CONSIDERING THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD

                                          

                                                                ATTRIBUTES OF GOD

 

Take a few minutes and refresh yourself with God. Think again on His attributes. See again those things that are true about Him. Renew your mind and cast your hope on Him. Remove your eyes from your pain and gaze upon His person. The following is an excerpt on the Attributes of God from several different sources that will aid in a moment of worship turning from despair to hope in this great God.

 

He is Sovereign

 

God’s sovereignty is the attribute by which He rules His entire creation, and to be sovereign God must be all-knowing, all-powerful, and absolutely free.

 

The reasons are these:

 

Were there even one datum of knowledge, however small, un-known to God, His rule would break down at that point. To be Lord over all the creation, He must possess all knowledge. And were God lacking one infinitesimal modicum of power, that lack would end His reign and undo His kingdom; that one stray atom of power would belong to someone else and God would be a limited ruler and hence not sovereign.

 

Furthermore, His sovereignty requires that He be absolutely free, which means simply that He must be free to do whatever He wills to do anywhere at any time to carry out His eternal purpose in every single detail without interference. Were He less than free He must be less than sovereign.

 

He is Holy

 

Holy is the way God is. To be holy He does not conform to a standard. He is that standard. He is absolutely holy with an infinite, incomprehensible fullness of purity that is incapable of being other than it is. Because He is holy, His attributes are holy; that is, whatever we think of as belonging to God must be thought of as holy. God is holy and He has made holiness the moral condition necessary to the health of His universe. Sin’s temporary presence in the world only accents this. Whatever is holy is healthy; evil is a moral sickness that must end ultimately in death. The formation of the language itself suggests this, the English word holy deriving from the Anglo-Saxon meaning, “well, whole.”

 

Since God’s first concern for His universe is its moral health, that is, its holiness, whatever is contrary to this is necessarily under His eternal displeasure. To preserve His creation God must destroy whatever would destroy it. When He arises to put down iniquity and save the world from irreparable moral collapse, He is said to be angry. Every wrathful judgment in the history of the world has been a holy act of preservation. 

The holiness of God, the wrath of God, and the health of the creation are inseparably united. God’s wrath is His utter intolerance of whatever degrades and destroys. He hates iniquity as a mother hates the polio that takes the life of her child.

 

God is holy with an absolute holiness that knows no degrees, and this He cannot impart to His creatures. But there is a relative and contingent holiness that He shares with angels and seraphim in heaven and with redeemed men on earth as their preparation for heaven. 

 

This holiness God can and does impart to His children. He shares it with them by imputation and by impartation, and because He has made it available to them through the blood of the Lamb, He requires it of them. God spoke, saying, “Be ye holy; for I am holy.” He did not say “Be ye as holy as I am holy,” for that would be to demand of us absolute holiness, something that belongs to God alone.

 

He is Faithful

 

In studying any attribute, the essential oneness of all the attributes soon becomes apparent. We see, for instance, that if God is self-existent He must be also self-sufficient; and if He has power He, being infinite, must have all power. If He possesses knowledge, His infinitude assures us that He possesses all knowledge. Similarly, His immutability presuppose His faithfulness. If He is unchanging, it follows that He could not be unfaithful, since that would require Him to change.

 

Any failure within the divine character would argue imperfection and, since God is perfect, it could not occur. Thus the attributes explain each other and prove that they are but glimpses the mind enjoys of the absolutely perfect Godhead.

 

All of God’s acts are consistent with all of His attributes. No attribute contradicts the other, but all harmonize and blend into each other in the infinite abyss of the Godhead. All that God does agrees with all that God is and being and doing are one in Him.

 

The familiar picture of God as often torn between His justice and His mercy is altogether false to the facts. To think of God as inclining first toward one and then toward another of His attributes is to imagine a God who is unsure of Himself, frustrated and emotionally unstable, which of course is to say that the one of whom we are thinking is not the true God at all but a weak, mental reflection of Him badly out of focus.

 

God being who He is, cannot cease to be what He is, and being what He is, He cannot act out of character with Himself. He is at once faithful and immutable, so all His words and acts must be and remain faithful. Men become unfaithful out of desire, fear, weakness, loss of interest, or because of some strong influence from without. Obviously none of these forces can affect God in any way. He is His own reason for all He is and does. He cannot be compelled from without, but ever speaks and acts from within Himself by His own sovereign will as it pleases Him.

 

I think it might be demonstrated that almost every heresy that has afflicted the church through the years has arisen from believing about God things that are not true, or from overemphasizing certain true things so as to obscure other things equally true. To magnify any attribute to the exclusion of another is to head straight for one of the dismal swamps of theology; and yet we are all constantly tempted to do just that.

 

He is Omniscience

 

He possesses perfect knowledge and therefore has no need to learn. But it is more: it is to say that God has never learned and cannot learn. God has never learned from anyone.

