Chapter 8

A God with a Body

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

Picture the people of Israel gathered at the foot of Mount Horeb. The mountain burns with fire, and out of the fire God speaks the Ten Commandments. Every one of them hears His voice. Forty years later Moses reminds their children of that day, and he asks them to hold on to one thing above the thunder and the flames. They heard a voice, and they saw no form.

And the LORD spoke to you out of the midst of the fire. You heard the sound of the words, but saw no form; you only heard a voice… Take careful heed to yourselves, for you saw no form when the LORD spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire, lest you act corruptly and make for yourselves a carved image in the form of any figure.Deuteronomy 4:12, 15–16 (NKJV)¹

Moses draws the lesson himself. Israel saw no form, so Israel must never carve one. God spoke plainly that day and showed them nothing they could copy.

Finis Dake taught the opposite. Lesson Four of his course God’s Plan for Man is titled “The Truth About God,” and in the middle of it he says this.

7. God has a spirit body with bodily parts like man. This is proved by hundreds of plain Scriptures that do not need interpretation. We will not attempt to interpret them. They are too clear and literal to misunderstand.Finis Jennings Dake, God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 56²

Dake meant this literally. He taught that God the Father has a real body with real parts, of ordinary size, in one place at a time, and that men have seen it with their own eyes. That teaching is heresy. Jesus said that “God is Spirit” (John 4:24), and Paul calls Him invisible (1 Timothy 1:17). Two classic Protestant confessions, the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Westminster Confession, put the church’s faith in one phrase: there is one living and true God, “without body, parts, or passions.”³ The church has always known one true embodiment of God, and that is the Incarnation, when the eternal Son took our flesh at Bethlehem.

The question here is the body itself, and the words Dake had to redefine in order to give God one. Those words are “spirit” and “invisible.” How many divine beings Dake counted is the subject of Chapter 6. Whether a God with a body can be everywhere at once is the subject of Chapter 9.

Why the shape of God matters

Moses treats the missing form as a guard over Israel’s worship.⁴ Every idol starts when someone decides he knows what God looks like. Once God has an outline, He can be drawn, and once He can be drawn, He can be carved.

The shape of God also touches prayer. A God with a body is in one place, so He is with you only when He has traveled to you. Dake accepted that conclusion, and Chapter 9 follows it out. It touches Christmas too. John announces that “the Word became flesh” as news, and it is news only if God had never had a body before.

What Dake teaches about God’s body

A body like every other person’s

Dake builds the doctrine on his definitions. At the head of Lesson Four he writes that God the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, “each angel and man, and every separate person in the universe has a personal body, soul, and spirit.” A body is “the outward form or house in which his soul and spirit dwell,” and “There are spiritual and natural bodies, or heavenly and earthly bodies; and both kinds are real.”⁵ The reasoning is simple. Every person has a body, God is a person, and so God has a body. Chapter 6 prints these definitions in full.

A few pages later Dake describes that body. He begins the paragraph by calling God “a person who is Spirit,” and in the same sentence he lists “invisible” among God’s attributes.⁶ Then he goes through the body part by part.

Every item on that list is meant as anatomy, and Dake closes it by saying there are more. The teaching runs through the rest of his work. Early in the course he gives the new student a list of questions. One asks whether the student knows that God “has a spirit body, a personal soul, and a personal spirit.” The answer adds that God eats, walks, and sits on a throne, and that He “can do anything that man can do.” Then Dake promises, “This will be proved fully in Lesson Four.”⁸ In Revelation Expounded, his commentary on the last book of the Bible, he writes that in the new creation “God the Father, Himself, will be in visible form before men,” and that these passages “will not permit an interpretation of invisible dwelling.”⁹

A body men have seen

A body that no one had ever seen would be a weak proof, and Dake knew it. So he called witnesses.

3. Bible writers not only stated that God has a body, but they also testified that they have seen it with the natural eyes. Abraham made a dinner for God and two angels and they actually ate food (Gen. 18). Jacob had a physical wrestling match with God all night (Gen. 32:24-30). Moses talked with God face to face (Exodus 33:11-23). Seventy-four elders of Israel had a banquet with God in Sinai (Exodus 24:9-11).God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 53¹⁰

The list goes on to Joshua, Gideon, Manoah and his wife, David, Job, Isaiah, Amos, Ezekiel, Daniel, Stephen, and John. Dake reads every one of them as a sighting of God’s own body. He also knew what the standard doctrine books of his day taught, and he quotes them a few paragraphs later. In those books God is an “incorporeal, invisible reality” with “no body or parts like human beings.” They treat the Bible’s talk of God’s hands and eyes as “figures of speech and mere human expressions trying to convey some idea of God.”¹¹ His answer is short: “Such statements are foolish and unscriptural, to say the least.” On the next page he states his own view.

