What is God like?
Ask an ordinary person what God is like and you will get an answer shaped by imagination, upbringing, or disappointment. Scripture takes a different route: God tells us what He is, and He does it in words so short they can be carried in the memory for life.
Beyond the Reach of Our Own Thinking
Any honest answer has to start by admitting where the search cannot begin. One writer puts the limit bluntly, and the reason for it:
J. N. DarbyMan's mind cannot go beyond his mind, and so it cannot reach God, for God is beyond his mind. If I trust my mind, I may be deceived, for another man may have a cleverer mind than mine and deceive me.
What He Is in Himself
Scripture says many things about God, but only twice does it define His very being. The distinction matters:
Julius A Von Poseck"God is light," and "God is love." These two are His essential qualities — His very being. We know that power, dominion and authority, wisdom and riches belong to Him. But nowhere does Scripture say that "God is power," or that "God is wisdom." We know that God is holy, righteous, and just, and that He is good, gracious, and merciful. But these divine qualities are only the visible results of what God is in Himself — Light and Love.
Two Truths That Hold Each Other Up
These two are not rivals, and neither can be true without the other:
C CrainIf light expresses the divine energy in showing the spotless purity of God's moral nature, "love" expresses the energy of God in asserting and maintaining the absolute perfection of His goodness. These two distinguishing qualities must 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 unstained light.
Which is why leaning on one alone distorts the picture. Commentators warn that this is where much popular thinking about God goes wrong:
A J PollockOne would have thought it impossible to over-emphasize these wonderful words, "God is love." That is certainly true, if this grand truth is held in due proportion to other Scripture truths. But when emphasis on the truth "God is love" is pushed so far that it obscures the truth that "God is light," something is very fundamentally wrong.
Where Both Are Seen at Once
At the cross the two are not balanced against each other but shown together, each doing its own work:
C Knapp"God is light" (1 John 1:5). This is His character, which made the death of His Son a necessity. "God is love" (1 John 4:8). This is His nature, which led Him to give His Son so that His death might become an accomplished fact. Grace reigns "through righteousness." God is showing grace, and the death of Christ at Calvary proclaims Him "a just God and a Saviour."
The Name He Proclaimed to Moses
Long before that, God announced His own character out loud on the mountain — and what Moses received was a glimpse, not the whole:
Hamilton SmithGod answers in grace, and gives a partial revelation of Himself in His goodness, grace, and mercy. This is a glimpse of His glory: not the law demanding what man should be, but the glory revealing what God is. So "The LORD passed before him and proclaimed, 'The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness… forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty'" (Ex. 34:6-7). This is clearly not pure law; neither is it pure grace — the sovereign grace of God revealed in Christ.
The Only Full Portrait
The complete answer is a Person, not a list. And He is the only place to look:
F. B. HoleAs the Witness to the peoples He stands absolutely alone. He alone is the Declarer of God, being the only-begotten Son, who abides "in the bosom of the Father" (John 1:18)… In Him we really know God as He is. We need to keep reminding ourselves of this, since people in the world always tend to judge God by what they find in the world. So they utterly misjudge Him and formulate their complaints against Him; and we may often be tempted to make the same mistake in principle, complaining of His ways in permitting this or that to come upon us.
Knowing Him Shows in Living
What we conclude about God does not stay in the head:
F. A. HughesIt is a basic principle of Christianity that the life and conduct of the believer should be determined by his knowledge of God. What we know of God should come out in the way we walk. God has been fully revealed in love, and John, who makes this truth so clear, also says, "Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love" (1 John 4:8).
Summary
- Not guessed. God is beyond the reach of the human mind, so everything we truly know about Him is what He has said about Himself.
- Light. His character is spotless purity — the reason the death of His Son was necessary.
- Love. His nature is perfect goodness — the reason He gave His Son at all.
- Together. Light without love, or love without light, is a false God; the cross shows both at full strength.
- Declared. Moses heard a partial revelation of mercy and grace; the full portrait is Christ — and knowing Him should show in how we live.