What is God like? It’s hard to say, isn’t it. The Bible says that “no one has ever seen God. But the one and only Son is himself God and is near to the Father’s heart. He has revealed God to us.” (Jn 1:18) On our own, describing the character of God is impossible—even if we try to do it by taking all the best things in creation and in our imaginations and multiplying them as highly and nobly as we can—because no one has ever seen God. If we want to describe the character of God, our only choice is to begin with Jesus.
And Jesus teaches us that the best word to use when we talk about God is Father, because Jesus himself is the Son.
Talking about God then, fundamentally, is like talking about a person. For example, if I were asked to describe my wife, it would be bizarre for me to begin by saying that she is a human female, an earthbound member of the animal kingdom, bestowed with rationality and the capacity for relationship. Yet although we recognize how odd it would be to describe another human being like this, it is nevertheless easy for us to fall into the trap of talking about God in just the same way. Of course God is immortal, and omniscient, and perfect. But using those kinds of words is a strange way to begin the conversation about a personal God, especially one whose Spirit teaches our hearts to call him “Abba, Father.” (Gal 4:6) The challenge of describing God is not one of cataloguing a series of traits and qualities that he possesses—even awesome ones—in the way that we would treat a plant or a star; it is much more like thinking through how you would respond to someone who asked: “Tell me what your mom is like.”
As pastors and church leaders therefore, it is less important that we can address philosophical questions about the maximum-ness of God than that we can respond when people ask us: “Tell me what your God is like.” And so, whenever we talk about God, we need to be vigilant not to cave to the pressure of discussing what he is, rather than who he is, because who he is—and who he is for us—is ultimately what counts.
For me, the answer to the question of what is God like?—the God who has revealed himself as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ—can be mostly encapsulated in three themes: he is loving, he is mighty, and he is holy.
God is Loving
In John 3:35 Jesus discloses one of the great secrets of the character of God. He tells Nicodemus that “the Father loves the Son, and has put everything in his hands.” This short verse is for me one of the anchor points of Scripture, helping us orient all of Christian theology, because it tells us about the very foundation of God’s will: he wants to be the Father. His will is to be the one that loves the Son.
It’s incredible really, especially for us humans. You see, my existence, whatever it is that makes me me, has mostly been given to me from the outside. Being born as a person, in this time and among all these factors that have shaped me, is not something that I have chosen for myself but something that has been chosen for me. God’s existence is different. No one ever willed to create him or influenced how he developed; no other force ever defined the parameters of how he could exist. God himself is, and has always been, totally in control of his own existence. Whatever God is like, he is like that because that is just how he wants to be. John 3:35 is important because it teaches us this very thing, how God has decided to shape his own existence. It teaches us that his eternal will is to be the Father.
When the earliest Church discussed this theme, they called God the Father the fountain of the life of God, meaning that the whole being and essence of who God is springs from this fact of his Fatherhood. Because he chooses to be the loving Father, his ‘one-ness’ is a relational kind of one-ness that puts everything into the hands of the Son and the Spirit, showering upon them and sharing with them his love. The reason God is ‘three Persons and one substance’ is because he eternally wills to have an existence that is based on shared love—he has decided that the way he wants to live is to be the Father.
God’s love, therefore, is not something that simply characterizes him like a deeply ingrained habit, it runs much deeper than that. Loving is not something that God does, it is who he is: “The Father loves the Son.” The very existence of Father and Son, not just their relationship together, is rooted in the decision of God to love. This is why the climax of God’s revelation to us comes in the person of the Son; every time Jesus calls God his ‘Father’ he is driving home the point that “God is love.” (1J 4:16) Brunner calls this fundamental aspect of who God is his ‘will-to-love’ (Our Faith, chapter 3), calling attention to the fact that being ‘Father’ is precisely the thing that God wants to be: God’s will—the blueprint of his being and his actions—is grounded in a desire to be the archetype of love.
