Attributes of God - God is Wise

There's just one attribute of God left for my series of blog entries; God is Wise.  At first, I wasn't certain exactly how to address it though.  Of course God is wise.  He's omniscient; He knows everything!  But then I started to think about the difference between knowledge and wisdom.

I was going to quote a Bible verse here, “Knowledge puffs up but wisdom builds up”. Unfortunately, this verse doesn't seem to actually exist.  I suppose I'll go a different direction...

Ever see the movie Rainman?  It follows an autistic man and his estranged brother on a cross-country road trip, but that's not important right now.  What is important, to my belabored point at least, is this.  The autistic character in this movie has incredible knowledge gained by obsessive observation of the world around him, but can't even cross the street safely without guidance.

In other words, knowledge is useful to a point, but wisdom is what guides the application of knowledge to its maximum effect.  God's omniscient knowledge was directed by His infinite wisdom with the effect being you and I and the universe we live in.  In His wisdom, God decided to create living, intelligent creatures that share many of His own attributes to a small extent.  Then, knowing that our free will allows us to make poor choices, His wisdom also directed the design of a plan for salvation for these beings He created.

Now, it is up to us.  We have knowledge about who God is and what He is all about; do we have the wisdom to ally ourselves with Him?

Attributes of God - God is Self Existent

There is one characteristic that every single thing in the entire universe shares.  Whether creature or thing, inanimate object or intelligent organism, every speck of matter in this universe was created by something.  Something caused everything in the universe to come into existence.  God, however was not.  No one and nothing caused God to come into being; He simply is.  Past, present, future, God is.

How can this be?  How can anything not have an origin?  Even the universe itself must have had an origin.  God exists outside of space and time, outside of the universe in a timeless manner that our limited human minds can barely conceive of, much less even begin to comprehend.


Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.
Hebrews 13:8

God is unchanging.  He exists yesterday today and forever concurrently.  This explains how the sacrifice that Jesus made on the cross took the penalty for all the sin in the world, from the day of creation until the day that the old heaven and the old earth pass away.  This God who created the entire universe invites us to share in His manner of existence after a comparatively infinitesimal time spent in this life, for the cost of nothing more than our acknowledgment of His position of authority over the entire universe and our acceptance of forgiveness of our sins.

Attributes of God - God is Righteous

We see many of the attributes of God reflected in humanity.  Righteousness however is an attribute that humanity does not seem to possess.  We are riddled with guilt from nearly the time of our birth.  We are selfish and violent.  If you doubt this, you need only visit a nursery school to be reassured of this fact.  There, you will witness children fighting over toys, over attention, and all too often fighting for reasons that do not seem to exist.  Stronger children often take toys from weaker children in a macabre survival-of-the-fittest display that is unfortunately reminiscent of the war-torn world that we live in.

Selfishness is the hallmark of the human condition.  Selfishness could be characterized as the polar opposite of righteousness.  Where selfish humanity is concerned with itself, righteous God is concerned with humanity, trapping Himself temporarily in the bonds of mortal flesh in order to free us from those same bonds.  In saving us, God commits the ultimate act of mercy by allowing us to choose to follow Him out of the failings of flesh and into the eternity that He has prepared or to continue on our own path that leads inevitably to an eternity solely in the company of oneself.  Apart from God, there can be found no joy, no companionship, no fellowship, just the horror of realizing an eternal separation from the source of all that is good.

It is worth remembering that it is not so much God sentencing people to eternal separation as allowing people to exist apart from Him.  A righteous God does not force us to love Him but gives us the choice to determine our own destinies.

Attributes of God - God is Omniscient

This is one of the easiest attributes to wrap a limited, human brain around.  Very simply, God knows everything; past, present, future, God knows.  God's knowledge of the future is the only troublesome point.  Many people equate knowledge of future events with the causation of future events.  In other words, the idea is that if God knows what will happen then He is responsible for what happens.  This thought is a shortcoming of beings that have a temporal existence.  We simply cannot conceive of an existence apart from time; God can.  Time is a dimension of the universe; God exists completely apart from the universe.  Before and after (from our perspective) the beginning and end of our Universe, God simply is.

Attributes of God - God is Omnipresent

This is a difficult concept to understand, to say the least; God exists in every corner of the universe at the same time.  In some way, you could say that God is as big as the universe.  Notice I did not say that God is the universe; as the creator of the universe, God exists independently from the universe.  As David said in Psalm 139,

“Where can I go from Your Spirit?  Where can I flee from Your presence?  If I go up to the heavens, You are there; if I make my bed in the depths, You are there.  If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there Your hand will guide me, Your right hand will hold me fast.”

