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A comprehensive study of the attributes of God is at once one of the most fascinating, one of the most rewarding, and one of the most fundamental to everything else that one can make. Unfortunately, it is also one of the most neglected. By God's attributes we mean His characteristics-who He is and what He is like. Usually we take the approach in the church to teach people what God expects of us or, even more in our day, how to receive things from Him. But this is to jump in at the middle. A proper response to God whether to trust or to and serve Him naturally flows from an understanding of His attributes. And by the same token, a failure to understand who He is and what He is like will naturally result in a failure to trust, serve, or worship Him as we should. Nothing is more fundamental to the Christian life than an accurate and complete understanding of who and what God is.

Job complained to God of the wicked:

Why do the wicked live on, growing old and increasing in power?They see their children established around them, their offspring before their eyes.` Their homes are safe and free from fear; the rod of God is not upon them. Their bulls never fail to breed; their cows calve and do not miscarry. They send forth their children as a flock; their little ones dance about. They sing to the music of tambourine and tarp; they make merry to the sound of the flute. They spend their years in prosperity and go down to the grave in peace. Yet they say to God, "Leave us alone! We have no desire to know your ways. Who is the Almighty, that we should serve him? What would we gain by praying to him?"" (Job 21:7-15, all quotations taken from the New International Version unless otherwise indicated)

Although Job intends to show that the attitude of the wicked toward God is one of rebellion, not ignorance. still, I think, we may employ their words here. They say. "Who is the Almighty, that we should' serve him?" Why don't people serve God? For one thing, they do not see Him as worthy of their service. But once we understand who God is, how can we do anything else but serve Him?

God commands us in His Word the Bible to love, fear, serve, obey, trust, and worship Him. But these will be impossible without an understanding of who He is, that He is worthy of these things. We will in effect, say, "Who is He that I should love Him? We cannot love an unknown God. But when we understand that He is love, that He is kind and merciful and good, how can we help but love Him? So many today have no fear of God, yet we are commanded in the New Testament as well as the Old to fear Him I have had many people. in discussing the things of God with them, say. Oh, I don't fear God,,, as if this were not the right way to respond to Him I don't mean rebellious sinners, hut people who supposedly have some Christian training. No doubt the reason they think it is not right to fear God is because their teachers have told them over and over that God is love but never that God is also a God of wrath and judgment who hates and punishes sin. They do not fear God because they have an incomplete, actually a defective, view of Him. They cannot fear Him because they don't see anything in Him that is worthy of fear. They think they have nothing to fear from God, but the Bible is plain that they do. Jesus told His own dear disciples,

I tell you, my friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body and after that can do no more. But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after the killing of the body, has power to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him.,, (Luke 12:4,5)

Some would say that Jesus was referring to the devil here, but would He tell us to fear the devil? That seems contrary to what the New Testament teaches us, that we should resist the devil and he would flee from us (James 4:7). No, He is telling us to fear God because He certainly is worthy of our fear. We should fear anyone who can do us such great harm-God can destroy both our soul and body in hell On the other hand Jesus went right on to say,

"Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God. Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Don't be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows." (Luke 12:6,7)

We are to fear God in a healthy sense, avoiding the things that displease Him, because He hates and punishes sin. But we are also to love and trust God because He watchfully cares for us. If we only love God and do not fear Him we may not hate or depart from evil as the Bible says those who fear Him will do (Proverbs 8:13; 16:6). This is very common in people today- We have majored the love of God to the exclusion or minimization of His holiness, wrath, and judgment to the point that even professing Christians think they have nothing to fear from Him. We also see blatant immorality among "Christians" as a result. On the other hand if all a person heard was the holiness, wrath, and judgment of God to the neglect of the love and mercy of God, it would be difficult to love Him. My point is this-our view of who God is will effect our response to Him.

In fact our response to God is naturally based on our view of Him. If we have an incomplete, inadequate. or erroneous view of what God is like, it will mean that we will fail in our love, fear, service, obedience, trust, or worship of Him.

The word "worship" is taken from the old English word " worthship"." Literally, then, it means to ascribe "worthship" to God. If we see how great and magnificent He is, we cannot help but offer Him heartfelt worship, but if we don't see what He is like, we cannot help but offer stale and unconvincing praise. True worship of God is just as natural a response to the sight of His glory and greatness as applause is in an auditorium after a great performance. No one has to tell us to clap when we have just heard a virtuoso in top form. We know it is greatness and we naturally respond. Why don't people praise God? Because they don't comprehend His greatness And it is useless to force worship out of them by constantly reminding them they should do so. Such worship is contrived, not genuine. But we will burst into "applause" if we get a view of His goodness and greatness.

