Does God Have Hands and Eyes?

If God is spirit, and not fleshly body, how can the Bible speak of His “hands,” “arms,” “eyes” and other parts? The following picture may help us to see the answer.

Imagine a man talking to an ant. He is trying to explain to the ant what a human city is like. The ant has never seen anything as large as our buildings and city streets. Yet the ant does have small paths and tunnels in its ants’ nest in the ground. So the man speaks of his streets as if they were like those ant paths. He speaks of the human city as if it were like a very large ants’ nest.

In the same way, God uses things that we can understand to talk of things much greater. He does not have our earthly kind of eyes and hands. But He uses “eyes” to speak of His seeing. He uses “hands” to speak of His power and action.

Though He uses these helpful words we should remember that we are still so very small beside Him. Like the ant with the man, some things about God will remain beyond our full understanding. We accept what God says in simple trust that He knows how best to tell us of things far greater than us.