The question of describing “who God is” is a critical matter in all areas of biblical teachings and practices. How you understand God can influence your faith. In orthodox Christianity, it is my firm conviction and belief that Scripture reveals God Himself as the Trinity: One God in Three Persons. I am sure that all of the conservative Protestant churches can attest to that. However, the main issue emerges when we try to explain and describe what God is.
It is my great concern that the congregation in the churches do not know their God well enough. As J.I. Packer said in his classical work, Knowing God, “Our aim in studying the Godhead must be to know God himself better. Our concern must be to enlarge our acquaintance, not simply with the doctrine of God’s attributes, but with the living God whose attributes they are” (p. 21-22). As Christians know God better, indeed their lives and their minds are being transformed.
The knowledge of God is ultimately gained by reading and studying the Word of God. The Scriptures attest to that in 2 Timothy 3:16-17, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”
When explaining and describing what God is, I am talking about His attributes: mercy, love, wisdom, knowledge, faithfulness, self-sufficient, righteous and so forth.
In this generation, there prevails a great theological error surrounding the attributes of God, which is to elevate one of God’s attributes over His other attributes.
Most people would recognize the love of God as His attribute. Indeed, the apostle John said that “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16). I believe in the love of God. I am also encouraged by the fact that God does love in action. Children in Sunday school would memorize John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” The Apostle Paul indicates the demonstration of God’s love in Romans 5:8.
The theological error does not consist in the fact that God is love, but when God’s love is elevated more than His other attributes. “We believe that God’s greatest attribute is love” is an erroneous statement of faith. The New Testament, especially 1 John, speaks about the love of God a lot. Don’t make the mistake between emphasis and elevation. When John wrote his first letter, love is indeed the emphasis or one of the themes because that’s one of the ways to know if one is a born-again Christian. However, do not equate emphasis to elevation. “…it should caution us not to take any one of these descriptions by itself and isolate it from its immediate context or from the rest of what Scripture says about God. If we did that, we would run the risk of misunderstanding or of having an imbalanced or inadequate picture of who God is. Each description of one of God’s attributes must be understood in the light of everything else that Scripture tells us about God. If we fail to remember this, we will inevitably understand God’s character wrongly” (Grudem, Wayne. Systematic Theology. p. 159). 1 John does say that God is love, but it is theologically dangerous to narrow our focus of who God is on a single epistle and separate the knowledge of Him from the rest of Scripture.
Indeed, I admit, the love of God is more appealing than the wrath of God. His loving attribute does affect us emotionally and spiritually. Yet the whole of Scripture does not submit to our emotions, for Scripture is sufficient and authoritative. Calvin warns us about this mindset in his Institutes, “The effect of the expression, therefore, is the same as if it had been said, that he is of infinite majesty, incomprehensible essence, boundless power, and eternal duration. When we thus speak of God, our thoughts must be raised to their highest pitch; we must not ascribe to him any thing of a terrestrial or carnal nature, must not measure him by our little standards, or suppose his will to be like ours”. Or another version can be said like this, “lest we dream up anything earthly or physical about him, lest we measure him by our small measure, or conform his will to our emotion” (Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. 3.20.40). If God’s love becomes more appealing and the greatest attribute against the rest, we have worshiped the wrong God or only part of God. You can end up believing in the god of Rob Bell who wrote Love Wins, becoming a heretic and destroying the message of the Gospel.
Have you ever sat down and reflected on what God verbally said about Himself? The authors of Scripture do describe His attributes in various places, but what does God say about Himself? Moses penned it down in Leviticus 19:2, “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” Whatever happened to teaching and reflecting about God’s holiness? Additionally, whatever happened to teaching and reflecting about God’s immutability, wisdom, justice, wrath, faithfulness, knowledge, self-sufficiency and so forth?
In conclusion, it is indeed my concern that the congregation in the churches do not know their God very well. Rather, they only know one part of God.
An (imperfect) illustration that can hopefully drive home my argument. You and your significant other have started dating. Both of you are in the honeymoon phase and love to be with each other because you found that this person is “compatible” with everything you love. Initially, you find that the other person is so kind, nice and loving. As both of you continue to know each other as a couple, you start to know the “bad” side of that person. You may realize that the other person is selfish, gossipy, arrogant and so forth. Perhaps you may contend with that person and still love him or her. After getting married, you start to realize that person is irresponsible, lazy, messy and so forth. Although you may not like his or her bad behaviors, you still love that person as a whole for who he or she is. You cannot just love that person when he or she is nice and loving. To truly love someone is to love that person as a whole even though he or she is not perfect.
The God of the Bible is perfect and sinless. Scripture has already reveal everything we need to know about God. Though you may not like one of His attributes, God will not change according to your liking – consider His immutability (Malachi 3:6; Numbers 23:19). Though we can continue to grow in the knowledge of God in this life, we cannot fully know God due to our sinfulness and our finite minds. Hence, I agree with the Reformed maxim “the finite cannot contain the infinite”.
To love God is to love Him as a whole being. To know God is to know Him as a whole being. To worship God is to worship Him as a whole being. “We must remember that God’s whole being includes all of his attributes: he is entirely loving, entirely merciful, entirely just, and so forth. Every attribute of God that we find in Scripture is true of all of God’s being, and we therefore can say that every attribute of God also qualifies every other attribute” (Grudem, Wayne. Systematic Theology. p. 179)
Tommy Wong 