Introduction
Recently, my family has begun a study into various aspects of Christianity and learning about the nature of God or theology. This has really gotten me thinking because it’s not a subject often discussed in churches. Certainly not in liberal ones, and sadly, not even in conservative ones. It is avoided, and I believe there is a reason for that. It isn’t a good one either.
Why It Matters
The reason this subject is the starting point and matters so greatly is that no study of how we ourselves should apply Biblical principles can be complete or accurate if we do not know the nature of God. As Tozer says, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. … Worship is pure or base as the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts of God.
“For this reason the gravest question before the Church is always God Himself, and the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like. We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God. This is true not only of the individual Christian, but of the company of Christians that composes the Church. Always the most revealing thing about the Church is her idea of God, just as her most significant message is what she says about Him or leaves unsaid, for her silence is often more eloquent than her speech…”
What We Believe About God Has A Huge Impact On How We Live Our Lives
Truer words might never have been spoken. What we believe about God defines how we come to the Bible, and it defines how we approach every single thing about our lives. If we believe He is a being that will accept us however we are, then we can comfortably live our lives however we please for the knowledge of the holy is insignificant and need not affect anything of the divine.
But if there is a God who has a nature that we can, if there is a God whom we can see anything of in the order of nature and the natural laws, if there is a God revealed through His own revelation to man in the Scriptures? If we know that God, then we know our view of Him must impact every aspect of our lives, leaving no area untouched. Not education, not our beliefs, not any action or part of our lives.
We must hold all up to the light of who that God is, not our imagination of who God is. For if the Bible is true and if there is anything we can see of God’s nature from the natural world, our imaginations of who God is are invalidated and only the truth of who He has said He is can stand. But if it is not true, if any part of it isn’t true, then it is one person’s imagination of God against another and there is no way to know anything. Simply put, there would be nothing different between Jehovah God and Zeus for we can no more know Him than the ancient Greeks could understand and know Zeus. With no clear indication of who God is from His own revelation of Himself, He remains so high above our imaginations that we have no hope of understanding Him and therefore no hope of understanding His actions, how we might gain His favor, or how we ought to act in order to gain a favorable eternity.
The Results of Not Believing the Bible Is Infallible and God’s Word
We see the results of a belief that Scripture is unreliable in many religions and beliefs. Some have thrown it out entirely, and they believe all manner of things. Their beliefs range from the belief that there is some cosmic energy they’ll become a part of to the belief that there is no heaven, only constant reincarnation until one reaches a state of enlightenment. But sadly Christian groups have also fallen prey to this belief. Many liberal churches and most if not all Catholic churches teach that the Bible is only a group of stories that are meant to give us instruction into how to live a good life.
Of course, if this is true, then what shall we base our morals upon? Our own ideas of morality cannot be trusted. They have produced men like Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini. Our own moral codes vary widely and can become very, very messed up. But if we cannot trust our own and we are, as those who claim the Bible can’t be trusted might say, unable to know God at all, where then can our moral codes come from? They have to come from a higher power. But if you cannot know the higher power whom they come from, then you have a serious issue because you also can’t know what that higher power’s standards are for morality. For all you can determine, the higher power could be happy with Hitler and angry with your own “good” behavior. There is zero basis to say what is moral and what is not if the Bible is not true, then.
What Does God’s Nature Have to Do With This?
God’s nature comes into play because it is necessary for us to understand anything at all about Him or what He expects. Several very basic things must be true of God’s nature if any of us are going to be able to understand Him in even a limited capacity. After all, if the Bible is true, then God’s goal is to have a relationship with us. As with any relationship, there are boundaries and rules to follow. While the relationship isn’t all about rules, it is governed in some ways by them. But what relationship that is loving and good can function with no communication of expectations or the personality of the individuals involved? Therefore, to have a relationship with us, God must reveal both His nature and His expectations.
And that leads us to the main focus of this Sunday Story and the next. For today, I want to go over what I’ve been learning about the essence of God. God’s essence are those things that make Him God. They are different from attributes, which I’ll discuss next time, in that they are not physical descriptions of Him and are often harder to pin down. But they’re important because without them, many of the attributes that Christianity and the Bible assign to God have no basis to stand on.
God’s Essence
God is a Spirit
First on the list, we have the essence of God being a spirit. Or, a better way to say is that God is spirit. (Luke 24:39 and John 4:24). Sometimes, God uses anthropomorphism in His Word to help us to understand Him. Some examples of this are in 1 Kings 8:29 where the people pray God’s eyes will be on them, but because He is Spirit, He has no real, physical eyes. Or, in Nehemiah 1:6, Nehemiah refers to His ears and eyes as he cries out to God. Again, because God is spirit, He doesn’t have physical eyes or ears, but He uses those to give us an understanding of Him. It’s important, however, to know that He has no literal physical traits because if He did, He would have the physical limitations we do.