It is the same with service to Him or obedience to Him. We will only serve and obey Him to the degree that we perceive Him to be worthy of it. It is the same with trust. We are always urging people to have faith, teaching them about faith (usually today with mind science principles sprinkled in). But faith or trust is the natural response we have toward someone we deem trustworthy. It is easy to trust someone we know is utterly trustworthy, but it is difficult to trust someone we know is not.

Trust in God is the natural response to a view of His attributes of faithfulness, omnipotence and love. How could we not trust Him if we saw Him as He is?

One man writes;

Even among people who regularly attend church, there is little understanding of God. -. They are engaged in "church activities", given pep talks, how-to-do-it lectures and conversion sermons; they are to give to God, serve God, and desire to see Him and spend eternity with Him; but seldom if ever are they taught anything about Him, His nature and His attributes. It is no wonder that many churches have to give prizes to get people to ride their buses to the church house... Without some knowledge of God's nature and attributes it is impossible to have faith in Him.. and there can hardly be any true concern for reflecting His image and obeying his commandments (Curtis Dickinson, "What's Happened to God?", The Witness, May, 1976; quoted in what the Bible Says About God the Creator, Jack Cottrell; College Press: Joplin,MO; 1983, p. 16)

A proper understanding of the nature and attributes of God is the foundation of all foundations, isn't it. Sometimes you hear people say, "We just need to get back to the basics in the Christian life,,' but do they ever mean the attributes of God? Usually when we are witnessing, we start with sin (at least we at our church do; I realize that most today don't even start there). But behind this is who is it that we have sinned against? We have sinned against a holy, just, angry, yet merciful God who has made provision for our forgiveness and salvation. If we start with the salvation God has provided (which is what most do today), we are jumping into the middle. We are assuming that people know more about God than they actually do. Do not be surprised if they express the same attitude Job said the wicked have- "Who is the Almighty that I should serve him?" or, as Pharaoh responded to Moses' claim that God had sent him to tell him to let the Israelites go, "Who is the Lord, that I should obey him?" (Exodus 5:2).

It is interesting to see how the apostle Paul dealt with heathen ignorance of God in Acts 17 in Athens, then the cultural center of the world:

While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there. A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to dispute with him. Some of them asked, "What is this babbler trying to say?" Others remarked, He seems to be advocating foreign gods.,, They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection. Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus. where they said to him, "May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we want to know what they mean. (All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.) Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: "Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him. though he is not far from each one of us. 'For in him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'We are his offspring.' Therefore since we are God's offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone-- an image made by man's design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead." When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, "We want to hear you again on this subject." (Acts 17:16-32)

Paul's appeal to the Athenians is full of explicit or implied references to the attributes of God~twelve to be exact! They had a very unworthy view of God, both erroneous and ignorant. and Paul rightly judged that until this was addressed, it was useless to speak to them about the salvation offered in the gospel. In our country today some idolatry in the classic sense exists, but for the most part people still hold to the Christian idea of God; however their concept of Him is woefully inaccurate or inadequate, an ignorant and unworthy view, mostly due to holding one aspect of His nature while disregarding others Many think of God as the Supreme Power", and God is surely omnipotent. But to think of Him only as power is not much different from the sun, our main energy source. It is to reduce God to an impersonal force, which is an unworthy view of Him. Others think of God as love," but again, if we think of Him as only love, we either over sentimentalize Him or exclude His holiness, judgment, and wrath. Even thinking of God as love, if by itself or without due consideration for His other attributes, is an unworthy view of Him. So, although idolatry in the classic sense is not as widespread in our country today as it was in Paul's time in Athens, we nevertheless need to have our false and unworthy ideas of God corrected almost as much.

