Who Is God? The One True and Living God

Everyone carries a picture of God about with them, whether they believe in Him or not. For one person it is a stern face from childhood, quick to be displeased. For another it is a benevolent vagueness — a warmth in the universe with no particular opinions. For a third it is a force, an energy, a something rather than a someone. And a great many people who say they do not believe in God will tell you, if you ask patiently, exactly which God they do not believe in — and quite often He is not the God of the Bible at all.

So the first question is not whether you believe in God. It is which God you have in mind, and where that picture came from. If it came from your upbringing, or your disappointments, or the general atmosphere of the age, then it is a portrait painted by men. The only way to know what God is actually like is for God to tell us. And He has.

1. We do not discover God; He reveals Himself

Begin here, because everything else depends on it. Men cannot reason their way up to God the way one might work out a proof. He is not an object in the universe to be located, measured, and described. If He is to be known at all, it must be because He has chosen to make Himself known.

And that is precisely the claim of the Bible: not that men searched and found God, but that God spoke. He spoke to Abraham, to Moses at a burning bush, to prophets over many centuries — and at last He spoke in His Son. Every genuine thing we know about God has come to us this way. The rest is guesswork.

This is a relief, if you think about it. It means that knowing God is not reserved for the clever or the philosophical. A farmer with a Bible knows more about God than a brilliant man with only his own reflections, because one of them is listening and the other is speculating.

2. There is one God, and only one

The first thing God says about Himself, and the thing He says most insistently, is that He is one and there is no other. This is the foundation of Israel's faith, recited daily for thousands of years:

"Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD." (Deuteronomy 6:4)

This was said in a world crowded with gods — a god for the harvest, a god for the storm, a god for the city, a god for war. Into that crowd God speaks, and He does not say that He is the greatest. He says He is the only one.

Through Isaiah He makes the claim in terms that leave no room whatever for a second:

"...and there is no God else beside me; a just God and a Saviour; there is none beside me. Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else." (Isaiah 45:21-22)

Notice two things packed together there. First, the exclusivity: there is none else, repeated as though God will not permit us to slide past it. Second — and this is the surprise — the God who insists on being the only One immediately opens His arms to the whole earth. Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth. His uniqueness is not the jealousy of a tyrant guarding a title. It is the reason no one need look anywhere else: there is one Saviour, and He is offering Himself to everybody.

There is a hard edge to this, and honesty requires naming it. If there is one God, then not all religious paths lead to Him, however sincerely they are walked. Sincerity is a fine thing, but it does not create truth. A man may take the wrong road with his whole heart, and his whole heart will not move the road.

3. He is a Person, not a force

Our age is comfortable with a divine something — an energy, a ground of being, a universal consciousness. That God makes no demands and asks no questions. But the God who actually spoke did not introduce Himself as a something.

When Moses stood before the burning bush and asked what name he should give, the answer was not a description of power but a declaration of being:

"And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you." (Exodus 3:14)

I AM. Not it is. A self-existent Person, who depends on nothing, who was not made, who does not become — who simply is, and always was, and always will be. Everything else in existence is derived; He alone is underived. Ask what caused a tree, a star, a man, and there is an answer. Ask what caused God, and the question dissolves, because He is the One who has being in Himself.

And because He is a Person, He can be known — not merely known about. A force cannot be loved, cannot be grieved, cannot be disobeyed, cannot forgive. A Person can do all four. The whole Bible is the story of a relationship, which would be impossible if God were an it.

He is also Spirit — not confined to a body, not located in one place, not visible to the eye. He does not live in temples made with hands, nor is He served by human hands as though He needed anything. He gives life and breath to all things and needs nothing from any of us. And He does not change. What He was a thousand years ago, He is; what He promises, He does not later reconsider. Men change their minds because they learn things they did not know, or because their circumstances shift. Neither happens to God.

4. He is holy

If we had to choose one word for what God is, the Bible would give us this one. When the prophet Isaiah was granted a sight of the throne, the creatures around it were not crying powerful, powerful, powerful, nor loving, loving, loving, but Holy, holy, holy — the only attribute Scripture repeats three times over.

Holiness means separateness — that God is entirely other than we are, in a category by Himself, without flaw and without the slightest shadow of wrong. It is not merely that He does not sin. It is that He cannot, any more than light can be dark.

"...God is light, and in him is no darkness at all." (1 John 1:5)

Weigh that last phrase — no darkness at all. Not a little. Not in the corners. Nothing.

Now this is the attribute that our generation finds hardest, and it is worth saying why. A holy God is not adjustable. He does not revise His standards when the culture revises its own. And it is precisely His holiness that creates the problem the rest of the Bible sets out to solve — because if He is like that, and we are like this, then something must be done about the distance between us, and we cannot be the ones to do it.

5. He is love

And here is the truth that the same Scripture places right beside the last one, in words as simple as any in the Bible:

"He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love." (1 John 4:8)

Note that it does not say God is loving, as one might say a man is generous — one quality among others. It says God is love. Love is not something He has; it is something He is. He did not begin to love when there was somebody to love; love is His own eternal nature.

But we must be careful here, because this is the verse the modern world quotes most and understands least. God is love is not the same as God is indulgent. It does not mean He approves of everything, overlooks everything, or has no standards. Real love is not the absence of standards; a father who does not care what becomes of his son does not love him more, but less.

And the Bible never leaves the word floating as an abstraction. It always points to an event. God's love is not a mood; it is something He did, at a particular time, at enormous cost — while we were still in the wrong, and had done nothing to deserve it.