God can be seen and has been seen with the eyes. God does have a tangible body that can be handled and that can do all things any other body can do. God does have bodily parts and passions… The expressions which tell us that God has bodily parts are real and literal and not figurative, as will be seen below.God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 54¹²

A body of ordinary size

A body has a size, and Dake gives God’s. Under the heading “God is Omnipresent” he writes that the bodies of spirit beings, God included, “are of ordinary size and must be at one place at a time.”¹³ What he then does with the word “omnipresent” belongs to Chapter 9. On the same page he turns the comparison around and makes man a small copy of God.

Man was made a miniature of God in soul and spirit faculties and with bodily parts like those of God. The only difference between the faculties of God and those of man is that those of God are infinite and those of man are finite; one is unlimited, and the other is limited.God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 60¹⁴

The course is not alone in this. Dake printed the same teaching in the notes of his Bible. Beside Solomon’s words that the heavens cannot contain God, his note says, “Surely the size of His body, soul, and spirit are not referred to, for He is of ordinary size as proved by the many personal appearances He has made to men.”¹⁵ Beside Micaiah’s vision of the LORD on His throne, another note says, “Here again He is pictured as an ordinary sized being in the midst of all His subjects on the right hand and on the left.”¹⁶ In the Genesis notes he lists “44 appearances of God” and then sums up what the prophets saw.

Besides the above appearances the prophets saw God, His shape, His body (like that of a man), His hair, eyes, and other bodily parts, His clothing, and His chariot throne drawn by cherubim in visions.Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible, classic setting, O.T. p. 64¹⁷

What he means by “spirit”

One verse stands in the way of all this, and Dake knew it. Jesus said, “God is Spirit.” Dake built a whole division of Lesson Four around that verse, and he answered it by changing what the word means.

According to all the above points a spirit is far different from what we have been taught. A spirit being can and does have real, material, and tangible spirit form, shape, and size, with bodily parts, soul passions, and spirit faculties. Their material bodies are of a spiritual substance and are just as real as human bodies.God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 56¹⁸

For Dake, a spirit is a being whose body is made of a finer material, and the word names that material. Spiritual substance, he says on the next page, is real matter, only “of a higher type of matter” and “governed by higher laws.” With that definition in place, John 4:24 stops being an obstacle.

Not one passage has ever been given by men to prove that God is intangible, immaterial, without body, parts, and passions except John 4:24, “God is Spirit,” and this certainly does not teach that He is without body… After all, John 4:24 is a mere statement of fact—that God is a Spirit—but it does not define and analyze a spirit.God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 57¹⁹

Dake knew the church’s phrase. He uses it here, as “without body, parts, and passions,” and sets it aside. He treats Luke 24:39 the same way. When the risen Jesus said that a spirit does not have flesh and bones, Dake says, “He simply taught that spirit bodies were not composed of earthly flesh and bone.”²⁰ The church’s words stay in his sentences, and their meaning changes underneath them. Chapter 5 shows how that works across his system, and Appendix D gathers his vocabulary.

What he means by “invisible”

Paul calls God invisible more than once, so Dake had to redefine that word too. He does it in a section titled “The Invisibility of God.”

When we use the word invisible we must not think of it altogether in the terms of substance, but mainly as distance—beyond eyesight, beyond natural visibility. God has been seen with the natural eyes many times, so His invisibility is not something beyond spiritual or physical possibility of manifestation or sight (point II, 31, above).God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 51²²

On this reading God is invisible the way a ship past the horizon is invisible. The trouble lies in our distance and our eyesight, and nothing in God’s nature keeps Him from being seen. Dake adds that no one can say “with Scriptural authority” that God is a substance that cannot be seen, and that God “will live among men in visible form for ever.”

He handles the hardest verses the same way. John writes, “No one has seen God at any time.” Dake answers that the Greek word for “seen” there means “to comprehend fully, or to understand fully with the mind, as well as to look upon with the eyes,” and so he reads the verse as a statement about understanding.²³ God told Moses, “You cannot see My face.” Dake answers that Moses did see God face to face, and that only God’s full glory was held back.

God could not grant Moses the request to see Him in all of His glory, but He did permit Moses to see Him face to face out of His glory. Moses got to see God’s glory as expressed in His “back parts” (vs. 18-23), but could not see God’s glory as expressed in His countenance.God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 58²⁴

A page later, Dake lists the faculties of God’s spirit, and between perfection and immortality he places “invisibility.” The texts he gives for it are Colossians 1:15 and 1 Timothy 1:17 and 6:16.²⁵ The last of these speaks of God “whom no man has seen or can see.” Dake cites that verse for God’s invisibility while he teaches that God can be seen. In his hands invisibility has become one more ability of God’s spirit, like His mind or His will, and it no longer describes what God is.