The heathen world sacrificed to all the gods after or during calamities in the hopes of appeasing the anger of whatever god was responsible. I once supposed that the altar to the "unknown god" in Athens was simply an attempt to cover all the possibilities. an altar to any god that they may have overlooked or were ignorant of. But many heathen and even one early Christian writer I read speak of the "unknown god of Athens." Lucien, one of the Roman Emperors, took his oath by "the unknown god of Athens." It seems that several hundred years earlier, Athens suffered a terrible plague. The people offered sacrifices to the gods in the hope of staying it, but to no avail. At someone's counsel, they built an altar to the "unknown god," offered sacrifice, and immediately, supernaturally to the Athenians, the plague stopped; thus you have the origin of the altar to which Paul referred. "'What you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you" (verse 23). Actually we cannot offer true worship to a god we do not know. The Athenians were simply engaged in superstition, not true worship. But I'm afraid many who attend church regularly in our day are in the same plight. They are attempting to honor a God they do not know either by personal ~counter or by the attributes ascribed to Him in the Bible Many who claim to have had a personal encounter with God are nevertheless ignorant of His attributes as given in the Scriptures, and thus are vainly attempting to worship an unknown God.

God's attributes are given in Scripture by adjectives used to describe Him (almighty, holy, eternal, merciful, etc.) and by the offices and roles and titles by which He is made known (Creator, Judge, Father, etc.) Paul employs these to correct the Athenians' mistaken notions of God:

1. God is the Creator. The first thing Paul says about the true God is that He "made the world and everything in it" (v. 24). Everything, whether matter, energy, space, or spirit was created by one God. not as the heathen believed, by many gods.

According to the law of the conservation of matter and energy, the sum total of matter and energy in the universe is constant and incapable of being either created or destroyed. Matter and energy are different forms of the same thing, as demonstrated in nuclear energy produced by uranium or plutonium. Nevertheless, the total amount of matter and energy in the universe remains the same~exactly the amount that God created. Only God can create in the true sense of the word, which makes Him unique. Everything that exists owes its existence to Him. He is the only uncreated thing (or Person) in the universe, which also makes Him unique. Just hearing these things inspires reverence in believers. God is worthy of our honor and worship on these grounds alone-that He is the Creator and our own existence as well as the existence of everything that sustains us is due to Him. People who do not honor God with their worship and their lives are acting as though they did not owe their existence to anyone or anything, as though they made themselves, and this is a great insult to our Maker.

We honor those who can by their skill turn a piece of wood into a table or pigments on canvas into a painting or sounds on an instrument into beautiful music. How much more should we not honor God, because He made everything. He not only made the materials from which we craft our tables or paintings or instruments, He also made the eye for seeing and the ear for hearing and the hands and the brain for crafting. The capacity for the eye to adjust to all ranges of light and focus upon the farthest and nearest objects is truly amazing. And the ear is equally remarkable, picking up all the nuances of differences of all the sounds produced by compressed air waves striking the eardrum which in turn vibrates and sends the message of the sound through the auditory nerve to the brain. People rave when they see great paintings or hear a fine concert, but. most of these same people give God no glory for His marvelous works which make man's works possible. Here we see that one does not have to commit gross acts of iniquity to qualify for God's wrath. To fail to give honor and glory to one so infinitely worthy is itself an infinite insult worthy of infinite punishment. From the time we are able to speak we are taught that it is our duty to say thank you to someone who gives us something or does something for us and that it is rude not to do so. Yet the bulk of mankind is guilty of unthankfulness to God for all the things He has made for us and for life itself. It is nothing less than brutish stupidity for men not to glorify and praise God. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him" (Romans 1:21)

As we shall see as we go on in our study of God's attributes in more detail, each attribute is interconnected with others and each calls for specific responses on our part. The fact that God is Creator is linked with His omnipotence (He has all power), His omniscience (He has all knowledge), and that He is self-existent and eternal. To make everything from nothing calls for omnipotence and omniscience as well as eternal self-existence, seeing that He could not have made Himself.

2. He is Lord of heaven and earth (v.24). There is no multiplicity of gods as the heathen thought, each creator and governor over separate aspects of the earth or universe, but only One God over everything whether it be in heaven or earth. No glory should be ascribed to any other god but Him.

3. He is omnipresent, that is, He "does not dwell in temples made by hands" (v.24). The only exception was the Great Temple at Jerusalem, but only in a limited way, as was clear from the very time it was erected. Solomon in his prayer of dedication acknowledged, "But will God really dwell on earth? The heavens, even the highest heaven, cannot contain you. How much less this temple I have built" ( I Kings 8:27). God now dwells in the temples of the bodies of New Testament believers. but these are not "made by [human] hands." And even so, it is again only in a limited sense. Does God have a dwelling place? Does He have an "address"? We will discuss this in more detail when we come to it.