6. Holiness and love are not at war

People often set these two against each other, as though God were divided — stern in the Old Testament, kind in the New; holy in principle, loving in practice. But God is not made of parts, and He does not have moods. His holiness and His love are one and the same nature.

See how the two hold together. Because God is holy, sin must be judged — He cannot shrug at evil without ceasing to be good. Because God is love, He desires to save the very people who committed it. Those two facts create the deepest problem in the universe. How can a perfectly just Judge acquit the guilty without ceasing to be just?

The answer is the cross, and it is the only answer that satisfies both. At Calvary, God did not lower the standard, and He did not abandon the sinner. He took the penalty upon Himself. Justice was fully served — the wage of sin was paid in full — and mercy was fully extended, because the One who paid it was the Judge Himself, in the Person of His Son. Holiness and love meet there, and neither is compromised by an inch.

This is why no other picture of God will do. A God who is only holy would condemn us and be right to. A God who is only loving would ignore evil and would not be worth worshipping. The God of the Bible is both, entirely, at once — and the cross is where you see it.

7. God has made Himself known in His Son

All that has been said so far a man might learn and still remain at a distance. But God did not stop at telling us about Himself. He came.

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." (John 1:1)

Read that slowly, because every clause is doing work. In the beginning was — He did not begin; He already was. The Word was with God — a distinction of Persons. And the Word was God — and yet not a second God, for we have already seen there is only one. Here is the deep mystery of the Godhead, stated without apology and without explanation, because it is revealed rather than reasoned.

And then the astonishing thing:

"And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth." (John 1:14)

The eternal God entered His own creation. He who made the eye was seen with eyes. He who made the hand was touched with hands. He did not send a message; He came Himself. And the Bible names this plainly as the central mystery of the faith:

"And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory." (1 Timothy 3:16)

God was manifest in the flesh. That is the answer to our question, and it is the highest answer there is. You wanted to know who God is. Look at the Lord Jesus Christ — how He dealt with the leper nobody would touch, the woman everybody had written off, the thief dying beside Him. That is not a picture of God. That is God, in the flesh, among us.

8. What this God asks of you

Knowing who God is settles nothing by itself. The question is what you will do about Him.

Because He is holy, we have a problem, and it is not a small one:

"For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God." (Romans 3:23)

"For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." (Romans 6:23)

Because He is love, He has already acted about it, and at His own expense:

"But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." (Romans 5:8)

"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." (John 3:16)

And because He is one, there is no second place to look, and no other terms available:

"But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name." (John 1:12)

That is the whole of it. The one true and living God, holy beyond our reach and loving beyond our deserving, has come near in His Son and asks to be received.

The God who is there, and who speaks

Set the pictures side by side. The stern face of childhood is not Him — that was a caricature, and it has kept people away for a lifetime. The benevolent vagueness is not Him either; that God has never said anything and never asked anything, and He is a projection of our own comfort. The impersonal force is not Him; a force did not say I AM, and a force did not go to a cross.

The God who is actually there is one, and holy, and love, and a Person — and He has spoken, and He has come, and He is not hiding.

If your picture of God has been wrong, you are not required to defend it. You are invited to put it down and look at the One who has revealed Himself, and to hear what He says to all the ends of the earth: Look unto me, and be ye saved.

Let us Pray:

Our gracious heavenly Father, we come before Thy throne of grace through the precious name and perfect merit of our Lord Jesus Christ, who alone has opened the way into Thy presence.

We thank Thee for Thy beloved Son, and for **Him** who declared **Thee**, whom no man hath seen at any time. We praise Thee for Thy preserved Word, which declareth **"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth"** (Genesis 1:1), and which cannot be broken.

We confess before Thee that we have made **Thee** small enough to be comfortable. Forgive us, we pray, and cleanse us, for Thou art faithful and just to forgive us our sins.

We beseech Thee for every soul reading these words who is yet without Christ. Send forth Thy Holy Ghost to convince them of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment; open their understanding; and draw them to Thy Son before this day is done.

Strengthen Thy people who read it. Comfort the discouraged, establish the wavering, and let none go away empty. And use this message to show every reader the God who is, and not the god he imagined, for Thy glory and not for ours.

We pray all of this to Thee, O God, our Holy and Heavenly Father, in the precious name of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, by the power and anointing of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

The Most Important Prayer You Will Ever Pray

Before you close this page, one question matters more than everything you have just read: if you died tonight, do you know where you would be?

You cannot be saved by joining a church, by being baptized, by giving money, or by living a decent life. Salvation is not a wage that is earned; it is a gift that is received. Every one of us has sinned, the wages of sin is death, and there is a real hell prepared for sin — but the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died on the cross in the sinner's place, was buried, and rose again the third day.

If you know yourself to be a sinner, and you are willing to turn from your sin and trust Him alone, then speak to God now. There are no magic words — but if these words are the cry of your heart, pray them and mean them:

After You Have Prayed

1. Tell somebody today. "That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved" (Romans 10:9).

2. Begin reading the Bible. Start with the Gospel of John, then Acts, then Romans. Read a little every day. "As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby" (1 Peter 2:2).

3. Talk to your Father every day. You may now come boldly, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. No appointment is needed and no man's permission.

4. Find a Bible-believing church and be baptized. Not to be saved — you already are — but in obedience, and as the public confession of what has happened to you.

5. Rest in this, and do not be shaken by your feelings. "He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life" (John 5:24). You will still sin; when you do, confess it and go on — "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9).