What is theology proper, or paterology?

Who by searching can find out God? Who can understand the mystery of the Godhead? Who can fathom the mystery of the incarnation of the Son of God? You might far sooner ask an ant to understand the working of a man's mind, than ask a man to fathom the mind of God. In the first case the ant is finite and so is man; in the second case man is finite and God is infinite. In the first case you can measure the distance; in the second it is impossible to do so.

His judgments are unsearchable, His ways past finding out. They cannot be discovered by all man's cleverness and searching. He must reveal them Himself if they are to be known at all. This does not mean that because of revelation we now know everything about His ways. Indeed, how much we are still ignorant of! But He reveals to us what He knows is good for us, and this is enough to subdue our hearts with awe when we listen to it rightly.

"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," or anything like that. 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, that is, "Light" and "Love."

God inhabits eternity. He fills all things. He is everywhere. He is the uncreated, self-existent source of all things, yet He Himself has no source. He created all things out of nothing... He is all goodness, all love, all righteousness, all holiness, all faithfulness. Every attribute and quality that we can admire is absolute in its fulness in Him... omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence all serve His love, and therefore serve us. This could not be known without revelation, nor fully known apart from the Cross, where God fully revealed Himself in Christ.

These three Persons, of one substance, completely united in thought, will, purpose and counsel, are not three Gods but one God — not tritheism, but a Holy Trinity. We cannot understand the mystery of all this, but this truth lies at the very foundation of the Christian faith.

Of these relationships... there are three: Almighty, Jehovah, and Father — the last never revealed until Christ the Son came. Elohim was revealed to Abraham as Almighty. He was to trust Him in that character... To Israel He was revealed as Jehovah, and He was to be known and trusted as such. To us He is revealed as Father, and especially as Holy Father, in which name He keeps us; and we who have believed in the Son know Him and trust Him.

It was not as Elohim, the strong One, that God made this revelation to Peter, nor as Jehovah, the self-existent One, nor as El-Shaddai, the Almighty, all-sufficient One, but as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ — "My Father," as He said. All that had come out in former days He is and always will be; but here it is not a question of His attributes, His power, faithfulness or sufficiency, but of what He is in His very nature. This could not be known to us by any work of His hand in creation, but only by His revealing Himself through the only begotten Son who dwelt eternally in His bosom.

God does not become the Father; neither did our Lord Jesus Christ become the Son. To say there was a time when the Father was not the Father, and a time when the Son was not the Son, degrades beyond measure the true essential greatness of both the Father and the Son.

A child has a nature capable of a child's affections, but he cannot have the feelings proper to a child until he knows his father. We are in the conscious sense of relationship: the love of God is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit... There is no question about love now, for God has given His Son; none about righteousness, for Christ is at the right hand of God; and none about relationship, for the Spirit teaches us to cry, "Abba, Father."