4. God is self-exstent and self-sufficient, that is, he is not served by [or dependent upon] human hands" (v.25). Here again He is not like anything or anyone else in all the universe. Everyone and everything except God are dependent upon others and the things in their environment for their existence.

5. God is the Sustainer of the universe and all that is in it. He himself gives all men life and breath and everything else" (v.25). Sometimes this is called God's providence. Since you owe your life, your very breath to God, shouldn't you glorify and honor Him and credit Him for everything you do? If men do not do this they are either ignorant or, worse, stubborn.

6. He is the Governor or Ruler of the universe. "From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live (v.26).

7. He is immanent. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us "(v.27)- It is true that God is transcendent, that is, as the Latin word supplies, He surpasses" or goes beyond" everything else. He, as one put it, goes beyond or surpasses human modes of perception and cognition. He is far off. But at the same time He is the opposite~immanent. There is no real contradiction,- in the ultimate sense, He is transcendent, "dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto,, (I Timothy 6:16, KJV), but in a lesser, limited sense, he is immanent-approachable, knowable, near. Some only know Him as transcendent, but others, true believers, know him also by experience as immanent, near. Some denominations deny that God can be experienced in any direct personal way and scoff at those who claim they have done so and call them fanatics. But Paul plainly says here that God can be and desires to be encountered in just such a personal and intimate way, that we can "find" Him by experience, not just by some idea of Him, that we can, in the language of the King James Version, "feel after Him" (a phrase particularly despised by some).

The main way we know God is through the Word of God, the Bible-He is what the Word of God tells us He is. But we can (and must if our knowledge of Him is to be complete) know Him also by personal contact and experience. "Taste and see,," the Psalmist says (34:8), "that the Lord is good.,, In order to know any famous person, you would read all you could about him, but nothing would take the place of actually meeting and becoming personally acquainted with him. It is the same with God. Knowledge of His attributes is not enough; we must encounter Him by His Spirit through Jesus Christ personally. On the other hand. personal experience is inadequate. This is a mistake many today make.

Many characteristics of God would not be detected by personal contact but only by the description of Him we find in the Word. Often people say, I just want to know God.,, But they are depending too much on personal encounter and experience. They should come to know Him in His attributes as the Word of God describes Him

8. God is a Father. "As some of your own poets have said, We are his offspring"' (v.28). All men are not the children of God in the saving sense of the new birth, but all men are children of God in the natural sense by creation. Either way, that makes Him a Father. Much can be derived from the fact that God is a Father, but too often in our day even this beautiful concept of God is abused. People limit God by equating Him with natural human fathers. God is not only our Father but He is also our Judge, which cannot be said of our natural fathers, When God is viewed as Father to the exclusion of Judge, error in our lives and practice results.

9. God is a Spirit, invisible. "We should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone-an image made by man's design and skill" (v.29). All idolatry is unworthy of Him.

10. God is kind and merciful. "In the past God overlooked such ignorance" (v.30). Although he has been so grossly misrepresented and insulted by man He forbears judgment in the hopes of reconciliation through repentance.

11. God is holy. "Now he commands all men everywhere to repent" (v.30).

12. He is a just Judge. "For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice" (v.31). He is a God who knows and judges right from wrong, rewarding the right and punishing the wrong. There are certain things of which He approves and there are others of which He does not. Some things He likes and some things He hates. This stands in contrast to a popular misconception of Him that He is so mild, kind, and merciful that nothing ever provokes or repulses Him.

Paul uses the same approach in Romans, his most comprehensive treatise on the gospel, as he does in Acts 17. He builds first on the foundation of the attributes of God before setting forth the gospel, listing no less than eighteen in the first five chapters.

In our study of the attributes of God we will follow the same method we would in describing or doing a biography of any other person. With you or me or anyone else, we would first list the "statistical" information concerning us-our name, our address, our age, our size, our picture, etc.-things that show up on our driver's license. They say that you can pinpoint anyone on earth with five pieces of information: country, state, city, street, and house number. Well, where is God? How old is He? how big is He? what does He look like? how strong is He? All these are sometimes referred to as God's "natural" attributes; they are more or less statistical information about Him, but still very enlightening and far-reaching in their implications for us. Second, in order to describe or write a biography of someone, we would include his roles, titles,occupations, skills, and hobbies. This would tell us much about him, would it not? So it is with God. Besides the adjectives the Bible uses to describe Him, we have the roles in which He is cast. But the information on a driver's license or in an obituary would not tell us anything about what kind of person we are, what our temperament or personality is, what our likes and dislikes are, etc. These would also be necessary to come to a full understanding of who that person is and what he is like, and so it is with God. 'What is His temperament? Does He have a "temper".? 'What especially pleases or displeases Him? 'What does He like and dislike? These are often referred to as the "moral" attributes of God. All of these directly affect us and call for specific kinds of responses from us.