This is why when we try to describe God in words, we begin by saying that he is loving, because it reaches right to the core of who he is: he is the Father who loves the Son. And of course, because his very essence is ‘loving-ness’, when he acts, he acts in love. Thus we have encountered him, because thus he is. He creates in love, he cares for us in love, he saves in his love, he waits long and patiently for us because of his limitless will-to-love. Nietzsche says that at the root of humanity is a will-to-power, a desire to dominate in every relationship, bounded only by the limits of our strength. It’s one of the reasons why his philosophy cannot understand God. God reaches out toward the Son—and toward creation—not with a desire to enslave and ‘be the boss’, but with a desire to love, to be the Father. Love never looks likes domination, even when it has the power to; love looks just like what we see Jesus to be. The more we come to know God, the less surprising we find this to be. For “the Father loves the Son, and has put everything into his hands,” and it is this same God who “showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners.” (Ro 5:8) His life is love right to the very center and so it is only natural that his will-to-love overflows towards us with every step he takes into our lives to rescue us. What is God like? God is loving.
God is Mighty
To say that God is mighty is simply to say that God never lacks the strength he needs to accomplish his will-to-love.
Our natural definition of almightiness—the ability to do anything—is similar, but different in a significant way. If almightiness means the ability to do anything, then we are faced with the exhausting task of explaining whether God can do evil, or make a rock too big for God to move, and the like. The ability to do anything is a philosophical definition of almightiness, not a Christian—and certainly not a Biblical—one. It’s a great way to talk about an army, or a battery, or a robot; it is a terrible way to talk about a Person. God the almighty is a divine Person, not a divine ‘force’ or ‘it’, and his almightiness is never just some sort of neutral or abstract reservoir of powerfulness that could be directed at this or that task, depending on the circumstances. The God of the Bible is never portrayed like that. With just his breath he overwhelms his enemies (Job 4:9), but this doesn’t mean he has some sort of ‘super-breath’ that no one can stand against, just waiting to spill out at every opportunity; he also speaks with Moses face to face and whispers to Elijah (Ex 33:11; 1K 19:12). God’s almightiness isn’t abstract, it is governed by—and for us, defined by—his will. And his will is to be the Father.
This is why God’s actions are sometimes difficult for us to understand. The disciples, spending every day with Jesus for years, even right up to the crucifixion cannot seem to figure out why God’s “mighty Savior from the royal line of his servant David” keeps talking about suffering and death rather than victory and thrones. (Lk 1:69) If he’s the mighty one, why aren’t we ‘winning’? It was confusing for them because they—like we often do—were presuming the wrong kind of almightiness, the abstract kind. The goal of Christ’s mission was never to ‘win’ in the way that the disciples understood winning, but to make peace between God and humanity. His goal was to love, and to make love possible. Nothing, not even our presuppositions about the way someone that mighty ought to act, could prevent him from accomplishing that goal. That’s what it means to say he is the mighty one. As any parent who plays games with their kids knows, the goal is actually trying to figure out how to lose effectively (and surreptitiously), because the real point of the game is enjoying our relationship with the child. A father’s might isn’t measured by being so tough that he can’t play Barbies, it’s being so strong that he can. God’s will is not a will-to-win, it’s a will-to-love; at family game night, God always loses, even if we never quite figure out how, because that’s just how mighty he is. He is free even to lower himself in the world’s eyes if that’s what it takes to make his will-to-love a reality. Nothing stands in the way of him being the Father.
Because of this, when we think through the group of qualities that are known as the ‘attributes of God’ (which is important), we must be very careful to only define them in light of the will of God to love, rather than as philosophical maximums. We should never (!) define God out of a dictionary, but only based on who he has revealed himself to be. That God is omnipotent, that there is nothing he wills that he cannot do, we have already seen. Closely related is his omnipresence, which means that he is always nearby, always present, in every context, and his omniscience, which means he knows and understands everything, including the past and the future. Isaiah communicates these themes together when he proclaims God’s promise: “Do not be afraid, for I am with you. I will gather you and your children from east and west.” (Is 43:5) God is omnipresent, he is with us; God is omniscient, he knows the future of us and of our children; God is omnipotent, nothing will stop him from putting his plan for us into action. And so we are not afraid. This is the personal God of Scripture: always mighty to save, always with us, always knowing what has happened and what’s to come.
