Appearances Are Real, and They Are Rationed

Let me make a concession here, because it is owed, and because it is true. Dake is right that the appearances happened. Abraham really did serve a meal to a visitor who was the LORD. Jacob really did wrestle. The elders really did see and eat. Those accounts are not myths. They are not made-up visions. The church has always confessed them as real, gracious, personal appearances of God.

The question is what they tell us. And the best answer comes from the one place where God explains the rules of an appearance ahead of time.

Read that as anatomy and it collapses. God hides a physical face behind a physical hand while a man crouches in a rock. But read it as God rationing how much of Himself He reveals, and it is beautiful. It is also unbearably tender. Moses asks for everything. God gives him what a creature can survive. This passage is not describing God’s build. It is a measured act of mercy.

Genesis 18 works the same way. Three visitors come to Abraham’s tent. One of them is the LORD. He accepts a meal under a tree. Then Abraham says something remarkable to Him: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” Think about that. Abraham is standing in front of a guest who has just eaten his bread, and he calls Him the Judge of the whole earth. The visit is real. The visitor is God. But Abraham is not taking measurements. He is speaking to the One who governs everything, and who has come close enough to share a meal.

That is what an appearance is. God takes a form so that a human being can meet Him and survive. He is not showing off His build. He is stooping. And the church has long read many of these accounts, especially the ones involving the Angel of the LORD, as the Son appearing before Bethlehem.²⁶ That is an old reading, not a modern dodge.

4. The Word Became Flesh

Here is where I think the doctrine costs the most. And here is where I most want a Dake reader to hear me out.

Every word of that is an announcement. Something happened that had not happened before. The invisible God took a body. The fullness of God now dwells bodily in one man. Paul’s word “bodily” in Colossians is carrying enormous weight. And it can only carry weight if bodily is something new.

Now put Dake’s own definition beside it. He wrote that incarnation means “a person assuming a body which he takes as his very own.”²⁸ That is actually a fine definition. But on his system, the Father already had a body. The Son already had a body. The Spirit already had a body. So what did the Son take on that was new? A different grade of material. He traded a fine body for a coarser one. The miracle shrinks from “God became man” to “God changed clothes.”

5. Nearer Than Approach

One sentence in Lesson Four has stayed with me longer than any other. Dake is explaining why we do not know God better through our senses, and he gives his reason.

Too far from us. That is where the whole doctrine ends up, and I think it is the saddest sentence in the lesson. The distance between you and God becomes a distance you could plot on a map. It will be closed later, when He moves to the neighborhood. But for now, He is somewhere else, and you are here.

That second passage is Paul in Athens, in Acts 17. It is the very chapter that will matter so much later in this book, two verses from the one Dake used for a very different purpose.³¹ Hold on to what Paul says here. God is not far from any one of us. We do not live near Him. We live in Him. Nobody of ordinary size can be spoken of that way.

Answering the Defenses

Dake’s readers have real arguments, and they deserve real answers. Here are the three I hear the most.

There is one more part of that argument that deserves a direct answer. Dake wrote that there cannot be a figure of speech for something that is not real, so God’s bodily parts must be real parts.³² That sounds tight, and it is half right. A figure does point to something real. But the real thing it points to is not always the thing named. When Scripture says God’s ear is open to my cry, the reality behind the figure is not an ear. The reality is that He hears me. And being heard by God is as real as anything in the universe. Dake’s rule quietly assumes that the only real thing a word can point to is a physical object. That assumption is the entire argument, and he never defends it.

His rule sounds careful. But it is not a rule the Bible follows about itself. This is the hyperliteral method doing what Chapter 4 shows it always does. It does not read the Bible more carefully. It reads one kind of sentence and forces every other kind to match.

The second defense is the image of God. Man was made in God’s image, and Dake argued from the Hebrew words that image means shape and bodily form.³³ He is right that the words can carry a visual sense. But Genesis tells us how to read this one.

Male and female, both in the same image. If image means body shape, that sentence breaks. Male and female do not share one body shape. The image has to be something both carry. In context, it is representation and rule. God plants His representatives on the earth and gives them charge of it. And when the question of what a spirit is came up directly, Jesus answered it Himself: a spirit does not have flesh and bones.

The third defense is Stephen. He looked up into heaven and saw Jesus standing at the right hand of God. Does that not put God in a location, with a right side?

