Did God have a physical form before Jesus?
According to Genesis 3, Adam and Eve heard God walking in the Garden of Eden. Was this Jesus or the Father? According to Jewish beliefs, God is incorporeal...having no physical form. Since this passage is taken from the Tanakh, how is this interpreted by Jews or Christians? Anyone care to offer an explanation...particularly from a Jewish perspective?
Genesis 3:8 Young's Literal Translation
And they hear the sound of Jehovah God walking up and down in the garden at the breeze of the day, and the man and his wife hide themselves from the face of Jehovah God in the midst of the trees of the garden.
It would appear from a direct reading of these passages that God does appear at times in a physical form. My point is that although God is basically a spirit being and has no standard physical form nor is mortal as man is, It still seems that according to some passages in the Old Testament or Tanakh that God CAN indeed manifest Himself in a physical form which is contrary to the Jewish belief that He cannot nor ever has....I.E. in the form of the Messiah...Jesus...who was prophecied and also referred to as Immanuel...God is with us. If Adam and Eve "heard" Gods walking in the garden, it would suggest that God had a physical form at that time....you can't hear a spirit doing a physical thing. Some other passages suggest that no-one can look at God's face and live, yet Adam and Eve were created perfect in the beginning and that rule may not have applied to them. They did not want to look God in the face for they were ashamed of their actions and nakedness. Thanks for the good answers so
To Full Armour of God...The source you cited ends with this....which I agree with. .
The solution is simple. All you need to do is accept what the Bible says. If the people of the OT were seeing God, the Almighty God, and Jesus said that no one has ever seen the Father (John 6:46), then they were seeing God Almighty, but not the Father. It was someone else in the Godhead. I suggest that they were seeing the Word before He became incarnate. In other words, they were seeing Jesus; compare John 8:58 with Exodus 3:14 above.
If God is a Trinity, then John 1:18 is not a problem either because in John chapter one, John writes about the Word (Jesus) and God (the Father). In verse 14 it says the Word became flesh. In verse 18 it says no one has seen God. Since Jesus is the Word, God then, refers to the Father, and the apparent contradiction is easily resolved, especially when this is examined in the light of Jesus' words in John 6:46 where He said that no one has ever seen the Father.
As a followup of this, how did Israel get it's name? According to Genesis 32:22-32 and specifically verse 30, Jacob wrestled with a man...God.... and saw him (God) face to face. It was at that point that Jacob was blessed and his name was changed to Israel....which carries down to modern Israel and Jews. Some people interpret the man as an angel but it does not say that...it states that Jacob saw God face to face at that meeting/wrestling match.