4:24
“God is Spirit”. This means that God is invisible and unknowable to man unless He chooses to reveal Himself. People often talk about the “search for God”. Now it is good for man to seek the Lord, but we need to know that we are dependent upon Him revealing Himself to us. This does not mean that our seeking is futile, for Jesus said “seek and you shall find” (Matt 7:7). If seeking is viewed as a purely human exercise then we are badly mistaken. Conversely, God has chosen to reveal Himself, through nature, through His word, and most clearly of all through Jesus Christ.
Since God is spirit He must be worshipped in spirit and in truth. In short this means we worship God on His terms, not ours.
4:25
The woman now tries to claim that she does know something, saying she does know that the Messiah is coming. When confronted with something so much greater than ourselves, and that shows that we effectively know nothing, then there is a tendency to be defensive and to try and prove that we have some merit or, in this case, some knowledge. The Samaritans viewed the Messiah (though they tended not to use that term) as one who would reveal the truth, hence the “he will tell us all things”.
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