The Wonder of our God

The Wonder of our God!

In the Bible God reveals to the human race all that they need to know about Him, and what He requires of them. The Bible is not the word of men but the word of God. The human writers of the Bible were inspired by the Holy Spirit to write down exactly what God intended. So when we wonder what God is like, we don’t need to guess, but go to His revelation, the Bible. He tells us there about Himself. Here are some things which He has told us about Himself.

God is a Spirit

He tells us that He is spirit. “God is Spirit...” (John 4:24).. Jesus is not saying that God is one spirit among many; rather, He intended to underscore the truth that God’s essence is of the nature of spirit. This means two things:

i) He is a personal Spirit. God is not Something but Someone. He is a personal Spirit. He is self-conscious and self-determining, living and active.Because He is a personal Spirit, we can know Him. This would not be possible if He was just a force. On the very first page of the Bible, we read of God speaking, and this continues all the way to the last page, because He is personal. And God has names; the best known is ‘Jehovah’. The very fact that the Bible ascribes to Him such attributes as wisdom, knowledge, a will, and goodness also indicates that God is personal.

ii) He is noncorporeal. He does not have a body as we do. This can be demonstrated from Luke 24:36-43, where in response to the desciples’s assessment that he was a ‘spirit,’ Jesus said, “Behold My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself. Handle Ma and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see I have” (v.39). Because God is noncorporeal no property of matter can be ascribed to Him. He has no extension in space, no weight, no mass, no bulk, no form, no taste, no smell. God cannot be measured or limited or felt by our senses. It is true that we read we His eyes, His ears, His mouth, etc. This is just a way of helping our poor and limited minds to realise that God sees all things, hears His people’s prayers and makes Himself known.

He is invisible. “I urge you in the sight of God...that you keep this commandment without spot, blameless until our Lord Jesus Christ’s appearing, which He (God) will manifest in His own time, the King of kings and Lord of Lords, who alone has immortality, dwelling in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see, to whom be honor and everlasting power. Amen” (1Timothy 6:13-16).

God cannot be pictured or represented in any way. He forbids us to try to depict Him (Exodus 20:4). When we go to the letter to the Romans we find that people try and make images of God. And the apostle says that that is the greatest sin in the world. Because in trying to represent God and trying to make a picture or a model of God they deface the glory of the incorruptible God. They pervert what God is really like. That is sinful.

God is very great

So we have affirmed that God is spirit. This description, while it may distinguish God from the corporeal human creature, fails to distinguish God from angels who are also noncorporeal personal entities. So the next thing we the Bible says about God is that He is great; infinite, eternal and unchangeable in His being. Angels are created, finite and capable of being annihilated but God is uncreated, infinite and eternal.

God is infinite. He is far greater than everything He made, far greater than anything that exists. As far as power is power is concerned, He is He does whatever He chooses (Psalm 135:6). Nothing that He chooses to do ever fails to happens (Isaiah 46:10). Nothing can resist His will.

As far as knowledge is concerned He knows every single thing (Psalm 139:2-5; 1John 3:20). Even your secret thoughts He knows them! Our knowledge is small and limited. We can only know one thing at a time. But that’s not true when talking about God. He knows all things at once as if they are happening in the front of Him. There is nothing of which He is not aware. His understanding is unlimited.

As far as space is concerned He is present everywhere. Just as God is unlimited or infinite with respect to power and knowledge, so He is unlimited with respect to space. He is present at every point of space with His whole being. “ “Am I a God near at hand,” says the Lord, “And not a God afar off? Can anyone hide himself in secret places, So I shall not see him?” says the Lord; “Do I not fill heaven and earth?” says the Lord” (Jeremiah 23:23-24). God’s omnipresence is beautifully expressed by David, “Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend into heaven, You are there; If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there. If I take the wings of the morning, And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, Even there Your hand shall lead me, And Your right hand shall hold me.” (Psalm 139:7-10). There is nowhere in the entire universe, on land or sea, in heaven or in hell, where one can flee from the presence of God. It is not that a part of God is in one place and a part of Him is in another. It is God Himself-the whole of God- who is present wherever we might go. This is difficult for us to imagine. Our mortal and finite mind cannot comprehend it. The finite cannot understand the infinite.

As far as time is concerned, God is eternal. “From everlasting to everlasting, You are God,” said David in Psalm 90:2. Everything owes its beginning to God, but He Himself had no beginning. He sees all time equally and vividly. We read in Psalm 9:4, “For You have maintained my right and my cause; You sat on the throne judging in righteousness.” In the New Testament, Peter tells us, “that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (2 Peter 3:8). These verses help us to image the way in which God see time.

God is absolutely independent and self-sufficient. He does not need any part of His creation in order to exist or for any other reason. Paul proclaims to the men in Athens, “God, who made the world and everything in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands. Nor is He worshiped with men’s hands, as though He needed anything, since He gives to all life, breath, and all things.” (Acts 7:24-25). People have sometimes wrongly that God created human beings because he was lonely and needed fellowship with other persons. If this is true, it would certainly mean that God is not completely independent of creation.

God is unchangeable. He is always the same. “Of old You laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of Your hands. They will perish, but You will endure; yes, they will all grow old like a garment; like a cloak You will change them, and they will be changed. But You are the same, and Your years will have no end” (Psalm 102:25-27). Referring to His own qualities of patience, long-suffering, and mercy, God says, “For I am the Lord, I do not change; therefore you are not consumed, O sons of Jacob” (Malachi 3:6).

