Just Who Is God, Anyway?

Posted On December 25, 2020

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First of all, I want to wish each and every one of you who may be reading or listening to this a very Merry Christmas! I pray that God will bring you his peace, and joy, through this season and well into next year. Yes… Whoever you are, I am praying for you!

Now, I should get back to our post. Who is God?

The short answer is this. Although we can never know everything about God, we know a lot based what we find in the Bible. Among many other attributes, we know that God is Good. Despite all of our struggles, failures, regrets, and sorrow, God really does care about you, and me, and in fact, everyone.

In recent posts, we made our way through a series of logical steps, supported by good evidence, that give us very high confidence that the entire Christian worldview is true.

In our last post, we arrived at a powerful conclusion that the Bible really is from God, so the Bible must be true. All of it. In that case, we have an incredible opportunity to study the Bible to find out who God is and what he is like. So what do we find? Well, for one thing we find the Trinity. We also find many, many attributes that describe the character of God.

The Trinity

The Bible is very clear that there is only one God. One of the most important creedal statements about God comes out of the Old Testament, “Here, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.” (Deut. 6:4 NIV).

But we also know that God is Triune in nature. That is, God is a Tri-unity, or Trinity for short. God is three persons in one: the Father, the Son (Jesus), and the Holy Spirit. Each person of the Trinity is fully God.

The Triune nature of God is extremely difficult to understand because there is no adequate illustration for it anywhere in nature. But we know it is true that this is who God is, because this Triune nature of God comes from the Biblical data, which we know is all true.

By the way, the Trinity is not a logical contradiction. We are not saying that the Trinity is three Gods in one God, or three persons in one person. The Trinity is three persons in one God.

Attributes of God

As we study the Bible more deeply, we find many wonderful and, frankly, astonishing attributes of God. Such attributes help us understand the character of God and who he is. When we engage in this kind of study, we’re simply doing Theology, which can be defined briefly as “an organized discourse concerning God.”

Many brilliant theologians throughout history have systematically studied the Bible with the express purpose of learning more about God. As a result, many attributes of God have been identified. Consider just some of them, as follows:

Faithfulness	Justice	Eternal	Benevolence
Truthfulness	Grace	Without Measure	Wrath
Mercy	Self Existence	All Knowing	Patience
Holiness	Infinite	All Powerful	Happiness
Love	Unchanging	Wisdom	Light
Goodness	Perfection	Life	Majesty

Let’s take a closer look at the meanings behind a just a few of these attributes, from the Latin. These definitions are simply amazing.^[1]

Faithfulness (Fidelitas)

God is consistent and constant in his promises and in his grace. The faithfulness of God rests directly on the intrinsic truthfulness of God and the absolute immutability of God.

Truthfulness (Veracitas Dei)

The divine truthfulness is the ground on which all the promises of God and all the truths of revelation rest. His promises are therefore sure and his truthfulness incapable of fault.

Mercy (Misericordia)

Compassion, or mercy of God, according to which God has compassion on his fallen creatures in their inability to return to him. 

Holiness (Sanctitas)

Sanctity, inward or intrinsic righteousness; the holiness of God refers to the absolute goodness of God’s being and willing.

Love (Amor Dei)

Defined as the propensity of the divine essence for the good, both in the sense of God’s inward, intrinsic willing of the good, and in the sense of God’s external kindness towards His creatures.

Goodness (Bonitas)

The goodness or moral excellence of God; God is good in Himself and is the absolute good, the ground and standard of all created good.

Conclusion

Here is what we can take away from these six attributes of God alone: God is consistent in all of his promises, which are grounded in truth.^[2] God’s truthfulness is incapable of fault, and God never changes. God feels compassion towards all people, and exercises kindness. God is intrinsically righteous and absolutely good. In fact, he is the ground and standard of all created good.^[3]

So there’s no question that God is absolutely good. But it brings us to a difficult, apparent problem. If God is good, then why is there so much evil and suffering in the world?

This is a very important question and is known as the problem of evil. It is considered one of the biggest barriers toward belief in God, in our culture today. Starting in our next post, I will address this and other related questions about evil and suffering.

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^[1]Definitions are taken from Richard A. Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms, 2^ndEd. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017), available on Amazon at: https://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Latin-Greek-Theological-Terms/dp/0801098866/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=Muller+dictionary+of+latin+and+greek&qid=1608667348&sr=8-2.

^[2]The Bible contains over 300 promises for the believer, as found in The NLT Bible Promise Book For Tough Times, available on Amazon at: https://www.amazon.com/Bible-Promise-Tough-Times-Books/dp/1414312350/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=NLT+Bible+Promise+book+for+tough+times&qid=1608666257&sr=8-2.

^[3]Notice that this is the same conclusion found in the Moral Argument for the existence of God, that God is the objective standard of moral perfection that we all know exists, at least deep down in our hearts.