He is Invisible
Second under this point is the concept that He is invisible (Deut. 4:15-19; John 1:18; 1 Tim. 6:16). This is why we’re not supposed to make up something or to create something that we call God or serve as God. This means not just creating idols we serve as a god but also setting up anything that we serve as the God of the Bible when it does not match with the God of the Bible. So when we replace God with our own image of who God is instead of how He presents Himself in His word, we create an idol, even if it isn’t the usual golden statues and wooden images we typically imagine in Christianity when told not to create idols. Furthermore, the passage in John adds another layer to this in giving us the distinction between God the Father and God the Son. It does this by making it clear that God is Spirit while the Son, though fully God, is the physical manifestation of God the Father. If you miss this, then it’s easy to land yourself in a lot of Biblically inconsistent beliefs, such as saying that Christ wasn’t God or was only partially God and partially human instead of 100% both at the same time.
Finally under this point, God is alive (Joshua 3:10; 1 Samuel 17:26, 36). What I mean by this is that He has life in Himself. The idea of life in Himself is the idea that He is eternal and never dying. We do not have life in ourselves. We only have life in Him. So His being alive is not the same sense of being alive as we would say we are alive. He literally has life and is the only one who can give it to another. Why is this important? Because if you don’t believe this, you end up with a cosmic force like you see in Hinduism that has no life in and of itself. Interestingly enough, not only is this cosmic force where the idea of karma came from, but this is also the idea that Star Wars and the Force were based upon, at least in terms of the philosophy.
He is a Person
A person must be self-conscious and self-deterministic. This means they can think about who they are and are capable of making choices. So what is the basis for saying God is a person? He is both self-aware and self-deterministic. (Isaiah 45:5; Job 23:13; Acts 15:18; Deuteronomy 1:37) If you miss this, you easily stray into Deism, the belief that God wound up the universe like a clockmaker by one method or another and then let it run with no further intervention or interaction (or, in some individual’s beliefs, He only takes an interest in the really big things and has no concern for anything smaller). I should also note that Theistic evolutionists often are in reality Deists who believe evolution is the method God used to wind everything up. But in either case, not believing God is a person, but is instead just a cosmic force or spirit, leads to easily believe He would abandon His creation as an entity without personality has no sense of caring or concern for anything.
God Is Self-Existent
In Exodus 3:14, God states I AM that I AM. The power of this identification is significant because only God can truly say this. We cannot say I am that I am because it steps us outside of time. That statement, in its truest meaning, means that the individual saying it has always existed and always will. It leads to another aspect of God: His eternal nature. We can say that we are tired or we are ourselves, but we don’t have the capability to sustain ourselves, nor are we eternal. So, therefore, in making this statement, God is saying He is self-existent and outside of time.
God’s Immensity
This is the concept that God the Father is so immense that He simultaneously fills time and the physical planes of Heaven and Earth. The support for this is found many places, but some of the key supporting passages are 1 Kings 8:27; 2 Chronicles 2:6; Jeremiah 23:24; and Isaiah 66:1.
God’s Eternity
The concept of how God’s immensity fills time is encompassed in the word eternity. God exists in eternity: in and at all times. He not only exists outside of time as we know it, but He created time and what we use to measure it. Unlike us, however, He is so immense that He is able to fill all of time.
Now why is this and time important? Because time is full of change. It’s an essential part of our lives, so much so that we know nothing different. Every one of us changes over our lifetimes, and the things around us are always changing. God is the only One who doesn’t change no matter how much time passes. This goes back to the concept of His eternal essence. Because He is outside of time, to Him, it is only, always, the here and now and He never changes.
Because change is everything to us and all we know, this is a hard concept for us to comprehend. But we absolutely must believe this about God because His claims to sovereignty and His very being as God demands it and relies upon His immensity and eternal being.
We find the support for this in Genesis 21:33, Isaiah 57:15, Hebrews 1:2 and 11:3, and John 1:3 among many other places.
His Sovereignty
So why does His sovereignty depend on His immensity and eternal essence? If God couldn’t exist simultaneously in all times, then He could miss something, not know something, or need to learn something new. He would be like us, and things could catch Him by surprise. He wouldn’t be able to have an overarching plan for time that would come to fruition no matter what anyone does. In short, He wouldn’t be sovereign, and He wouldn’t be God because being God means being sovereign, eternal, immense, and spirit.
This leads to further discussion, then, on human free will and choice. But I’ll leave that for another post. It isn’t the point of this post, though it is an interesting discussion and one well worth having.
Conclusion
These essences of God are key to understanding who God is. These are the foundation for our understanding of God and for all doctrines we hold to. If they are not, then we easily stray off into heresies and misinterpretations of God and His Word. Every false religion or belief leads back to a flawed understanding of God or a complete denial of Him.
So this lesson, this study of God is absolutely essential if we are to know with any certainty why we believe what we do about God. Without the Bible and without these aspects of His nature, we could know nothing of God and could have no assurance of any eternal destination, any purpose in life, or any structure for morality or anything else. Some of these aspects of life relate more specifically to His attributes, which I’ll discuss next week, but in the end, this foundation is necessary if we’re going to understand His attributes, which are more commonly discussed.
Understanding the foundation and laying our doctrines on it is an unavoidable step if we want to build a life that is consistent with what God has said and who He is. Only when we are content with or ignorant of our flawed, inaccurate view of God will we be content to focus on the end result with no concern over understanding why we believe the end result is true.