These too are beyond our understanding. All we can do is to believe and trust what God has declared in His Word and marvelled at his greatness!

God is Unique

God is Holy. ‘God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all” (1John 1:5). God is “glorious in holiness” (Exodus 15:11). His character is perfect. He is pure and entirely free from wicked and dishonest motives, thoughts, words and actions. It is this characteristic which cuts Him off, and marks Him out as different from all His creatures. God is of purer eyes than to behold evil, and cannot look on wrong (Habakkuk 1:13).

And God is righteous. He always does what is right. And God is love (1John 4:8,16). He is slow to anger and abundant in mercy and kindness. He is good, just and wise. When we see the beauty and harmony of God’s creation, and the intricacy of the design of the smallest creature, we are compelled to say, ‘O Lord, how manifold are Your works! In wisdom You have made them all. The earth is full of your possessions” (Zabur, psalm 104:24)

God is incomprehensive

We can never fully understand God. Because God is infinite and we are finite and limited, we can never fully understand God. In this sense, God is incomprehensive. I am not saying that God cannot be understood. What I am saying is that God cannot be fully or exhaustively understood.

David, in Psalm 145:3 says,. “Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised; and His greatness is unsearchable” God’s greatness is beyond searching out or discovering. It is too great ever to be fully known. His thoughts are so much higher than ours. “Great is our Lord, and mighty in power; His understanding is infinite” (Psalm 147:5). Similarly, when thinking of God’s knowledge, David said, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain it” (Palm 139:6).

Paul, speaking of God, said, “Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out!” (Romans 11:33).

All these verses allow us to take our understanding of the incomprehensibility of God one step further. It is not only true that we can never fully understand any single thing about God. His greatness, His understanding, His knowledge, His wisdom, judgment, and ways are all beyond our ability to understand fully. Thus, we may know something about God’s love, power, wisdom and so on. But we can never know, for example, how God’s love relates to every other attribute of God, and to every individual thing in the universe, for all eternity! We can never know God completely and exhaustively.

And so as we study the doctrine of the Trinity, we must come with a humble heart. The trinity is a mystery. It is futile to try to understand the Trinity through human reason. God is beyond human reason. One great leader of the early church said, ‘It is easier to measure the entire ocean in a little cup than to grasp the greatness of God in the human mind.’ We will never understand the Trinity, but let us accept by faith that God, who is one, is also ‘three in one.’ God wants us to know who He is. He longs for us to understand Him rightly, according to what He has revealed in His Holy Word.

God is one

Over the centuries, certain Christian concepts have been misunderstood. One false idea is that Christians believe in three gods.

Do Christians worship three God?

No! Let’s talk about the early Christian for instance. Most of them were from a Jewish background. Judaism, as you know, is a monotheistic religion; that is, Jews believe that there is only one God, and that this God, Yahweh, is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The early Christians continued to affirm their belief in this one God. They knew that the God of the Old Testament is the God that Christians worship.

The early Christians lived among the polytheistic peoples of the Roman world. Most people in first century Greek and Roman society believed in many gods. Since polytheism was all around them, Christians could have been tempted to start believing in three gods in order to try to fit in with society. But this did not happen! Christians never entertained such an idea. They continued to believe that there is only one God. Why did they do this? They did it simply because they believed the Bible.

Let’s briefly look at some evidence which makes it clear that both the Old Testament and the New Testament affirm that there is only one God.

Old Testament support for monotheism

The Old Testament declares this truth very clearly. In fact, the opening verse of the Holy Bible reads, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). God created all that exists. There is not one god of the sun, one god of the moon and yet another of the stars. No, there is one God who made the stars, the moon, the sun… and everything else.

Consider some other Old Testament verses: Moses said, “To you it was shown that you might know that the Lord Himself is God; there is none other besides Him” (Deuteronomy 4:35 ). Later Moses again declared, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one!” (Deuteronomy 6:4).

Solomon spoke these words, “May these words of mine, with which I have made supplication before the Lord, be near the Lord our God day and night, that He may maintain the cause of His servant and the cause of His people Israel, as each day may require, that all the peoples of the earth may know that the Lord is God; there is no other” (1 Kings 8:59-60). What a statement!

In another passage, God spoke through the prophet Isaiah and said, “I am the Lord, and there is no other; there is no God besides Me” (Isaiah 45:5). Again, God said in Isaiah 46:9, “Remember the former things of old, For I am God, and there is no other; I am God and there is none like me.”

The early Christians, then, saw clearly from the Old Testament Scriptures that there is only one God. But does the New Testament (Injil) also state this? Let’s have a look at some important verses from the New Testament.

New Testament support for monotheism

The New Testament also states clearly that there is only one God. For example, John (one of Jesus’ disciples) asserts, “This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God” (John 17:3). Only God gives

eternal life, and the God who does this is one.

The apostle Paul says plainly, “Yet for us there is one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we for Him” (1 Corinthians 8:6). Writing to Christians in Rome, Paul asserts the same truth; “Or is He the God of the Jews only? Is He not also the God of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also, since there is one God who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith” (Romans 3:29-30). The God who brings Jews and Gentiles together through faith in Jesus Christ, is one God.

When the apostle Paul wrote his first letter to his fellow worker Timothy, he said, “For there is one God and one Mediator between God and Man, the Man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5).

James, a brother of Jesus, wrote one of the books in the New Testament. It says, “You believe that there is one God. You do well. Even the demons believe - and tremble!” (James 2:19). How sad it would be if Christians were to deny what even the demons get right!