The Personal God

From Gospel Translations

God is, but what is God like? The question is not merely academic, because if what we think about God is basically wrong, we may be worshipping a false God, an idol.  And what we worship shapes us. We tend to take on something of the character of what we worship - money, pleasure, success, God, or anything else. So if we will worship God, we must think of him as he is. Otherwise the false image we worship will distort our motives and twist our personalities.

So what is God like? What are his main qualities (which are sometimes called his attributes)? Many of God's characteristics are shared in some degree with human beings. This makes it possible for us to understand what he is like. But the qualities God shares with us are not exactly like ours, for our words are not adequate to express his perfection. God wills, and we will; God loves and we love: God hates, and we hate. But God's wilI, God's love, and God's hate are not exactly like ours. In each case, we must try to detect how God's qualities are like ours, and how they differ.

In addition, God has attributes quite unlike anything else in the universe. They are far harder for us to understand, even when they are described for us. But there are ways of picturing them and glimpsing them, and they are an essential part of what makes God who he is.

QUALITIES GOD SHARES WITH PEOPLE

God is personal. This means he is aware of his own existence, that he reasons, makes free decisions. He is an intelligent moral being, not merely an abstract idea, a 'thing' which somehow exercises fatalistic control over the universe, like a giant robot in a factory. He acts and speaks because he consciously chooses to act and speak, deciding what he will do and what he will say.

All moral virtues belong to God. Jesus has shown us that God is good, loving, forgiving, merciful. gracious, holy, truthful, righteous: that he is a peacemaker, helper, a compassionate provider: that he plans things according to his own perfect will. Because he is perfectly righteous, he is also angry at both sinners and their sin, for light cannot stand darkness, and is jealous of those pledged to be his but who yet turn away and choose some lesser allegiance. All these qualities belong in some measure to people as well. We, too, can be merciful. truthful, compassionate, angry, jealous.  We use our wills and choose our course.

God's perfection

What makes these characteristics different in God from in us? It is that in God they are perfect and unqualified, quite untarnished by sin. God is perfectly good. Everything he is and everything he does and says is good: he cannot be other than good. God is loving, so much so that the Bible dares say God is love. His love, unlike ours, never fails. His forgiveness is far more remarkable than ours. When we forgive we remember that we too, have sinned: but when God forgives, it is despite the fact he is always the wounded party, and has never sinned.

The Bible tells us that God feels wrath against all sin and all sinners (we are all by nature 'children of wrath'). But, unlike most of our anger, this is not the result of personal pique. It is a necessary part of his justice. He cannot but be angry with sin and with sinners. If he were indifferent he would be denying his own holiness. This does not mean God's anger is impersonal, merely a symbolic picture of his justice. It is personal enough, but without being spiteful. arbitrary, or uncontrolled. His jealousy is justified precisely because he is God, who rightly lays claim to our devotion. Our jealousy, by contrast, is too often (though not always) the result of our desire to hang on to something over which we ought not to make such absolute claims.

More important yet, most of us find we can be loving or angry, forgiving or jealous, compassionate or holy, but not both a t once. God is under no such limitations. He cannot be other than both compassionate and holy. In what he feels towards a sinful human being, God will invariably be both loving and angry. But to understand better how this can be so, we must think about some other of God's qualities.

QUALITIES UNIQUE TO GOD

There are some things which can be said of God alone. God alone is self-existing. This means that whereas everything and everyone else depends on him for existence, he is absolutely independent of them. He has life in himself, and he is the source of the life of the universe; but he himself has no source. He alone is utterly self-sufficient. He needs nothing the universe offers him.

It follows that God does not change. His life does not change, his character does not change, his ways do not change, his purposes do not change: even his Son does not change. For this reason, God is supremely reliable and trustworthy.

It is most important to understand God's changelessness correctly. It does not mean he is passionless, that he cannot feel a variety of emotions. The Bible shows us a God who feels very deeply. Nor does it mean that his dealings with a particular person or nation may not change in their experience. Rather, it means God's dealings with us will always be based on the same things - on what God is like.

