Probably every child when he first learns of God thinks of Him in a general way as being an enlarged man up in the sky or away at a distance. Many adult people have not escaped from the habit of thus thinking of God, more or less vaguely, as having a body like the human body, or at least as having a body with definite outlines of some kind. The disposition to think of God in this way results in part from our teaching that mortals are the children of God, that they are made in God's image and likeness; partly from the fact that the "natural man" is unable to conceive of God spiritually. "The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned."
The true way to think of God is that suggested by Jesus when he said to the Samaritan woman, "God is a Spirit." If Spirit, God, is infinite and omnipresent, it is manifest that He cannot be contained within a form having definite boundaries. In his endeavor to think about God in the right way, the writer has been aided by recalling his sense of liberty, which is comparatively clear and vivid. There is nothing for which men will more freely sacrifice their property, their health, their lives even, than for liberty. Yet no one thinks of liberty under a form. We do not think of it as either round or square or oblong, or under any form, except as now and then an artist tries to construct a symbol of liberty in the form of a statue. To think of God as having form, is, in a measure at least, to conceive of Him materially, to think of Him as an enlarged likeness of our mortal selves, and this is to base our thoughts of God, to a degree at least, on sense-testimony.
The harm that comes from thinking of God in this incorrect way is set forth by St. Paul in the first chapter of his letter to the Romans: "They claimed to be wise, but proved themselves fools; and for the glory of the immortal God substituted images in the likeness, either of mortal man, or of birds, animals, or reptiles. That is why God abandoned them to impurity, letting them follow the cravings of their hearts and make . a degrading use of their bodies with one another; for they had substituted a lie for the truth about God, and had reverenced and worshiped created things rather than the Creator." (Twentieth Century Version.) It does not matter whether we actually construct graven images of God and worship them, or whether we worship God under material thought-images; the error is the same in kind if not in degree.
