If scripture is to be believed, and it is, God exist beyond any limitations we could possibly attach to our understanding of existence. God shapes the nature of existence like a human potter shapes a piece of clay. God designs creation’s intricacies of interrelation as a watch maker makes a watch. From beyond galaxy clusters down to the invisible world of subatomic particles and from the creation of life on earth to the creation of angelic beings, all spiritual and material creation is framed and exist within God’s relational symbiotic coexistence.
From this we understand that God is more superior to us than we are to an amoeba. With the ease in which we put a drop of water on a microscope’s slide, a drop that becomes the amoeba’s entire universe, God has created our universe entire through a fiat of His divine will. If humanity is capable of so easily creating an amoeba’s universe on a glass slide, is it so difficult to conceive a being at least as superior to us? God has created the drop that is the immeasurable universe we live in.
To believe such a being could not exist, and live accordingly, is the epitome of human hubris. To assume a human superiority in existence that would exclude such a superior being is equivalent to assuming that the earth is the center of the universe, and the planets and stars all revolve around us. To believe without foundation that humanity is the ultimate type of entity and there could be no mode of existence beyond our essential nature, except by measurable degree, is without rational foundation.
For an increasingly large portion of our culture this assumption, and the various life philosophies that derive from it, is assumed truth. However, to truly reject the idea of God requires some introductory understanding of His potential nature. Without this introductory understanding there can be no rational grounds for the exclusion of His theoretical existence.
Another popular stance in today’s culture is to claim a relationship with God without any understanding of how one may be in relationship with God. Instead of denying God’s existence they shape God, and the nature of relationship with Him, according to their own whim and fancies.
Both approaches are just two sides of the same coin of human hubris. One denies God’s existence which frees them from any responsibility for their lives beyond their own understanding of good and evil. The other creates their own God and shapes their relationship with Him according to their own knowledge of God and evil.
Both approaches mirror the deception and fall of humanity in Eden and excludes the adherents of these approaches from any possible relationship with God beyond empty inventions. These inventions are modern versions of the original deception and do not exist beyond the human mind. They are like nursery rhymes told to children to teach behavior. However, God is not an idea invented by the human mind and cannot be defined or described by human thought. God is yet God.
The nature of God is as far beyond the grasp of our inadequate philosophy, our deficient science, and our meager attempts at religion as we are beyond the amoeba. For us to begin to comprehend God and His Creation from our own effort would be like an amoeba through its own effort trying to grasp human existence. Could an amoeba grasp poetry, a cell phone, or the nature of human relationships? No, it would be completely beyond the amoeba’s abilities. In the same way, we can only understand God and His works in the way and to the measure He chooses to reveal Himself.
God has Chosen to reveal Himself and His activities through Jesus and to fully reveal Jesus through the Bible. However, God has not done this by writing the Bible as a philosophical, scientific, or theological manual for us to read. We have already stated that these human tools would be inadequate to understand God. In addition, if God did use these tools, it would mean that those who were intellectually superior would have an advantage in comprehending and initiating relationship with God. No, this would not do.
God has chosen to reveal Himself in the Bible through relationship without regard to any other qualification. God’s relationship with humanity is displayed in the Bible as a series of relational stories. Reading the Bible is like reading a photo album filled with portraits of God interacting with individuals, various groups, or all of humanity within their given cultural context.
To begin to understand God as He has revealed himself to us in scripture, we must look at the relationships He has had and assemble them like a puzzle. These individual pictures of God come together to create a grand portrait that begins to reveal His ultimate nature. As this larger picture of God begins to emerge, we see that God occupies an expansive undefinable existence and we can only begin to see this grand picture through revelation.
Revelation is the spiritual comprehension of God made available only through relationship with Him. As we grow in relationship with God, He reveals more of Himself to us. This relationship is not comparable to corporeal relationships that are common to humanity. God is incomprehensibly superior to us in scope but is also incomprehensibly other than us in essence. God is spirit. Because of God’s superiority and otherness, the only appropriate nature of our relationship with Him is spiritual worship, John 4:24. Therefore, the revelation of God is not granted according to intelligence, creativity, or emotional dexterity, but is knowledge expressed directly to our spirt as we grow in a sufficient spiritually worshipful relationship with Him. The knowledge of God is closed to all else.
“But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.” 1st Corinthians 2:14.
Without a spiritual relationship with God, it is not possible to receive revelation or have any understanding of His nature, purpose, or plan. For this reason, even as the Bible contains unlimited truth the spreading of this truth will only spread as far as those who choose relationship with God.