The unlimited God

Both the glory of God, and the difficulties we have in grappling with what he has revealed of himself, stem from the fact that he transcends the limits we experience. God is essentially unlimited. By contrast, we human beings are limited in time (we are born, live and die at a certain time in history): place (if I am in London I am not simultaneously in Montreal or Karachi); power (there are many things I am incapable of doing): knowledge (enough said!). But God is infinite in all these respects.

• He is unlimited in time. His realm is eternity. Our very notion of time is bound up with the movement of the stars and planets which he created. We cannot easily think of days or years or any sequence, apart from presuppositions about the movement of planet earth, rotating on its axis and circling the sun. But God is not bound by this system. He made it, and so he is above it.

The problem is that we can scarcely understand what it means to be above time. It certainly does not mean that God is merely static: the God of the Bible stands in active relationship with the universe he created. We are creatures in time, and so if God is to reveal himself to us, it must be in terms of history, of sequence, of 'before' and 'after'. Before Paul was converted, in the days of Pontius Pilate , Jesus died and rose again, the perfect manifestation of God within time , at a specific place in history.

The thought is staggering: the eternal God, the timeless God, has chosen to reveal himself to us in time, because that is the only habitat we understand. And if we find it difficult to understand what it means to say God stands above time, how much more difficult is it for us to understand how this eternal God can reveal himself to us in time. There is nothing intrinsically illogical about the idea; but there is much we do not comprehend about it.

• God is unlimited in place. He is everywhere: as the theologians say, he is 'omnipresent'. It is impossible to hide from him or to escape from him. He is in everything. But it does not follow that he cannot sometimes appear to people in a localized way. In the Old Testament, God meets with his people personally and at a particular place - in a bright cloud of glory, at the tent in the wilderness, at the temple. When he withdraws from them in wrath, he makes it impossible for them to meet him or experience him; but in one sense even then they cannot escape his presence.

In the New Testament, God meets his people in the most humanly personal way possible - in his Son Jesus. When Jesus is in Galilee, he is not in Jerusalem or Jericho; he is spatially restricted. But God himself is not thereby restricted to anyone location, for Jesus continues to pray to him as his 'Father in heaven'.

In other words, just as God is timeless, but meets us in history, so is he omnipresent, but meets us in his Son Jesus. And Jesus lived in a real place, Palestine, and met people in separate encounters on known roads, in boats, in houses. Today, too, he meets with us by his Holy Spirit where we are.

• God is unlimited in power. He can do anything: he is ·omnipotent'. But this fact, frequently stressed in the Bible, is often applied wrongly. College lecturers have been known to ask puzzled philosophy undergraduates, 'Is God so powerful that he can make a stone too heavy for him to lift ?' - knowing that a 'yes' answer means God cannot lift the stone, and a 'no ' answer means God cannot make the stone. Either way there is something he cannot do. In fact, this old chestnut is a trick question: it is asking God to do some thing self contradictory, which no one, not even God, can do.

In the same way. God cannot do anything that would violate his own character, or break one of his promises. When Christians say that God is omnipotent, they simply mean that there is no limit to his power, no intrinsic weakness or inability. He can do anything he pleases; but what he pleases will always he in perfect harmony with his character, with all that makes him God.

• God is unlimited in knowledge: he is 'omniscient'. There is nothing that God does not know. This includes not only all brute facts, but also all opinions and thought. He knows the future as well as the past and present - perhaps because he stands above time as we know it, and is not bound by the past-present- future structure which dominates our lives.

Quite clearly, some attributes of God, such as his eternity, are very difficult to understand in their own right. They become that much more difficult when we recognize that this God graciously stoops to meet us where we are - bound by time, place and limitations of power and knowledge. It is hard enough to think deeply about God's timelessness. But it is even more difficult to think about how this timeless God could meet us in history and respond to us in the interplay of real personal relationships.

It is hard enough to understand God's unlimited power, his absolute sovereignty. But it is more difficult to understand how this utterly sovereign God, who does whatever he wants, can have meaningful relationships with us, his creatures, without either reducing us to robots or else sacrificing his own sovereignty.