 

God knows instantly and effortlessly all matter and all matters, all mind and every mind, all spirit and all spirits, all being and every being, all creaturehood and all creatures, every plurality and all pluralities, all law and every law, all relations, all causes, all thoughts, all mysteries, all enigmas, all feeling, all desires, every unuttered secret, all thrones and dominions, all personalities, all things visible and invisible in heaven and in earth, motion, space, time, life, death, good, evil, heaven, and hell.

 

Because God knows all things perfectly, He knows nothing better than any other thing, but all things equally well. He never discovers anything. He is never surprised, never amazed. He never wonders about anything, nor does He seek information or ask questions.

 

Isa 40.13-14 Who has directed the Spirit of the LORD, Or as His counselor has informed Him? With whom did He consult and who gave Him understanding? And who taught Him in the path of justice and taught Him knowledge and informed Him of the way of understanding?

 

He is Omnipresent

 

God is everywhere here, close to everything, next to everyone.

 

God is immanent in His creation; there is no place in heaven or earth or hell where men may hide from His presence. God is at once far off and near, and in Him men move and live and have their being…

 

Ps 16.11 …In Your presence is fullness of joy; In Your right hand there are pleasures forever.

 

Answers to a major objection: “Wouldn't the sin in the world defile an omnipresent God?” Some argue that if God is everywhere, He must be impure because the impure things that touch Him would defile him. Without a doubt God is in all places and in everything. As a holy God He enters the hearts of sinners to inspect and convict them of sin. He also is in hell to execute judgment, for Matt 10.28 "And do not fear those who kill the body, but are unable to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.

 

But while God's essence is everywhere, He never mingles with any impurity. He is like the sun's rays. A sunbeam may fall on a manure pile in a field, but the manure pile can't defile the sunbeam. In the same sense nothing can defile God--He is unmixed with anything. HE IS TRANSCENDENT.

 

Jesus came into the world and lived among sinners. Yet the apostle John said of Him: "In him is no sin" (1 John 3:5). He was among sinful men and women yet totally undefiled by them.

 

Ps 139:8 If I ascend to heaven, You are there; If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, You are there.

 

Further on the support that God is in some sense, “actively occupied in hell judging sinners”…

 

Perishing means fiery torment. In one of John's other books, the Revelation 14:10, he describes the one who is perishing like this:

 

"He will drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is mixed in full strength in the cup of His anger; and he will be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb."

 

And on the other hand…Perishing means separation from the glory of God. Paul describes the perishing in 2 Thess 1:9:

 

"These will pay the penalty of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power."

 

Here in this world God reveals himself in a thousand ways every day, if we would see. In hell the perishing will be cut off from all his work—except the work of wrath.

 

He is Omnipotent

 

Sovereignty and omnipotence must go together. One cannot exist without the other.

 

To reign, God must have power, and to reign sovereignly, He must have all power-

 

Ps 62.11 Once God has spoken; Twice I have heard this: That power belongs to God;

 

The words “God is love” mean that love is an essential attribute of God. Love is something true of God but it is not God. It expresses the way God is in His unitary being, as do the words holiness, justice, faithfulness and truth. Because God is immutable, He always acts like Himself, and because He is a unity He never suspends one of His attributes in order to exercise another.  God is not schizophrenic!

 

From God’s other known attributes, we may learn much about His love. We can know, for instance, that because God is self-existent, His love had no beginning; because He is eternal, His love can have no end; because He is infinite, it has no limit; because He is holy, it is the quintessence of all spotless purity; because He is immense, His love is an incomprehensibly vast, bottomless, shoreless sea before which we kneel in joyful silence and from which the loftiest eloquence retreats confused and abashed.

 

He is Just

 

God’s being is unitary; it is not composed of a number of parts working harmoniously, but simply one. There is nothing in His justice which forbids the exercise of His mercy. To think of God as we sometimes think of a court where a kindly judge, compelled by law sentences a man to death with tears and apologies, is to think in a manner wholly unworthy of the true God. God is never at cross-purposes with Himself. No attribute of God is in conflict with another. God is His own self-existent principle of moral equity, and when He sentences evil men or rewards the righteous, He simply acts like Himself from within, uninfluenced by anything that is not Himself.

 

The words “God is love” means that love is an essential attribute of God. Love is something true of God but it is not God. It expresses the way God is in His unitary being, as do the words holiness, justice, faithfulness and truth. 

Because God is immutable, He always acts like Himself, and because He is a unity He never suspends one of His attributes in order to exercise another.

 

Justice is not violated but satisfied when he redeems a sinner…as in any of God’s attributes, none contradicts another.  His love is not violated but satisfied when He passes judgment on a sinner.  No attribute violates another when God acts – He is a unity unto Himself.