Religions are defined by their view of God. It is the most fundamental thing of all. If we are incorrect or inadequate here it will affect everything else we do. A complete, proper, and balanced view of God will lead us to fulfill what He commands of us, that we love, fear, serve, obey. trust, and worship Him. Conversely, an incomplete,erroneous or unbalanced view of Him will lead to error and failure in our lives and keep us from fulfilling what God requires of us. All that God requires of us is directly due to how He is, what kind of Being He is. For example, He says, "Be holy" -why?-"because I am holy" (I Peter 3:16; Leviticus 11:44,45), and "Love one another-why?-"because God is love" (1 John 4:7,8). In fact, everything is the way it is because God is the way He is. The reason why everything is the way it is, whether in the natural or spiritual worlds, and the reason why we have to be and do what we are required to be and do whether it is to be saved or to please God is because God is the way He is. His attributes and Being is the foundation of all foundations.

Of course one might argue that His Word is the foundation even of His attributes since it is there that we have them described. But if you think about it, God had Being and attributes before He had them recorded in His Word for our benefit. The reason the Word says He is the kind of Being that He is is because that is the way He is. The Word did not make it so, but only reported it to us.

We do have an objective view of God presented to us in His Word. What God is like is not, despite commonly held error, a matter of personal opinion or subjective viewpoint. So many times people say, "Well, that's your view of God; I have another", - as if all views were equally valid. But this would be to say that God has no objective existence at all but exists only in the mind of man! No, God has an objective existence apart from whatever conception we may have of Him, and our view of Him is either in harmony with the reality of Him and His attributes or it is not. It is not at all a matter of opinion whether God exists and what His attributes are if He does. If He exists, He exists as the Person He is and no one's knowledge or lack of it has any bearing on His existence and attributes at all. Our view of God is either valid or invalid, right or wrong, depending on whether or not it conforms with the characteristics by which He is described in the Bible. But we must be careful to include all the characteristics by which He is described in the Bible and not just some (usually the the ones we find pleasant or agreeable or favorable to us). To have a God that is anything less than what the Bible describes Him to be is to have a false god as much as any idol. We may choose to accept Him just as the Word describes Him and make the necessary adjustments in our thinking and lives, or we may choose to reject Him (and face the consequences). But let us not be guilty of altering Him to fit our own conception of what we think He ought to be or what we wish He were. As one man said, "God made man in His own image, but now man makes God in his own image." It is quite easy to do, but also quite foolish, because God is the way He is no matter what we think, and ultimately, that is the reality we must all deal with. 'Why fool ourselves? We cannot, as we are used to doing as Americans, elect by popular vote who we want to be God or what we want God to be. He is already God and He is already the kind of God He is, and there is and can be no other.

"But what if I don't believe the Bible?" Then you definitely have a problem. And it is beyond our present scope to deal with the reliability of the Scriptures, their inspiration and evidences for it. We can and have dealt with this, but we will not do so at this time. For now we will simply start with this as a "given"--that the depiction of God we find in the Bible is the only true one of Him available, and thus serves as a standard or measuring rod by which we can judge our own or anyone else's ideas of Him whether they be true or false.

I did my first study and teaching on the attributes of God for our "Tuesday school" home school children at the church several years ago. I told them then and have repeated it since in a larger study in the church some time ago, "God is my favorite subject." And it is not just an academic exercise, either, as I hope I have shown in this article. The consequences of how we view God are far reaching, affecting our whole lives. An inadequate or erroneous view of God is at the heart of all other failure in the Christian's life. If we really understood who He is and what He is like, the rest would follow almost as a matter of course.

You do not have to wait for our subsequent articles to launch a study of God's attributes, A good place to start is with Nave's Topical Bible under "God"~89 pages of Scripture on various attributes. See if a comprehensive study doesn't just "knock your socks of"'

Until next time, God bless each one of you and give you a more complete understanding of who God is and what He is like.

Leon Stump, Pastor of Victory Christian Center

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