INTRO: We have come now, in this series, to this greatest of all questions: What is God like? And by doing so, we have also come to the most complicated question of all questions, because we want to describe as best we can the indescribable Being we call God with a capital G. What we will be talking about is the attributes of God. Now the attributes of God are revealed in three ways in special revelation, the Bible. They are revealed by the names He is given; by His actions, past, present or future; and by actual propositions about Him. The attributes of God, as revealed in Scripture, are the qualities or characteristics we attribute to God from what the Bible says. For example, from the Bible we learn that God is holy, or He is good etc… These are attributes.
Having said that, we arrive at yet another great problem: how shall we deal with this question? How shall we categorize the attributes of God? Shall we separate them as to what He is essentially and what He is in character? Shall we, like Henry C. Thiessen, divide His attributes as moral and non-moral? Shall we, like Strong, divide them as absolute and relative? Well, in my limited studies, I have concluded that all methods want to break down somewhere. That is how almost everything we try to communicate about God seems to be. Every effort in every area seems insufficient. It never seems quite right. Understanding seems to fail, and when we have more of that, then words want to fail. |
