Who is God? The character and attributes of God

A. W. Tozer opened The Knowledge of the Holy with a sentence worth memorising: what comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.

He was not exaggerating. If you believe God is mainly disappointed in you, you will relate to him as an employee to an unpleasable manager. If you believe he is indulgent, sin will look harmless. If you believe he is distant, prayer will feel like a formality. Almost every distortion in Christian living traces back to a distorted picture of God.

So what is he actually like?

He begins by describing himself

Moses asks to see God's glory. The answer is not a display but a proclamation — the fullest self-description God gives anywhere in Scripture:

The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty.— Exodus 34:6-7

Two things are worth noticing.

The order. Mercy, grace, patience, love and faithfulness come first, at length. Justice comes last, in one clause. When God introduces himself, this is the emphasis he chooses — and this passage becomes the most quoted text within the Old Testament itself, echoed in the Psalms, Joel, Jonah and Nahum.

And the final clause is not a contradiction of the others. A God who shrugged at cruelty would not be loving. Our own moral instincts agree: we do not admire a judge who lets the guilty walk.

Holiness: the attribute behind the others

When Isaiah is given a vision of God's throne, the seraphim do not cry "loving, loving, loving" or "powerful, powerful, powerful." They cry "Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts" (Isaiah 6:3) — the only attribute in Scripture raised to the third degree.

Qadosh means set apart, other, in a category of one. God's holiness is first about his distinctness from everything created, and only then about his moral purity. He is not the best being on a scale that also contains us. He is not on the scale.

Isaiah's response is not delight but collapse: "Woe is me! For I am lost" (Isaiah 6:5). Every encounter with God's unfiltered presence in Scripture goes this way. Any account of God that leaves you comfortable has described something else.

Love: not a mood, but what he is

"God is love" (1 John 4:8). John does not write that God is loving, as one quality among several. He writes an identity statement.

This is exactly where the Trinity becomes necessary rather than decorative. Love requires an object. If God were a solitary individual, then before creation there was nothing for him to love, and love would be something he started doing rather than something he is. But Jesus prays of the Father, "you loved me before the foundation of the world" (John 17:24). Father, Son and Spirit have loved one another eternally. Creation is the overflow of a love that was already complete, not a remedy for divine loneliness.

That changes how you read your own existence. You are not necessary to God. You are wanted by him — which is a better thing.

The attributes in brief

• Eternal and self-existent (aseity) — he depends on nothing. "I AM WHO I AM" (Exodus 3:14). Everything else that exists is contingent; he is not.
• Unchanging (immutability) — "I the LORD do not change" (Malachi 3:6). His character and promises do not drift with circumstance or mood.
• All-powerful (omnipotence) — "nothing is too hard for you" (Jeremiah 32:17). Not that he can do nonsense; that no power constrains him.
• All-knowing (omniscience) — "even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O LORD, you know it altogether" (Psalm 139:4).
• Everywhere present (omnipresence) — "if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there" (Psalm 139:8). There is no location outside his presence, including the ones you would rather he not see.
• Perfectly just — "shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?" (Genesis 18:25).
• Faithful — "if we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself" (2 Timothy 2:13).
• Spirit — "God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth" (John 4:24). Not confined to a body or a place, which is why every image made of him is a downgrade.

Where the attributes meet

The obvious question is how a perfectly just God forgives guilty people without ceasing to be just. Exodus 34 has said both: abounding in steadfast love, and by no means clearing the guilty.

The answer is the cross. Paul says God put Christ forward as a propitiation "to show his righteousness... so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus" (Romans 3:25-26). Not just instead of merciful. Just and the justifier. The penalty is not waived; it is absorbed. God pays it himself.

Every attribute meets there. Holiness that cannot overlook sin. Justice that requires it addressed. Love that will not let the sinner go. Power sufficient to raise the dead. Wisdom to do it in a way nobody would have designed.

Transcendent and near at once

The God of the Bible is both further away and closer than most people imagine. "For thus says the One who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit" (Isaiah 57:15).

Distant gods are safe and useless. Domesticated gods are comfortable and worthless. The God of Scripture is neither: high enough that Isaiah fell down, near enough that Jesus taught us to say Father.