A further way of describing the might of God is by saying that he is not like us humans in all the ways that make us frail: he is immortal (not dying), infinite (not bound by time), and immutable (unchangeable). Here too we need to be careful. When we say, for example, that God does not change (Mal 3:6), that Jesus is always the same (Hb 13:8), this does not mean that God is inflexible or static. For God, immutability is personal, like the consistency or reliability of someone you know you can always depend on. Because he is consistent, we know we can trust him; because he is trustworthy, we know we can safely return his love. Jesus says: “Trust in God, and trust also in me;” (Jn 14:8) we are called to trust, even though we will never know everything about him. He is infinite after all. But we can trust him because we know that the same Jesus through whom the world was created—the same one who gave himself for our sins—is the one who already awaits us in the future, with a good plan for us; “Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” We trust God because when he wanted to save us, he gave us his real self—not an emissary or a duplicate—so that we could see for ourselves what kind of God he really is. We trust him not because we know everything about him—his vastness is not limited by our understanding of it—but because he is consistent, because he does not change; the parts we know teach us to trust the parts we don’t. All God’s attributes, as with his almightiness, can only thus be understood in the context of his will to be the Father—he has the oneness he wants, the infinity he wants, the power he wants, the knowledge he wants, and the unchangeableness he wants—never is he burdened with traits that oppose him or get in his way.
The creeds call him God the Father almighty to remind us that he is never one without the other. He is never mighty with an almightiness that interrupts his being the Father; he is never the Father who would like to show his love but has a hard time figuring out how. He is the God who always finds a way to love with out caging us in. He is the Father, he is the almighty. Always the two together. What is God like? God is mighty.
God is Holy
A third key aspect of God’s character is his holiness; the unsoilable separateness and purity that he possesses in his nature and in all his actions. It is this element of his character that causes all of creation to tremble in fear before him, as the one who is so perfect, and so awesome that we are dust before him. But here too, we remember that God’s holiness never impedes him being who he is, the Father who loves the Son. His holiness is so great that all melt like wax before him, and yet, because his will is the will-to-love, he chooses to be holy in such a way that he makes his people holy, so that we can stand in—and enjoy—his presence. This balance is reflected in Isaiah 57:15 where God says through his prophet: “The high and lofty one who lives in eternity, the Holy One, says this: ‘I live in the high and holy place with those whose spirits are contrite and humble. I restore the crushed spirit of the humble and revive the courage of those with repentant hearts.’” He is the holy and lofty one, too high and too great to approach, and yet at the same time the one who reaches down in love to restore the broken and revive the repentant, even though they fall short of his holiness.
God’s holiness, then, means transcendence. He is above and ‘set apart’ both from this world and from anything unclean or impure, and cannot be grabbed at or reached up to. More than even that, it means that God is perfect in every regard, having no shortcomings and existing beyond even the possibility of accusation. Theologians sometimes describe this total perfection of God using the word ineffable, that is, that God is so perfect we have no words or ideas that are sufficient to say everything about him that ought to be said. (Mt 5:48) In his own being, not just considered in comparison to us, God is totally holy in a deeper and more real way than we can imagine.
God’s holiness also includes his sinlessness: God does no wrong. (Dt 32:4) This theme is especially important when we come to the life of Jesus. Hebrews records that Jesus “faced all of the same testings we do, yet he did not sin.” (4:15) Our God is holy with the kind of holiness that can climb down and live with us, even in the dirtiest spaces of our lives, without becoming ruined himself. God is totally separate from sin, but equally, he is so superabundant in purity that the things he comes in contact with—us!—are made clean by his touch. God is not holy like a new white shirt that you constantly fret about getting dirty; in the face of the griminess of sin, God’s holiness overflows to make the impure, pure, and the dirty, clean. He is, as Leviticus 20:8 says, “the LORD who makes you holy.” What is God like? God is holy.
If I was preparing for accreditation I would . . .
• Make sure I understood the meaning of the terms omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence, especially how they are defined in light of the will of God to love
• Be ready to explain why it is important that God is both Father and almighty
• Memorize Isaiah 57:15 and either John 3:35 or 1 John 4:16
• Read Emil Brunner’s amazing sermon ‘The Father Almighty’ in I Believe in the Living God, chapter two [http://www.scribd.com/doc/35864925/I-Believe-in-the-Living-God-Sermons-on-the-Apostles-Creed-Emil-Brunner pp. 26-37]
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