Part of the answer is a glad yes. Jesus has a body now, and He will have it forever. That is the Incarnation, and nobody who loves Christ should want to water it down. But the phrase “right hand” is the Bible’s standing picture for the place of honor and authority, taken from Psalm 110.³⁵ Stephen sees the Son in glory and the Father in glory. He is not filing a report on anatomy. And if we push the vision for physical measurements, we are going to need to explain where the Spirit fits, since John saw Him as seven lamps and seven eyes in the same book Dake loves to cite.

Conclusion and the Words

Dake taught that God the Father has a real body of ordinary size, with parts he lists by name, in one place at a time, and that men have seen it with their eyes. To hold that position, he had to redefine two words. “Spirit” became the name of a substance a body is made of. “Invisible” became a matter of distance and eyesight. Both redefinitions are printed in his own course, and I have given you the pages. Set beside them: Jesus tells a woman that God is spirit in order to unhook worship from the map entirely. Moses tells Israel they saw no form so they would never carve one. And Paul says God dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see.

So when a Dake reader tells you, sincerely, that his Bible teaches God is a Spirit, believe that he is sincere. Then ask one gentle question: What is a spirit? The answer to that question will tell you which God is on the table. That is the whole method of this book, and it is why Chapter 5 comes before this one.

Here is what I most want to leave with you, especially if this chapter has been hard.

The God who has no body is not the vague God Dake was fighting. He is not thinner than Dake’s God. He is bigger. A God with a body has to travel to get to you. A God who is spirit is already there. He is not too far away for your senses. He is closer than your senses, closer than your own thoughts, nearer to the broken heart than the person sitting next to it. Nobody has to wait for Him to arrive.

You do not have to give up your Bible to say that. Keep it. Read the notes with your eyes open. Read the pages Dake pointed to. Then read the sentence Jesus spoke out loud to a tired woman beside a well, and take it exactly as He meant it. God is spirit. That is not a smaller God. That is the God who is already in the room.

Notes

↑ 1. Deuteronomy 4:12, 15–16 (NKJV). The NKJV is this book’s default translation; see the note on translations in Chapter 1. The Hebrew noun rendered “form” is temunah, a visible shape or likeness, the same word used in the second commandment (Exodus 20:4) and repeated four times in Deuteronomy 4:12–25.

↑ 2. Finis Jennings Dake, God’s Plan for Man (Lawrenceville, GA: Dake Bible Sales, Inc.; © 1949, copyright renewed 1977), Lesson Four, “The Truth About God,” pp. 49–66. Publisher, place, and both copyright dates are taken from the resident front matter. All page numbers in this chapter come from the printed running heads embedded in the resident text file and were independently cross-checked against Dake’s own subject index, which lists, among others, “Body of, p. 34, 53-57”; “Invisibility of, p. 51”; “True interpretation as Spirit, p. 52-62”; “Seen by men, p. 53-54”; “Has a body, soul, and spirit, p. 56-59.” The passage quoted at the head of this chapter is point 7 in the second main division of the lesson; the numbering is Dake’s.

↑ 3. Deuteronomy 4:15–19 (NKJV). The passage moves from the absence of a form, to the prohibition of carved images of any figure, to the specific warning against images of male or female, animals, birds, creeping things, fish, and the host of heaven. The logic is unbroken: no form seen, therefore no form made.

↑ 4. Stated here at the level of well-established fact rather than by quotation: the classical Pentecostal denominations adopted doctrinal statements that affirm the historic attributes of God, and their worship assumes the omnipresence of the Spirit poured out at Pentecost. The specific texts of those statements are not resident in this project’s libraries and are therefore not quoted; readers who want the wording should consult the current statement of faith published by their own fellowship. The author’s continuationist position and his reason for writing from inside this house are set out in Chapter 1.

↑ 5. God’s Plan for Man, 56–57. The passage runs across the page break; the printed running head for page 57 falls between “He has a heart… hands” and “and fingers.” Scripture references are reproduced as Dake printed them, including his abbreviations. Ellipses mark omitted reference strings only; no descriptive wording has been cut. The extended list of divine acts that follows in the same paragraph (that God travels bodily, eats, wears clothes, and dwells on a material planet) belongs to Chapters 9 and 16 and is documented there. Dake’s numbered definitions on p. 51, quoted earlier in this section, also cover “in,” “person,” “Father and Son,” “Trinity,” and “incarnation”; his definitions of “person” and “Trinity” are the property of Chapter 6 and are documented there.

↑ 6. God’s Plan for Man, 19. The passage is item 3 in a numbered list in Lesson One, framed as a series of questions beginning “Did you know…?” and used to advertise the course’s distinctive teachings to a new student.

