We as Latter-day Saints believe what we believe about the corporeal nature of God as a result of modern revelation. As early as 1830 Joseph Smith recorded the following, which is now in the Pearl of Great Price:
“In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; in the image of his own body, male and female, created he them, and blessed them”(Moses 6:8–9).
In 1841 the Prophet declared: “That which is without body, parts and passions is nothing. There is no other God in heaven but that God who has flesh and bones.”
In April 1843 Joseph taught that “the Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s; the Son also; but the Holy Ghost has not a body of flesh and bones, but is a personage of Spirit”(D&C 130:22).
Two months later he explained: “As the Father hath power in Himself, so hath the Son power in Himself . . . so He has a body of His own. . . . Each one [God and Christ] will be in His own body; and yet the sectarian world believe the body of the Son is identical with the Father’s.”
Elder Bruce R. McConkie wrote that the statement “God is a spirit”(John 4:24) has been “interpreted by the Christian world to mean that God is a spirit essence that fills all space, has no form or substance, and dwells in human hearts. It might properly be said that ‘God is a Spirit’if by that is meant that he has a spiritual or resurrected body in harmony with Paul’s statement relative to the resurrection that the body ‘is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.’”
The word spiritual, as used in the New Testament and in Latter-day Saint scripture, means immortal, not subject to death. Thus, the mortal body is temporal and corrupt, whereas the resurrected, immortal body is incorruptible and spiritual, meaning that it is no longer subject to the pulls and passions of life and the ever-present reality of physical death (1 Corinthians 15:44).
One Book of Mormon prophet affirmed that “this mortal body is raised to an immortal body, that is from death, even from the first death unto life, that they can die no more; their spirits uniting with their bodies, never to be divided; thus the whole becoming spiritual and immortal, that they can no more see corruption”(Alma 11:45). Likewise modern revelation, in speaking of the resurrection of individuals, points out that “notwithstanding they die, they also shall rise again, a spiritual body”(D&C 88:27).
Finally, the correct translation of John 4:24 is not “God is a spirit,” but rather “God is spirit” (NKJV, NIV, NRSV, NEB). That is to say, God is approached and known in spiritual ways, or he is known not at all; indeed, God stands revealed, or he remains forever unknown. Because we are made up of both body and spirit, and because our spirit is the real, inner, eternal part of ourselves, modern revelation teaches that “man is spirit”as well (D&C 93:33).
“For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God”(1 Corinthians 2:11).