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God's qualities and atrributes

The Bible attributes all sorts of qualities to God:

  • As the creator, God is the only being in the universe that has absolute freedom and is never accountable to anyone.
  • He also possesses limitless strength and power. With these He achieves anything He wants to achieve. God’s limitless power and strength are discernable all over the universe. They also guarantee that God’s intentions when creating the earth and man will certainly be realized. At the end of our human history the earth will become a Paradise, ruled by God’s Kingdom, in which all people who acknowledge God as their king will live in perfect happiness.
  • Some other qualities which the Bible regularly attributes to God are: love, wisdom and justice.
  • God loves people and communicates with them. Through angels, through prophets like Moses and Elijah, through His Son whom He sent to the earth and through the Holy Scriptures.
  • He is a God of order and laws. Think of the laws of nature which are unchangeable and which make life on earth possible for people. Think of the standardization in nature which makes it possible to classify plants and animals into kinds because all the individuals within a kind are the same, down to the smallest detail.
  • He is a God who makes demands on people. As the creator to whom all living beings owe their existence and everything there is for them he demands exclusive gratitude and devotion. He demands that people recognize His sovereignty and obey His just rules and laws. He also demands from all people that they acknowledge His words as true. For example all His words which are to be found in the Bible. The Bible presents things as they are, no matter whether it gives information on God’s qualities, God’s intentions or the rules of life that God has made for humans.
  • He is a God who does not accept certain ideas of people and actions of people. He can get angry about ideas, He can get angry about actions and He can punish. When people have committed serious transgressions against His commandments, God’s punishment may have the form of the complete destruction of the person who has willfully violated His just laws. This means that people who willfully reject the Holy Scriptures and refuse to believe what the Bible says about God and Jesus Christ, will in their turn certainly be rejected by God. The same holds good for people who deny that Jesus Christ is God’s Son, who do not believe in the role that God has given to His Son within His great plan of salvation, who refuse to recognize Jesus Christ as the eternal King of the Kingdom that God is going to establish. Or people who do not want to subject themselves to His authority. For this kind of people the Bible uses terms like the Anti-Christ, the man of lawlessness and the sons of destruction.
  • In God’s way of thinking there exists such a thing as just punishment. Suffering and death that God causes people to undergo to comply with His own perfect sense of justice and His own righteous standards. A good example of this can be found in the way in which God punished Adam and Eve for their disobedience in Paradise: suffering followed by death. Within this context we can also understand the capital punishment that God has determined for all people who sin. Or things like the Flood, when one day God decided to kill all the people of the earth except for eight righteous ones. Or the ten plagues which God poured out over Egypt.
  • With respect to what has just been said people may, fortunately, take into account that the Bible also, very explicitly, says that God is very forgiving and extremely willing to bear in mind the shortcoming and weaknesses that are part of human nature. Within this context people should think of the fact that God is willing to forgive the sins of people who want to make use of the benefits of Jesus’ ransom sacrifice.
  • God can both love and hate. He feels an intense love for righteousness and for people who want to obey His laws. But He hates unrighteousness and people who reject His laws. When the Bible describes God as a being that feels love and hate, the Bible emphasizes thereby that God is a real person. Only persons can have this kind of feelings.
  • God’s love is discernable all over the earth. Everywhere people can see that God has done His best to make the home for the people as beautiful and comfortable as possible: think of the beauty of His creation, the colors, the animal world and the plants. Think of the fact that the earth brings forth food which people find very tasty.
  • But the Bible also talks with great candor and great frequency about the God who hates, who fights against people and situations, who wages war and destroys. The God of the Bible is also often called the God of armies. The Bible says that JHWH is a God who is mighty in battle and in war. There are many places in the Bible where people can read how God’s sense of justice causes Him to punish the people who willfully ignore His commandments with extreme severity. Again: think of the Flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the plagues which God poured out over Egypt in the days when he was liberating His people. Another example of the way our God wages war is to be found in the accounts of the conquest of the Promised Land by Israel. The Bible leaves no doubt about it that the seven nations which lived in the Promised Land when Israel started its war of conquest, had sinned against God’s commandments on such a large scale that God thought that they had to be driven away from the land they owned and that it was excellent if His own people started living in the territory that first belonged to them. In the Bible passages that deal with Israel’s conquest of the Promised Land JHWH is often called the God of Israel’s fighting-lines and Israel’s combat troops. In addition: the last book of the Bible, Revelation, shows us a God who, when at the end of human history He establishes His Kingdom, will use violence to end any form of resistance against the establishing of this Kingdom.
  • The fact that God can love and reward, but also hate and punish also becomes very clear when you compare the acts of God described in the Hebrew Scriptures and the acts of God in the Greek Scriptures. In the Hebrew Scriptures we see how God deals with people who are Israelites through birth and not through their own choice. Many of them were stubborn, unteachable and little willing to submit to the laws of their creator. As a result the Hebrew Scriptures usually show us a God who is angry with the people of Israel and must punish them. The Greek Scriptures deal with spiritual Israelites: people who, irrespective of their nationality, have voluntarily chosen to do God’s will and to live their lives in the service of God. As a result the Greek Scriptures show us a God who acts much more gently and much more lovingly towards spiritual Israel than he ever did towards the physical nation of Israel
  • The Holy Scriptures often talk about God’s spirit. Also called the holy spirit. From the context in which the words God’s Spirit and the Holy Spirit are used it always appears that these words refer to God’s power, the effective force with which He carries out his will and achieves His end. God’s Spirit, God’s Holy Spirit are words that refer to His endless source of energy, which He used (to give an example) when He created the universe. God can also pour out His Holy Spirit on people. Thus He poured out His Holy Spirit on Jesus on the occasion of His baptism. At Pentecost of the year 33 He poured out His Holy Spirit on the apostles and disciples of Jesus, who experienced this receiving of the holy spirit as a sign that God had accepted them as His sons. They also experienced it as a sure sign that they might reckon on a place in His future Kingdom, where they would live for ever.
  • The Bible makes it clear that God, being the creator of the earth and of all that is and all that lives, claims the right to be the earth’s sovereign and to demand perfect obediende from all the creatures He has endowed with intelligence. The Bible also makes it clear that Satan, Adam and Eve doubted whether God had this right. And after Satan, Adam and Eve there have been many more angels and people who have blamed God for reserving certain amounts of knowledge and power for Himself instead of sharing them with His living created beings. This situation gives rise to a question of immense importance: Has God the moral right to the unique position He occupies in the universe and has God the moral right to demand from angels and from people the total obedience that He demands….or does not He have this right? A second moral question of vital importance raised by Satan in the case of Job is this one: Can a man remain completely faithful to God, even under the hardest of trials? Purely out of love for God, for what God is and does and for God’s truth? The Bible makes it clear that God uses human history to deal with these two essential questions mentioned above for once and for all. He wants to demonstrate in the course of human history, for everybody to see, which insights and points of view with regard to these questions are true and which are false. The last Bible book, Revelation, shows that the two vital questions mentioned will go on playing a part throughout our human history until, on the last day of this history, God will announce that He considers the questions answered and sufficiently dealt with and will proceed to establish the Kingdom He has promised us.