↑ 7. Finis Jennings Dake, Revelation Expounded, or Eternal Mysteries Simplified (1950 printing; resident in the project library), comment on Revelation 21:3. Cited by section rather than page: the nearest surviving printed page marker in the resident digitization is 297, but no marker survives between that head and this passage, so a page citation could not be confirmed. Dake’s early adoption of strict literalism, described in this book’s preface, is treated in Chapter 4.

↑ 8. God’s Plan for Man, 53. Three OCR breaks in the resident text have been silently repaired in the quotation, following the project’s standing rule that obvious scan damage is corrected but wording is never altered: “Gen. 32:2430” to “Gen. 32:24-30”; “Exodus 33:1 1-23” to “Exodus 33:11-23”; and a broken parenthesis after “Exodus 24:9-11.” Dake’s own index lists this page as “Appearances of God, p. 53.”

↑ 9. God’s Plan for Man, 53. Dake introduces the passage as a quotation “from books on the great doctrines of the Bible that are widely used” but does not name the authors or titles, so the source of his quotation cannot be identified from the resident text. What can be observed is that the wording he quotes tracks the classic confessional formula closely; compare the Thirty-Nine Articles, Article I, “without body, parts, or passions.” He was rejecting the standard, not a caricature of it.

↑ 10. God’s Plan for Man, 54. One OCR artifact repaired: “that can. do all things” to “that can do all things.”

↑ 11. God’s Plan for Man, 60, under Dake’s section heading “God is Omnipresent.” His distinction between being “omni-present” and “omni-body” (pp. 57, 60) is the central exhibit of Chapter 9 and is printed in full there. The scale-model sentence quoted next is from the same page; the sentence immediately after it applies the same logic to the soul, saying man has the same feelings as God “but only on a smaller scale.” Dake’s doctrine of God’s emotional changeability is the property of Chapter 12.

↑ 12. God’s Plan for Man, 56. This sentence stands at the head of the summary paragraph that closes Dake’s treatment of what a spirit is, immediately before the body catalog quoted above.

↑ 13. God’s Plan for Man, 57 and 57–58 respectively; the two sentences are joined here with an ellipsis and are roughly a page apart. Dake’s heading for this entire division of the lesson is “True Interpretation of God as Spirit, John 4:24” (p. 52), which is itself worth noticing: he understood that the verse was the hinge, and he built a section around answering it.

↑ 14. God’s Plan for Man, 52: “He simply taught that spirit bodies were not composed of earthly flesh and bone.” Dake’s KJV wording of Luke 24:39 is reproduced as he printed it; one OCR artifact (“as .ye see me have”) is repaired.

↑ 15. God’s Plan for Man, 51–52, under Dake’s section heading “The Invisibility of God.” The two phrases quoted in the paragraph following the block quotation (“with Scriptural authority” and “will live among men in visible form for ever”) are from p. 52. Dake’s own index confirms the locator: “Invisibility of, p. 51.” His printed em dashes in this sentence have been rendered as commas for readability; no words are changed.

↑ 16. God’s Plan for Man, 58. The Greek verb in John 1:18 is horaō (perfect tense here), “to see, perceive.” Dake is correct that the verb can extend to mental perception, and any lexicon will list that sense. The difficulty is contextual rather than lexical: John’s sentence is completed by a contrast about disclosure (“the only begotten Son… He has declared Him”), and the parallel statement in 1 Timothy 6:16 adds the words “or can see,” which a distance-and-eyesight reading cannot absorb. The block quotation that follows, on Moses and the glory, is from the same page and treats Exodus 33:11, 18–23 together with 1 Timothy 6:16.

↑ 17. God’s Plan for Man, 59. His list of spirit faculties and attributes runs across pp. 59–60 and includes mind, intelligence, will, power, truth, faith, hope, righteousness, faithfulness, knowledge, wisdom, speech, reason, discernment, eternity, immutability, self-existence, omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence, infinity, holiness, justice, impartiality, perfection, invisibility, immortality, and others. That invisibility appears in a list between perfection and immortality, as one more attribute possessed by God’s spirit, reveals the quiet work the definition has done: the word no longer describes what God is; it names one power among many.

↑ 18. John 4:21, 23–24 (NKJV). The setting is the well of Jacob near Sychar (John 4:5–6). Jesus’ statement answers the woman’s question about the correct mountain (verse 20) and closes with a statement of God’s nature as the ground for a new kind of worship. The logic requires that “God is Spirit” explain why worship is no longer tied to a location; a God who is located somewhere would not produce that conclusion.

↑ 19. Isaiah 31:3 (NKJV). The contrast is between the kind of being that can be killed (flesh) and the kind that cannot (spirit). The rhetorical force depends on the two terms naming opposite categories, not degrees of the same substance.

