Attributes of God - Charnock - X - Chapter 3 (God's being a Spirit) commenced

Required reading
Attributes of God by Charnock (available from Amazon or free on the internet, here for example) - Commence Chapter 3 (A discourse upon God's being a spirit) by reading up to 'Use. If God be a pure spiritual being, then, 1. Man is not the image of God, according to his external bodily form and figure.'

My summary
Now we begin Chapter Three which tries to understand God being a spirit.

Firstly Charnock gives us the context of his text, 'God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth' (John 4:24).

Then he examines what it means that God is spirit positively: 'God is called a Spirit, as being not a body, not having the greatness, figure, thickness or length of a body, wholly separate from anything of flesh and matter.'  Then negatively; what God is not if he is a spirit. 

Then we see that if God were not a Spirit he could not be:
(i) Creator;
(ii) one;
(iii) invisible;
(iv) infinite;
(v) independent;
(vi) immutable and unchangeable;
(vii) omnipresent;
(viii) perfect.

What grabbed me
Charnock gave us a good explanation of the necessity of spiritual worship: 'Every nature delights in that which is like it, and distates that which is most different from it.  If God were corporeal, he might be pleased with the victims of beasts, and the beautiful magnificence of temples, and the noise of music; but being a Spirit, he cannot be gratified with carnal things.  He demands something better and greater than all those, that soul which he made, that soul which he hath endowed, a spirit of a frame suitable to his nature.  He indeed appointed sacrifices and a temple, as shadows of those things which were to be most acceptable to him in the Messiah, but they were imposed only "till the time of reformation," Hebrews. ix. 10.'

Want to worship God?  Give him your soul.

Next week's reading
Conclude Chapter 3 (A discourse upon God's being a spirit).

Now it's your turn
Please post your own notes and thoughts in the comments section below.