What does the Bible tell us about God?

If there is one thing that is made clear by every sentence in the Bible, it is the fact that God exists. The Bible presents the existence of God as the most important fact within our universe, within everything that exists, within everything that lives. According to the Bible the complexity, the perfect order and the limitless beauty of all creation prove the existence of a creator whose wisdom and intelligence have brought forth everything and exceed all human wisdom and intelligence in a degree which is unimaginable for human beings.

The Bible leaves no room for denying the existence of God: not even on the ground of the fact that God is invisible and unnoticeable for the human senses. The existence of God and His invisible qualities are noticeable everywhere in His visible creation.

The Bible presents God as having no beginning and no end. There has never been a time when God did not exit yet. And in the future there will never be a time when God is not there any more. Though God has created all matter, He Himself does not consist of matter. God is a spirit. Therefore he is, like we have said before, unnoticeable for the human senses.

It is certainly not true that the human mind cannot accept and understand as realities matters which are not noticeable for the senses. Think in the context of the notion of time. Time is something limitless and something unnoticeable. Still every human being accepts time as something that exists and influences our lives.

The universe too is limitless and lies in its totality without the scope of our observations. Still, every sensible human believes that the universe exists. Actually, the Bible often talks about God’s eyes, ears, heart, hands, feet, nostrils, etcetera. It stands to reason that the Bible does this because there is no other way to express God’s acts and God’s activities in human language.

The Bible presents God first and for all as the Creator. God has made everything and everybody. Everything and everybody exist because He wants them to exist. God Himself owes His life to nobody. But everything that lives, including every human being, owes its existence to God. Recognizing this fact is the beginning of every form of wisdom, denying it lies at the base of every form of foolishness.

Also everything that is not alive, dead matter, is the work of God.

When creating, God did not make use of anything that already existed: before God started creating there was nothing except God.

Some characteristic qualities of God’s creation that demonstrate His infinite wisdom, goodness and intelligence are: the perfect order that is perceptible in all creation, the purposiveness of everything that exists and the perfection that is observed in all that has been created.
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God created first and for all His Son. The one whom the Bible calls the firstborn of all creation. After that God used His Son for the creation of all other things and all living beings. For this creating the Son did the real work, but He made use of insights and strengths which He had received from His Father.

The first living beings who were created are the angels: spiritual beings without a material body. They were created before the earth came into being.

Practically all people know the first sentence of the Bible: in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. The Bible does not tell us when this beginning was. It may have been thousands of millions of years ago.

The first chapters of the first Bible book, called Genesis, tell us how God made the earth suitable for habitation by humans. God did this perfectly: everything that is observable on earth testifies to His limitless knowledge, insight and power.

The Bible presents God as a person. Not as a force, a law of nature or a composition of forces and laws of nature. Within the faith of the Jews, the Christians and the Muslims people are convinced that what exists is not the result of blind, arbitrary forces, but the work of a Supreme Being whom they call God. This God is the first cause. Not created. Existing for ever. Perfectly free and perfectly powerful.

In the history of mankind the thought of such a creator of the universe, who at the same time is the ruler of the universe, was universally accepted until a very short time ago. It was something that stood to reason, something that nobody had doubts about. The thought of a world without a god or gods is very modern: it came into being only a couple of centuries ago.

The God of the Bible has a name: JHWH. These four letters occur thousands of times in the oldest Hebrew manuscripts that we still have today. The problem is that written Hebrew texts have only consonants and no vowels. And consequently we do not really know know which vowels we should place between the four consonants mentioned.

An additional problem is that at a given moment in Jewish history there arose a certain superstition which meant that God’s name is so holy and so sublime that a human just may not pronounce it. Nobody knows when this superstition came into being, but it is a fact that in many old manuscripts of the Bible or parts of the Bible God’s personal name has been replaced by words like Lord or God.

However, the oldest Bible texts that we still have do contain God’s personal name JHWH: in all the 66 Bible books together it is used almost 7000 times. This means that in our time there is every reason to use God’s name JHWH: it is God’s personal name, which He has not made known to us for nothing and which He wants to be sanctified (Think of the second sentence of Christ’s model prayer, the Our Father: hallowed be thy name.).

As regards the proper pronunciation of God’s name and the question which vowels we should place between the four consonants: there are two theories: Yahweh and Jehovah. Most Bible scholars prefer Yahweh.

From the nineteenth century onward God’s personal name, in the form of Yahweh or Jehovah, has been used again in many translations of the Holy Scriptures into modern languages. Consequently many people know God’s personal name again in our time and can do their best to sanctify or hallow it.

It should not be forgotten that all Biblical names mean something. JHWH means ,i>the one who is the cause of being and of becoming. Or: the one who will prove to be there.