↑ 20. 1 Timothy 1:17; 6:16; Colossians 1:15; John 1:18 (all NKJV).

↑ 21. John 5:37 (NKJV). Dake cites this verse for God’s “shape” at God’s Plan for Man, 52 and 56, glossing eidos as “form, appearance, shape, fashion, or sight… what can be seen with the eyes.” The gloss is defensible as far as it goes; the sentence in which the noun sits is a negation.

↑ 22. Philippians 2:6–7. Dake’s parenthesis at God’s Plan for Man, 56, appeals to Mark 16:12, where morphē does carry a visible sense. The immediate context in Philippians is the stronger guide: the same noun governs both “form of God” and “form of a bondservant,” and the second is a status rather than a silhouette. Dake’s treatment of this passage as a series of steps in Christ’s humiliation belongs to Chapter 13.

↑ 23. Westminster Confession of Faith 2.1 (traditional English text, public domain); compare the Thirty-Nine Articles, Article I, “There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions.” These are cited as the historic Protestant consensus, not as an authority above Scripture; the scriptural ground is given in the body of this chapter. The Athanasian Creed, which does the corresponding work on the Trinity, is quoted in Chapter 7.

↑ 24. God’s Plan for Man, 700, item 31 in a numbered list of things a believer may do after conversion, where Deuteronomy 4:15 appears in a reference string alongside Exodus 32:7 and Deuteronomy 9:12. This negative finding rests on a search of the full resident text of Lesson Four (pp. 49–66), in which Deuteronomy 4:12 and 4:15 do not appear. Dake’s conditional-security teaching, which is the subject of the page 700 list, is ordinary Arminian doctrine and forms no part of this book’s case against him.

↑ 25. Exodus 33:20, 23 (NKJV).

↑ 26. The identification of the Angel of the LORD with the pre-incarnate Son is an ancient and widely held reading, defended by patristic writers and carried into Reformation and later evangelical exegesis. It is offered here as the historic reading rather than as a novelty, and the argument of this chapter does not depend on it: whether the appearance is of the Son or of the Father, a granted appearance is not a disclosure of anatomy.

↑ 27. John 1:14; Colossians 2:9 (NKJV). The adverb in Colossians is sōmatikōs, “bodily.”

↑ 28. God’s Plan for Man, 51, definition 6: “INCARNATION means a person assuming a body which he takes as his very own, dwelling inside that body and not existing in any sense outside the body which he has taken to dwell in.” The second half of the definition raises its own difficulties for the doctrine of Christ, which Chapter 13 takes up.

↑ 29. God’s Plan for Man, 58. One OCR artifact repaired: the scan reads “that IJe is bodily too far from us.” The sentence continues that when the time comes, men “will see God and be in His bodily presence” and will comprehend Him by the same senses used with the bodily presence of others.

↑ 30. Psalm 34:18; Acts 17:27–28 (NKJV).

↑ 31. Acts 17:26 is the verse under which the pre-1988 printings of the Dake Bible carried the note on the segregation of the races. That note, its text, and its later removal are documented in Chapters 20 and 22 and transcribed in full in Appendix B. Nothing in the present chapter depends on that material; it is mentioned here only because Paul’s argument in the same paragraph, that God is not far from any one of us, bears directly on the doctrine under examination.

↑ 32. God’s Plan for Man, 58: “If all the expressions about God having bodily parts are mere figures of speech and human expressions, as is contended by Bible teachers, trying to convey some idea of God, then it may well be asked, what kind of ideas about God do such expressions convey?… It must be remembered there cannot be figures of speech of anything that is not real.” The reference to God’s ear is Psalm 34:15 and 1 Peter 3:12.

↑ 33. God’s Plan for Man, 52, arguing from Hebrew tselem (“image”) and demuth (“likeness”), which Dake transliterates as demooth, and from Greek eikōn in 1 Corinthians 11:7. He concludes: “If man was made in the image and likeness of God bodily, then God must have a body, and an outward form and shape.” The conditional is doing all the work in that sentence.

↑ 34. Genesis 1:27 (NKJV); see also Genesis 1:26, where the image is stated together with the commission to have dominion, and Luke 24:39.

↑ 35. Psalm 110:1; Acts 7:55–56 (NKJV). Dake cites Acts 7:54–59 repeatedly through Lesson Four as evidence of separate divine bodies seen at once; the inference from a vision of two persons to two embodied beings is Chapter 6’s subject and is answered in Chapter 7. The Revelation imagery mentioned here is at Revelation 4:5 and 5:6.