What Jesus said God is

The answer begins at the well in Samaria, where Dake’s own section heading points. A woman there raises the old quarrel between her people and the Jews. Her people worship on this mountain, and the Jews say Jerusalem. She wants to know which place is right.

Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe Me, the hour is coming when you will neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, worship the Father… But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such to worship Him. God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.”John 4:21, 23–24 (NKJV)²⁶

Her question is about a place, and Jesus answers it with the nature of God. Because God is Spirit, worship is no longer tied to one mountain. That answer works only if “spirit” means what the church has always taken it to mean. If spirit were a finer kind of matter with a shape and a size, God would still live somewhere, and her question about the right place would still stand. Jesus settles it by telling her that God is not the kind of being who lives at one address.

Isaiah uses the word the same way. He warns Judah against trusting Egypt and its cavalry.

Now the Egyptians are men, and not God; and their horses are flesh, and not spirit.Isaiah 31:3 (NKJV)²⁷

Isaiah sets flesh against spirit as two different kinds of being. Horses can be counted, weighed, and killed, and God cannot. On Dake’s definition the prophet would only be telling Judah that God has finer horses.

The New Testament speaks just as plainly. 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, “No one has seen God at any time.”²⁸ Paul’s words “or can see” close the door on Dake’s reading. Distance can be crossed in time, but Paul says that no one can see God at all.

Two of Dake’s own proof texts point the other way. For God’s “shape” he cites John 5:37.

And the Father Himself, who sent Me, has testified of Me. You have neither heard His voice at any time, nor seen His form.John 5:37 (NKJV)²⁹

Dake is right that the Greek word here, eidos, means a visible form. Yet Jesus is telling His hearers what they have never seen, so the verse denies a sighting of the Father’s form. His other text is Philippians 2:6, which says Christ was “in the form of God” and uses the word morphē. In the next verse the same word describes “the form of a bondservant,” and that phrase describes a servant’s station in life.³⁰

The mountain where Israel saw no form

Go back to Horeb. Moses makes the same argument Jesus made at the well. Deuteronomy 4 reports that Israel saw no form, repeats it, and explains why. Because they saw no form, they were not to make one, whether of a man or a woman, an animal or a bird, a fish, or the sun and stars. The empty sky at Horeb taught Israel how to worship.

Run Dake’s teaching through that chapter. If God has a face, hair, and arms, and Israel’s only problem was weak eyesight, then a carved figure of a man would have been roughly right, only made too soon. Moses says there was no form to copy at all.

Lesson Four, Dake’s lesson on the nature of God, never takes up this passage. Where the course does cite Deuteronomy 4:15, it is in a list of ways believers may be corrupted after they are saved.³¹ A doctrine that claims “hundreds of plain Scriptures” ought to deal with the plainest Scripture against it.

God’s appearances were real, and measured

Dake is right that the appearances really happened. Abraham served a meal to a visitor who was the LORD. Jacob wrestled through the night. The elders of Israel saw God, and they ate and drank. The church has always confessed these as real appearances of God, and I confess them too.

The question is what they show. The best answer comes from the one place where God explains the terms of an appearance before He makes it.

But He said, “You cannot see My face; for no man shall see Me, and live”… “Then I will take away My hand, and you shall see My back; but My face shall not be seen.”Exodus 33:20, 23 (NKJV)³²

Read as anatomy, the scene falls apart: a physical face hidden behind a physical hand while a man crouches in a rock. Read as God measuring out how much of Himself a creature can bear, it is mercy. Moses asks to see everything, and God gives him what a man can survive.

Genesis 18 works the same way. Three visitors come to Abraham’s tent, and one of them is the LORD. He eats under the tree. A little later Abraham pleads with Him for Sodom and asks, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Genesis 18:25). The guest at his table is the Ruler of the whole world, come near enough to share a meal. An appearance is God taking a form so that a human being can meet Him and live. The church has long read many of these accounts, above all those of the Angel of the LORD, as the Son appearing before Bethlehem.³³

The Word became flesh

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth… For in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily.John 1:14; Colossians 2:9 (NKJV)³⁴

Both verses announce something new. The invisible God took a body, and now all His fullness lives “bodily” in one man. Paul’s word “bodily” carries weight only if God had not been bodily before.

