Who is God?

Any attempt to create a theology must begin with one question: who is God? It is the premise upon which the entire rest of the religion is founded. It is the cornerstone of the rest of one's belief, for what one understands of God in turn dictates how he/she perceives the rest of the faith. With that in mind, let us begin.

First and foremost of God's attributes is His perfection. It is a sort of holistic perfection the manifest itself in everything about Him. He is perfectly (x). In fact, the only limit that God has is this perfection, for it is the only kind of limit that could apply to the Most High God.

You se, perfection implies goodness, and if God is perfectly good, He cannot, by default, be bad. If we then look at any of the traits He may be said to posses, we can extrapolate this good/bad dichotomy. God is not just just, He is perfectly just. and if He is perfectly just, than He cannot in any way, at any time, in any place be unjust. God is perfectly loving, and to that end, He can never be unloving. This applies to literally every aspect of His nature.

Now, there are so many traits to list about God that to endeavor to write them all would be foolhardy, so I will instead tackle those I deem to be most relevant, important, and most frequently encountered. Also understand that, as I said above, His perfection is implicit in each of these.

God is just. When God makes a promise, it will be kept. This goes both ways, also. God promised Solomon that he would be a king without equal, and it was so. Likewise, God promised Adam and Eve that if they ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, "[they] will surely die", and when they did, He kept His word. People like to assume that God's justice is their ally, there to avenge them in their time of need, but too often they forget that it is we who must ally with Him. His justice punishes evil as much as it rewards good.

God is loving. This seems to be almost contradictory to the first attribute we have discussed, but in fact His love stems from His justice, for without punishment, there can be no mercy. Without adversity there can be no kindness. Without wrath, there cannot be love. God's love is the result of His righteous fury at the defiling taint of sin in His prized creation, us. Knowing as He did how we had corrupted ourselves, His immediate reaction was to guide history so that we might be redeemed. When faced with rebellious children, His thought was "how can I save them". This ultimate love supersedes everything. We like to think that, if God truly loves us, He'd not let anything ever go wrong for us. Our culture is full of people whose parents have tried that, and we can see where that has led both them and their children. To avoid punishing wrong does not create love. In many ways, it destroys it.

God is powerful. Consider the sun. It is a ball of liquid fire, thousands of times the size of our planet. n it's core churns millions of atomic explosions thousands of times more powerful that the most powerful bombs known to man. It's heat and light are so immense that they can be felt here, 93 million miles away form it (if you drove 1000 miles an hour, it would take you more than 10.5 years to reach it). Yet astronomically speaking, our sun is a small star. There are stars thousands of times larger than ours. And God created all of these simply by speaking. The sound of thunder, the fury of a hurricane, the mighty mountains that rise up from the earth and the canyons that scar our world's face are all products of His divine imagination. And he created them all with no more than the words of His mouth. The magnitude of God is evident in everything, and the immensity of His mind is even more so. The equations that govern how galaxies rotate also apply to particle physics. This is a truly astounding picture of God's immense power.

God is merciful. Despite essentially spitting in His face, God wants our salvation. No matter how badly we screw up, God is willing to listen and forgive. God upholds His divine law with one hand, and with the other He reaches down to wipe the tears from the eyes of those who call out to Him for help. One need look no further than the plan of salvation to see exactly the depth of His mercy. Christ went to the sick, the lame, the dying, the poor, the broken, and the desperate with His message of love and mercy. Those whom no one else loved or cared for are the ones He went to first. When others saw this, some realized what this meant, but others rejected Him. Still, God continued to reach out to all who would listen. Paul the apostle was originally Saul the Christian-killer. Fueled by religious zeal, Saul hunted down and persecuted all the Christians he could find, until God intervened directly, and Saul's life was never the same again. No matter what we do, God "is faithful and just to forgive our sins" if we are willing to "confess our sins". Considering how often we do what is wrong, it is amazing that He would have mercy on us.

God is the creator, the redeemer, the Sovereign and Most-High God of all. "In Him, all things are held together" and without Him, all things would cease to exist. He is eternal, loving, strong, creative, mighty, just, and merciful. He is, was, and shall always be God. And it is to Him we look for all the answers in our lives.