This idea of relationship as the only path to discerning God’s nature is reflected in the growing rejection of the knowledge of God among academics in general but especially among the scientific community. To pursue the knowledge of God scientifically as a detached observer is a self-defeating proposition. To use some version of the scientific method to understand God would be like trying to discern color through your ear. Faith leads to relationship with God and relationship with God leads to understanding. No one said it better than Saint Augustine:
“Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore, seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.” - Augustine of Hippo
However, God engages humanity with revelation no matter how embryonic the initial relationship is. Anyone with faith enough to ask a question or initiate an honest investigation of God’s word is eligible to receive revelation according to their measure of faith. We must present God in a way that engages the hearer’s initial faith and services their need for answers to the questions the Gospel provokes in them. It is faith flowering in the heart of people that must be nurtured by our various ministries like a new flower in fertile soil.
Therefore, to communicate the mysteries of God is to assume some level of faith in the receiver. But we must keep in mind that the faith of the receiver exists in the context of mitigating circumstances. Cultural influences and prejudices can influence how God is communicated and received. And we must also acknowledge that in His sovereignty God reveals what He wants to reveal to whichever individuals, in whatever measure and for whatever purpose He chooses to reveal it. Also, the nature and scope of our relationship with God can further open or restrict our understanding of His revelation.
It is also possible for a well-meaning God-fearing person to error in matters of the nature of God and His works. We see these possibilities spelled out for us in 1st Cor 3:12-15. Here the Apostle Paul tells us that it is possible to build upon the perfect foundation of the knowledge of Christ with imperfect theological knowledge. Some of this knowledge is even deemed useless by God and will be completely consumed by fire when Christ returns, to the complete loss of reward of the sharer of such knowledge.
It appears all we can do is be careful to guard and nurture our growing relationship with Christ and be humble in our own studies and abilities as we share and receive God’s word, 1st Cor 3:18-20. For in the end, it is God Himself that will accomplish His ministry out of His shared word, Isaiah 55:11.
It is in this spirit and with this mutual understanding that I present the following brief review of some of the images of God’s nature that He presents to us in scripture. This type of introduction to the nature of God is central to piercing the creations of God that exist in the human mind as well as expressing an effective invitation for relationship with God through Jesus Christ in the larger culture.
First, God exist as an individual multi-relational person. God is an individual but is not limited by human notions of individuality. Part of God’s intrinsic nature is relationship. God exist at once as complete and fulfilled relationship as well as unique individual self, Genesis 1:26, Genesis 11:7, Deuteronomy 6:4.
Second, God does now, has always and will always exist everywhere, however and for whatever purpose He chooses Exodus 3:14. God’s activities are therefore expressed in His eternal now through this fulness of existence as part of His intrinsic nature. Therefore, all of God’s activities simultaneously have been done, will be done and are being done as part of His existence, even if from our perspectives these activities seem to happen as part of a linear progression in time, 1st Pet 1:19-20, Rom 8:28-30, Eph1:3-14, Jerimiah 1:5.
For this reason, God’s overall plans cannot be thwarted or even resisted, anymore than His intrinsic nature can be altered. Even as humanity occupies the infamous position of the only created being that can say no to God, no human being can prevent God’s plan for humanity from being fulfilled, Proverbs 21:30, Psalms 33: 10,11. God is omnipotent.
Third, God is spirit and dwells in heaven. Understand that heaven is not just a spiritual plain of existence because demons live in the spirit, yet they are not in heaven with God. No, heaven is the unique abode of God and heaven is the nature of God’s abode as much as it is the place of God’s abode. God abides in heaven as a rose abides in its fragrance. God’s abode is an expression of His intrinsic nature and apart from God heaven cannot be accessed or experienced. Heaven is a place where only God’s will is done, heaven is a place of unthwarted perfection, heaven is the unconstrained seat of God’s authority, majesty and grace. God’s people will and do also dwell in the kingdom of heaven as we submit to the Lordship of God. Heaven cannot be experienced as a place separate from the presence, majesty, authority, essential nature and will of God because God dwells in His own majesty. Rev 21, John 14:2, Rev 22:1-5, Rev 4.
Forth, God is love. Love, not to be confused with fleshly human understandings of an emotional feeling or natural intuition. Love is the nature of God’s multi-relational individual existence. Love exists in its fullest expression completely contained within God’s deity but also as it is expressed through relationship with His creation. Love, as it is used to describe God, is His intrinsic nature described as a noun. God is also Light. Light, when referencing God’s essential nature, is God’s love in action or God’s essential nature described as a verb. 1st John 4:7-8, 1st John 1:5, Matt 5:14-16.
