You can’t grow in a relationship with someone you don’t know. So, who is God?
Jesus answers it directly: “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3). Eternal life is not first an amount of life. It is a quality of life. It is knowing God. So a working knowledge of who God actually is, His nature, His character, and how He has revealed Himself as Father, Son, and Spirit, is essential to walking with Him.
We can’t know God exhaustively. But we can know Him accurately.
The God of the Bible is not a created being. He is holy other. The difference between God’s being and ours is not a difference of degree. As Wayne Grudem puts it, the difference is more than the difference between the sun and a candle, more than the ocean and a raindrop, more than the universe and the room you’re sitting in. God is qualitatively different.
There’s an old story about Augustine walking along the seashore wrestling with the question of how God can be Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, yet one God. He noticed a small boy running back and forth from the ocean to a hole in the sand, scooping water with a shell and pouring it in. Augustine asked the boy what he was doing. I’m putting the ocean in this hole. Augustine told him it was impossible; the ocean was far too vast. The boy looked up and said, No more impossible than for you to fit God into your mind.
That’s the first rule for thinking about God: be humble. We don’t know Him exhaustively. But we know Him accurately, because He has chosen to reveal Himself: through creation, through Scripture, and ultimately through Jesus.
Think of gravity. You experience it every second. But no physicist can fully explain what gravity is beneath the equations. Yet gravity is as real as real gets. Reality is bigger than our ability to fully articulate it. If that’s true of gravity, how much more is it true of God?
There are two helpful categories for what God has revealed about Himself: His nature and His character.
His nature describes His otherness, what theologians call His incommunicable attributes. Things that belong to God alone. Three of them:
Eternal. God has no beginning and no end. He created time and isn’t bound by it. “Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the whole world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God” (Psalm 90:2).
Self-existent. Everything that exists depends on something else for its existence. God depends on nothing. He is the uncaused cause, the ground of all being. In Exodus 3:14 He names Himself, “I AM WHO I AM.” Existence itself is what He is.
Immutable. God doesn’t change. Not His character, not His purposes, not His promises. “I the LORD do not change” (Malachi 3:6). What He has said, He will do.
God’s nature ministers primarily to our minds. When we grasp even a little of who God is, the only appropriate response is worship.
His character describes His communicable attributes: the things He shares with us, in part. We will never plumb their full depth, but we can know them in part. They are what make us want to follow Him.
The oldest self-disclosure of God’s character in Scripture comes in Exodus 34, and it’s the most-quoted Old Testament passage within the Bible itself:
“The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished” (Exodus 34:6–7).
That’s God describing Himself. Compassionate: He feels the weight of our suffering. Gracious: He gives what isn’t deserved. Slow to anger: extraordinarily patient, not because He’s passive but because He restrains in the face of real offence. Abounding in love and faithfulness: the Hebrew word here is hesed, a loyal, covenantal love that doesn’t walk away. Forgiving: His default posture toward us is forgiveness, not condemnation. Just: He does not leave the guilty unpunished. God’s love and God’s justice aren’t in tension. They are both perfect expressions of who He is. The cross is where they meet.
Hold both together: His nature ministers to your mind and causes you to worship. His character ministers to your heartand causes you to follow.
The Christian God is one God who exists eternally as three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Each person is fully God. They are not three gods. They are not three modes of one being. They are one God in three persons.
This wasn’t revealed all at once. The Old Testament gives us glimpses. “Let us make mankind in our image” (Genesis 1:26). “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” (Isaiah 6:8). The New Testament makes it explicit. At Jesus’ baptism, all three persons appear in a single moment: the Father speaks, the Son is baptized, and the Spirit descends like a dove (Matthew 3:16–17). At the close of Jesus’ ministry He says, “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19).
Every analogy for the Trinity eventually breaks down. The clover (three leaves, one plant), but no single leaf is the whole clover. Water (ice, liquid, steam), but a single molecule is never all three at once. Body, soul, and spirit, but those aren’t three distinct persons. None of these is a flaw in the doctrine. It’s what you’d expect. If the Trinity could be neatly captured by something we already understand, it would suggest God is no bigger than our existing categories.
The Father is the source and origin of all things: the One Jesus taught us to call Abba. He planned your salvation before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4–5), sent His Son, and adopted you into His family.
The Son is fully God and fully human. “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created” (Colossians 1:15–16). Jesus is not a prophet who showed us the way. He is the way. When you look at Jesus, you see exactly what God is like. If you want to know how God feels about the sick, watch Jesus heal them. If you want to know how God feels about the outcast, look at who Jesus ate with. If you want to know how far God will go for you, look at the cross.
The Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity. Not an influence or an atmosphere, but a person. And He now lives in every believer. “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever … you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you” (John 14:16–17). The Spirit convicts of sin and draws us to repentance. He assures us we are God’s children. He produces the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22–23). He gives gifts to build up the church.
You can know this God accurately. Not exhaustively, but accurately. Through Jesus, He has made the unknowable knowable. The Father is for you. The Son has come for you. The Spirit lives in you.
That changes everything about how you come to Him.