 

Thus justice actually goes over to the side of God’s trusting children. This is the meaning of those daring words of the apostle John: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” But God’s justice stands forever against the sinner in utter severity. The vague and tenuous hope that God is too kind to punish the ungodly has become a deadly opiate for the consciences of millions. It hushes their fears and allows them to practice all pleasant forms of iniquity while death draws every day nearer and the command to repent goes unregarded. As responsible moral beings we dare not so trifle with our eternal future.

 

He is Incomprehensible

 

Matt 11.27 …no one knows the Son except the Father; nor does anyone know the Father except the Son…

1Co 2:11 … Even so the thoughts of God no one knows except the Spirit of God.

 

He is Self-existence

 

God has no origin.

 

Ex 3:14 God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM"

 

He is not composed.

 

Col 1.16: For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities--all things have been created through Him and for Him.

 

He is Self-sufficient

 

JN 5.26  “the Father has life in Himself”

 

But the truth is that God is not greater for our being, nor would He be less if we did not exist. That we do exist is altogether of God’s free determination, neither by our desert nor by divine necessity.

 

Thou dost seek us though Thou does not need us. We seek Thee because we need Thee, for in Thee we live and move and have our being. Amen

 

 

He is Eternal

 

He has no past and no future.

 

Ps 90:2 Before the mountains were born Or You gave birth to the earth and the world, Even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God.

 

Or,

 

From vanishing point to the vanishing point

 

This is why God can say Isa 46.9-10 "Remember the former things long past, For I am God, and there is no other; I amGod, and there is no one like Me, Declaring the end from the beginning.

 

He sees the end and the beginning in one view.

 

He is Infinite

 

Limitlessness.

 

Measureless.

 

Rom 11:33 Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways!

 

He is Immutable

 

He never differs from Himself.

 

He does not grow, nor develop; He does not change for the better or the worse.

 

“All that God is He has always been, and all that He has been and is He will ever be.”

 

Mal 3:6 "For I, the LORD, do not change…

 

He is Wise

 

Wisdom, among other things, is the ability to devise perfect ends and to achieve those ends by the most perfect means. It sees the end from the beginning, so there can be no need to guess or conjecture. Wisdom sees everything in focus, each in proper relation to all, and is thus able to work toward predestined goals with flawless precision.

 

PS 104.24 O LORD, how many are Your works! In wisdom You have made them all; The earth is full of Your possessions.

 

Ecl 3.14 I know that everything God does will remain forever; there is nothing to add to it and there is nothing to take from it, for God has so worked that men should fear Him.

 

He is Transcendent

 

He is exalted far above His created universe, so far above that human thought cannot imagine it. – “far above” does not here refer to physical distance from the earth but to quality of being. … not with location in space nor with mere altitude, but with life.

 

Yet we must not compare the being of God with any other, i.e., the mountain with the child. We must not think of God as highest in an ascending order of beings, starting with the single cell and going on up from the fish to the bird to the animal to man to angel to cherub, then, ultimately, to God. This would be to grant God eminence, even pre-eminence, but that is not enough; we must grant Him transcendence in the fullest meaning of that word.

 

Forever God stands apart, in light unapproachable. He is as high above an archangel as above a caterpillar, for the gulf that separates the archangel from the caterpillar is but finite, while the gulf between God and the archangel is infinite. The caterpillar and the archangel, though far removed from each other in the scale of created things, are nevertheless one in that they are alike created. They both belong in the category of that-which-is-not-God and are separated from God by infinitude itself.

 

Isa 57.15 For thus says the high and exalted One Who lives forever, whose name is Holy, “I dwell on a high and holy place…

 

He is Merciful

 

As judgment is God’s justice confronting moral inequity, so mercy is the goodness of God confronting human suffering and guilt. Were there no guilt in the world, no pain and no tears, God would yet be infinitely merciful; but His mercy might well remain hidden in His heart, unknown to the created universe.

 

No voice would be raised to celebrate the mercy of which none felt the need. It is human misery and sin that call forth the divine mercy.

 

He is Grace

 

In God mercy and grace are one; but as they reach us they are seen as two, related but not identical.

 

As mercy is God’s goodness confronting human misery and guilt, so grace is His goodness directed toward human debt and demerit. It is by His grace that God imputes merit where none previously existed and declares no debt to be where one had been before.

 

Grace is the good pleasure of God that inclines Him to bestow benefits upon the undeserving. It is a self-existent principle inherent in the divine nature and appears to us as a self-caused propensity to pity the wretched, spare the guilty, welcome the outcast, and bring into favor those who were before under just disapprobation. Its use to us sinful men is to save us and to make us sit together in heavenly places to demonstrate to the ages the exceeding riches of God’s kindness to us in Christ Jesus.

 

We benefit eternally by God’s being just what He is. Because He is what He is, He lifts up our heads out of the prison house, changes our prison garments for royal robes, and makes us to eat bread continually before Him all the days of our lives

 

And He is Love, Righteous, Triune, and Good

 

(Sources: AW Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy; John Macarthur and John Piper)