Fifth, God is Holy. Holiness is God’s essential nature and can only be defined as being distinct from this current world. God also calls His people to be holy or distinct from this present world. We know God’s Holiness includes the above descriptions of His essential nature, but we have no other frame of reference to explore it further than the images we find revealed in scripture. God’s Holiness remains a mystery beyond His manifested distinction from fallen creation, 1st Sam 2:2, 1st Pet 1:15,16, Isa 6:3.
Sixth, God is invisible. The fulness of God’s nature is invisible not only to us but to the heavenly host. It is not possible to perceive a limitless being that is not contained or limited within any mode of existence or any combination of modes of existence that we can perceive or imagine. Even angels as creations of God occupy a limited mode of existence compared to God, so there are aspects of God that they can never know. The Apostle Paul marvels at the mystery of the nature of God revealed in Jesus Christ and includes in that mystery the notion that God was actually seen by angels.
And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness:
God was manifested in the flesh,
Justified in the Spirit,
Seen by angels,
Preached among the Gentiles,
Believed on in the world,
Received up in glory.
1st Tim 3:16
Seventh, God is Jesus, Colossians 2:9, Isaiah 9:6, John 20:28, Rev 1:8. The scriptures that most clearly reveal the above idea of God’s expanded existence are those pertaining to His relationship and ultimate redemption of humanity, John 1:1-5. Our only direct perception of God is through Jesus Christ. God becoming flesh as Jesus, manifesting to us the Godhead, is the perfect eternal expression of self-contained and expressed relational existence. This complete representation of God’s nature is revealed to us through the person of Jesus Christ. God has become like us and revealed His essential nature in its quality, if not in its entirety, in a way our limited abilities can receive it. This mystery is presented to us in Phil 2:5-11. Here we find the Apostle Paul musing on the apparent paradox of Jesus being completely God yet humbling himself and then being born as an obedient human being for God’s purposes.
You must have the same attitude that Christ Jesus had.
Though he was God,
he did not think of equality with God
as something to cling to.
Instead, he gave up his divine privileges;
he took the humble position of a slave
and was born as a human being.
When he appeared in human form,
he humbled himself in obedience to God
and died a criminal’s death on a cross.
Therefore, God elevated him to the place of highest honor
and gave him the name above all other names,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue declare that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
Phil 2:5-11
The above scripture reinforces the idea that God’s essential nature is not divided into a collection of the above-mentioned manifestations of a nature. The mystery of the nature of God is the paradox that He exist at once as one divine Person as well as all the above manifestations of His nature. The Lord our God is ONE, Deuteronomy 6:4. God is not divisible into a collection of attributes but is one hundred percent all of them at once without diminishment or variance of any of them.
Jesus is the direct expression of this dilated existence, Heb 1:1-3. This idea that Jesus is God was from the beginning a central truth of the Christian Faith. When Jesus Gives His instructions for spreading the Gospel in Matt 28:18-20 He begins by telling them that He has been given all authority in heaven and earth. Then Jesus instructs His disciples to baptize all nations under the one name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The disciples understood the larger implications of these instructions because starting in Acts 2:38 and continuing through any following act of baptism described in the Bible, all of the disciples baptized all people in the one name of Jesus, Acts 8:16, Acts 10:48, Acts:19:5. Jesus is that one name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, the only visible expression of the complete nature of God and the origin and preserver of all of creation, John 1:1-5.
The understanding of the above-described seven aspects as the singular dilated existence of God is completely foreign to human experience and cannot be comprehended intellectually. However, an introductory understanding of God’s nature is a necessary step to the proper understanding of His activities in the world through God’s revelation.
The creation of the universe from nothing, the proclamation of light, the creation of mankind as a singular male and female relationship, the judgment of sin, grace offered to the sinner, the necessity of God becoming human in a singular moment in time, the eternal nature of the Son, the completion of God’s plan before it began and all the other difficult to reconcile and comprehend aspects of God’s nature and activities can only be approached through a basic understanding of the introductory aspects of His nature.
However, culture cannot access even a cursory understanding of God’s nature without relationship with Jesus and relationship with Jesus cannot be properly accessed without scripture and a serious examination of scripture is all but excluded from the rhetorical systems that shape culture.
An asymmetrical biblical engagement of these rhetorical systems, freed from traditions, norms and attitudes that restrict its scope and versatility is what is needed. Only such an engagement can infuse our information saturated culture with an accurate introduction to the narrative of scripture and allow a plausible invitation for the necessary relationship with God that is only possible through Jesus Christ.