What are the most important things to understand about God's nature?

God inhabits eternity. He fills all things. He is everywhere. He is the uncreated, self-existent source of all things, yet knowing no source for Himself. He created all things out of nothing. Such a conception satisfies because it is beyond conception... He is all goodness, all love, all righteousness, all holiness, all faithfulness. Every attribute and quality that we can admire is absolute in its fullness in Him.

Attributes are ideas which we attach to God in connection with what is outside Himself, though belonging necessarily to Him as God. He is omnipotent, omniscient, supreme; even righteous, holy; these... are relative terms. I must think of God's dealings and claims to call Him righteous... To call Him holy, I must think of evil which He rejects. Hence He is not called righteousness and holiness, but righteous and holy.

"God is light;" and "God is love." These two are His essential qualities — His very being... We know that God is holy, righteous, and just, and that He is good, gracious, and merciful. But these divine qualities are only the manifest results of what God is in Himself, that is, "Light," and "Love."

If light expresses the divine energy in manifesting the stainless and unstainable purity of God's moral nature, "love" expresses the energy of God in asserting and maintaining the absolute perfection of His goodness. Necessarily these two qualities unite in God. If He were not absolutely "light" He could not be absolute goodness; and if He were not absolutely "love" — perfect goodness — He could not be unsullied light.

Every attribute of the blessed God is to be seen in relation to the holiness of His nature. So every promise, every act of love, every movement in grace, every dispensing of mercy, is in absolute accord with His nature and in relation to His eternal purpose. His Name is "the SAME;" He remains faithful; He cannot deny Himself... Neither the corruptness of man nor the power of death are able to divert His will.

There could be no full revelation of God, but through the Son by the Spirit, and by that of the Father. The full revelation of the one God is only thus — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This, this only, is what the one God is, one identity of will and being, so that they are essentially one and one only, yet distinct in willing and acting.

In Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily, but it dwells in Him to be expressed. He is "the Word" — the expression of all that is in the divine mind — the full and blessed revelation of God. Until the incarnation God was unexpressed, and therefore unknown, for "no one has ever seen God"... God is in the light; everything that belongs to His nature and character is perfectly disclosed in the Person of the Son.

Creation had displayed His Godhead and power; but that tells me nothing of His nature. A man of power may be a very good man or the reverse; power as such tells me nothing of character. But in the cross the whole character of God has been revealed... But where we see His love, there also we see infinite holiness. That is what makes the cross the resting-place of our souls for ever.

"God is spirit, and His worshippers must worship in spirit and truth." It is the nature of God which is here in question, not the relationship of grace which He now reveals in and by Christ... as God is spirit, spiritual worship is all He accepts. It is a moral necessity flowing from His nature.