Who is God?

But Moses protested, “If I go to the people of Israel and tell them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ they will ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what should I tell them?”   God replied to Moses, “I Am Who I Am.  Say this to the people of Israel: I Am has sent me to you.”  Exodus 3:13-14

When you really want to know who someone is, there is no better source for information than the individual in question. Moses illustrated this in the above Scripture by asking this question of God in anticipation that he would be asked the same thing. Even though God can never be fully captured in human terms, through my own relationship with Him, there are three characteristics in particular about Him that have helped me personally grasp His reality more.

A first given about God that must be known and accepted in order to begin to see Him is that He is invisible. I use the term “given” here because, just as certain other beliefs you accept in your life such as some scientific theories, have certain givens that must be known in order to correctly apply the theory, so to must it be accepted that God is invisible in order to begin to properly see His reality.

An everyday example of this would be the wind. Just as you cannot see it, but rather see it at work, so it is with God. Jesus, who will be further discussed in a later article, is described in Scripture such as Colossians 1:15 as the visible image of the invisible God. Once the given of God’s invisibility is accepted, you can then begin to see Him at work.

A second given about God is that He is eternal. This means that He always has, does, and will continue to exist forever as explained in Scripture such as Revelation 1:8. This concept is hard to grasp because you always think of everything and everyone you know as having come from somewhere or someone else. If you take time to follow this logic through, something or someone had to be the beginning. The Bible presents God as that beginning as described in Genesis 1.

An example through which to see this would be your family tree. Take your tree back as far as you can to the earliest ancestor possible. Even though your limited knowledge stops there, logic tells you that person came from someone as well. If you were able to trace this lineage back far enough, it would eventually take you to Adam and Eve who came from God as initially described in Genesis 1:26-27 and more specifically detailed beginning in Genesis 2 of the Bible.

A final, yet the most important, truth I have learned about God is that He made me, you, and everyone for no other reason than to love us and for us to love Him and one another in return. This is illustrated in the fact that Scripture such as 1 John 4:8 tells us God is love and Genesis 1:27 tells us He made us in His image. He loves when we express this love to Him and one another through unconditional acts of love to one another, but He made us first and foremost for Him to love and for us to love Him and one another in return, regardless of any acts or lack thereof.

In conclusion, once again this article is not intending to serve as an all-inclusive description of who God is, for there is not enough words in the human vocabulary to do that. His invisibility, eternalness, and unconditional love though, are just a few of His attributes that have helped me grow in my own personal relationship with Him.