We know now that the universe is far more vast than David knew.  The bottom of the sea, the farthest shore, the entire expanse of the Earth are the merest slivers of creation.  This knowledge should put us in far more awe of God than David was.  How incredible is it that God should take notice of us at all; let alone desire a relationship with us.  How incredible for us to take advantage of this privilege.

Attributes of God - God is Loving

For each of us, the word love is a noun or a verb.  As a noun, love is a feeling of affection toward an object or being.  As a verb, to love means to express this feeling of affection.  In the case of God, love means much more.  The Bible says that God is Love.  This is of course not true in the literal sense, but the attitude, emotion and act of love is so much a part of the character of God that is impossible to express the nature of God without mentioning love.

Unfortunately, the world's skewed understanding of love has indelibly stained our perception.  We use a lot of in a flippant, casual way.

“I love that dress.”

“I love french fries.”

To apply the word love to something temporary and transient is to dramatically minimize its power.  Though none of the other lyrics are terribly meaningful, a famous song from the 1960s sums up the concept of love quite nicely.

“Love, love, love; love is all you need.”

If God is indeed love, this couldn't be more true.

Attributes of God - God is Just

To be just is to be fair.  Because He is just, God will never act any way that is unfair.  Everything that God does, has done or will do is completely correct and appropriate by any truly objective standard.  Where there has been undeserved suffering, there will certainly, in due time be a be a reward.  Where there has been undeserved blessing, there will certainly in due time be appropriate consequences.  By His very nature, God cannot act in a way that is not just toward us, humans, the most intelligent, most capable (of both good and bad) beings in creation.

This is potentially terrible news.  If God is completely just, then we are in trouble.  We have all acted in ways that are inappropriate and we all deserve punishment.  So long as we are imperfect, we cannot exist in the presence of a perfect God.  Thankfully, God has another attribute, His mercy.  Because He is just, there must be consequences attached to our actions that because He is merciful, He chose to take the consequences on Himself in the person of Jesus.

God is both just and merciful.  May we always strive to be the same in our dealings with those in our sphere of influence.

Attributes of God - God is Holy

The holiness of God is quite likely one of the most difficult attributes for us as humans to come to grips with.  To say that someone or something is holy is to say that he, she or it is supremely good, exalted or worthy of complete devotion.  Anyone that is holy is, by definition perfect in goodness and righteousness.  This definition does not fit any person, object or idea that we as humans can interact with in any non-spiritual manner.

Lying beyond the difficulty of simply comprehending what holiness means is the fact that we are incapable of giving our complete devotion to anything.  If we could, we would be unable to maintain our existence.  In this life, we will never truly understand the holiness of God, but in the next we will experience it personally.

Attributes of God - God is Faithful

Human beings are not faithful. Sooner or later anyone who depends on other humans will be disappointed. Promises will be broken, feelings will be hurt and hearts left in ruins.  God on the other hand is faithful, completely faithful. God will never… can never break a promise.

God is the healer of hurt feelings. God rebuilds broken hearts. The most faithful things that humans have direct experience with are the laws of physics. Every person alive is familiar with gravity. If you let go of object you're holding you can be certain that it will soon be drawn towards the ground. Leave an ice cube in the hot sun long enough and it will certainly melt. Put your unprotected hand in a flame and it will hurt.

God is more faithful than all of these. God's faithfulness is higher than these physical laws that we cherish. God's faithfulness is far beyond our comprehension. While the universe will eventually pass away, taking our familiar laws with it, God’s word, laws and character will always endure, God is eternally faithful.

The Attributes of God - God is Eternal

We humans get caught up in the idea of eternity. It's confusing. We experience time one day after another. When we try to think of eternity, we imagine an endless string of days compounding into millions and billions of years. I don't know about anyone else, but the idea of spending 8 billion years doing anything sounds horrible.

God does not experience time in this manner; the eternality of God means that He is beyond time. Eternity is not something that we as temporal beings can easily come to grips with. We're simply unable to comprehend the nonexistence of time. We are finite beings and as such are incapable of ompletely understanding what is infinite. The fact that we have any comprehension at all of God is evidence of His reaching out to us.

In the book of Isaiah, Gad says that His ways are not our ways; His thoughts are higher than our thoughts.  We can never be completely like God, but we were all created with an eternal component, our soul that will advance to eternity after our time on Earth is complete.  Possessing a proper understanding of and posture toward God will ensure that this eternity is spent with Him rather than apart from Him.