Dake defined incarnation as “a person assuming a body which he takes as his very own.”³⁵ As far as it goes, that is a sound definition. In his system, though, the Father already had a body, and so did the Son and the Spirit. What did the Son take at Bethlehem that He did not already have? Only a body made of a different material. The miracle shrinks from God becoming man to God trading one body for another. Chapter 13 takes up what Dake taught about Christ.

Nearer than any distance

One sentence in Lesson Four shows where the whole doctrine leads. Dake is explaining why we do not know God better through our senses.

The reason we do not comprehend God more than we do by the senses is that He is bodily too far from us.God’s Plan for Man, Lesson Four, p. 58³⁶

On this teaching the gap between you and God is a real distance, the kind that could be measured. Dake promises that it will close one day, when men “will see God and be in His bodily presence.” Until then God is somewhere else. The Bible answers him directly.

The LORD is near to those who have a broken heart, and saves such as have a contrite spirit… so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and have our being.Psalm 34:18; Acts 17:27–28 (NKJV)³⁷

The second passage is Paul in Athens, in the same speech as Acts 17:26. God is not far from any one of us. We do not live near Him, because we live in Him. No being of ordinary size could be described that way.

“But the Bible says God has eyes and hands”

This is the strongest defense, and Dake pressed it himself. If the Bible’s words about God’s body are figures of speech, he asked, what do they tell us? “It must be remembered,” he wrote, “there cannot be figures of speech of anything that is not real.”³⁸

Part of that is true. A figure does point to something real, but the real thing is often different from the thing named. When the psalmist says that God’s ears are open to the cry of the righteous (Psalm 34:15), the reality behind the figure is that God hears. Being heard by God is as real as anything in the world, and no ear is needed for it. Dake’s rule assumes that the only real thing a word can point to is a physical object, and he never defends that assumption.

The rule also proves too much. The Bible that gives God hands also gives Him wings: “He shall cover you with His feathers, And under His wings you shall take refuge.”³⁹ If the language of hands proves a body, the language of feathers proves feathers. Israel was never confused about that. Chapter 4 shows how Dake’s rule for reading the Bible leads to mistakes like this one.

Doesn’t the image of God mean a shape?

Dake argued from the Hebrew and Greek words for “image” and “likeness” that man resembles God in bodily form. “If man was made in the image and likeness of God bodily,” he wrote, “then God must have a body, and an outward form and shape.”⁴⁰ Everything rests on that “if,” and Genesis itself shows what the image is.

So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.Genesis 1:27 (NKJV)⁴¹

Male and female both bear the one image of God, and they do not share one body shape. The image has to be something both of them carry. The verse before it joins the image to the charge to rule the earth, so God’s image-bearers stand on the earth as His representatives. When the risen Jesus spoke about what a spirit is, He was just as plain.

Behold My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself. Handle Me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see I have.Luke 24:39 (NKJV)⁴²

Jesus was proving that He had risen in His body, and He drew the contrast with a spirit to make the point. Dake reads the verse as if it spoke only of earthly flesh, but Jesus draws no such line.

Didn’t Stephen see Jesus at God’s right hand?

Just before he was stoned, Stephen looked into heaven and saw Jesus standing at the right hand of God (Acts 7:55–56). Some readers ask whether that gives God a location and a right side.

Part of the answer is yes. Jesus has a body now, the body He took at Bethlehem and raised from the tomb, and He will have it forever. That is the Incarnation, and no one who loves Christ should play it down. “The right hand” of God, though, is the Bible’s standing picture of honor and rule, drawn from Psalm 110:1.⁴³ Stephen saw the Son in glory beside the Father in glory, and he was not measuring God. If his vision has to be read as a report on bodies, then John’s visions in Revelation have to be read the same way. There the Spirit appears as seven lamps of fire and as the seven eyes of a Lamb (Revelation 4:5; 5:6).

God is Spirit

Dake taught that God the Father has a body of ordinary size, with parts he named one by one, in one place at a time, and seen by human eyes. To hold that teaching he redefined “spirit” as a kind of material and “invisible” as a matter of distance. The church calls that teaching heresy. It sets aside what Jesus said at the well, what Moses said at Horeb, and what Paul said of the God “whom no man has seen or can see.” The church confesses one God without body or parts, and one Incarnation, when the Son took our flesh.

The God who has no body is greater than Dake’s God, and He is nearer too. A God with a body has to travel to reach you. The God who is Spirit is already there, “near to those who have a broken heart” and “not far from each one of us.” Jesus told a tired woman at a well that God is Spirit, and that the Father is seeking people to worship Him in spirit and truth. You can take Him at His word, and you do not have to wait for Him to arrive.