This chapter deals with the personality of God. Personality, of course, is characterized by a being possessing knowledge, feeling, and will power. An idol is devoid of personality, for an idol neither knows, feels, nor responds. Our God is an individual, who is living and has definite personality characteristics. God is a person, not an influence or an unseen force or power like electricity. Jeremiah 10:10 says, “But the Lord is the true God, he is the living God” Acts 14:15 says, “Turn from these vanities unto the living God.” First Thessalonians 1:9 says the converts “turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God.” We read in 2 Chronicles 16:9, “The eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to shew himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect.”
God’s Incommunicable Attributes
God has some natural attributes which can be either communicable or incommunicable. First of all, we will discuss God’s incommunicable attributes. By incommunicable, we mean that God Himself, as a spirit and as a person, has certain innate qualities which cannot be transmitted to man; which a man by his natural ability or reasoning or senses cannot grasp. This is why the unsaved man has a tendency always to become a self-righteous agnostic, or a self-righteous humanist. Since he cannot grasp God with the mind, he figures either there is no God or you can’t get to know Him. God has certain natural attributes which have a quality about them that are uniquely His. God possesses certain basic qualifications. 1) He is eternal; we refer to this as His infinity. 2) He is unchangeable; we refer to this as His immutability. 3) He possesses all power; He’s omnipotent. 4) We speak of God, too, as being present everywhere at the same time. This is called omnipresence or, as the classical theologians call it, “immensity.” 5) He has all-knowledge, which we call omniscience.
In short, God within Himself, as an intelligent living being—the Author and Creator of all life and the source of all life—is infinite, immutable, all-powerful, allpresent, and all-knowing.
God Is Eternal
First of all, God is eternal. To be the true God, He must have neither beginning nor ending. He must be eternal. He must be more eternal than the universe or the heavens, which the pagan Greek philosophers thought were eternal, because they believed in what we call “the eternity of material.” They believed that material things were eternal. We will discuss more about the belief that material things are eternal when we get into the doctrines of anthropology and creation, but of course, any man knows that it takes a great deal more faith to believe in the eternity of matter (as all dialectical materialists believe) than it does to believe in the eternity of a spiritual Being.
All right, God is eternal. An idol is disqualified, for it was made by someone, thus it had a beginning. In Psalm 90:2 we read, “Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.” In Genesis 1:1 we read, “In the beginning God.” God has always existed.
God Is Unchangeable
God is unchangeable. God is so constituted that He cannot change. Malachi 3:6 says, “For I am the Lord, I change not.” James 1:17 says, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.” God is unchangeable. He says, “The Strength of Israel will not lie nor repent: for he is not a man, that
he should repent” (1 Sam. 15:29). Once God has said something, He is going to do it. It is true that the Lord may change His mind about a circumstance that is flexible about which He has laid down no definite decree, such as the destruction of the earth in Genesis 6, 7 and 8, but where God has spoken and committed Himself to writing (and there are more than eleven hundred promises in writing on which you can get you hands), He does not change or repent. “For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance,” Romans 11:29.
God Is Omnipotent
In God’s incommunicable attributes is the attribute of all-powerfulness oromnipotence. If He lacked this, He would not be God. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” That is creative power. He said, “Let there be light: and there was light.” The spoken word of God carries a power and authority to it far beyond the decrees of any church that ever was or ever will be. “The word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword,” and when God said, “Let there be light,” “there was light.” Man cannot speak rain into existence. Man cannot speak lightning or thunder into existence. Man cannot speak life into existence. God can! Man makes things out of existing material. God creates out of nonexistent materials objects that are good and perfect. Notice in Genesis 1:4, “It was good.” In Job 42:2, Job says, “I know that thou canst do every thing.” The Psalmist said, “For he spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast,” Psalm 33:9. And speaking to Jeremiah, the Lord said in Jeremiah 32:27, “Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh: is there any thing too hard for me?” Certainly not.
God Is Omnipresent
God’s omnipresence is one of His attributes. We call this in classical scholastic theology God’s “immensity.” That is, He is present everywhere at one and the same time. Notice Psalm 139:7–10, where David said, “Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me.” The Lord said to Jeremiah, “Am I a God at hand...and not a God afar off?” (Jer. 23:23). The same Lord knows where every hair of your head is, and the same Lord watches the sparrow fall to the ground; Christ said He did.
God Is Omniscient
The Bible says in 2 Chronicles 16:9, “For the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to shew himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him.” Nothing is hid from the Lord. He’s omniscient, allknowing. The Bible says in Job 34:22, “There is no darkness, nor shadow of death, where the workers of iniquity may hide themselves.” Job confessed, “No thought can be withholden from thee” (Job 42:2). And Isaiah said in chapter 40:28, “There is no searching of his understanding.” The Bible says in Matthew 12:36, “Every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment.”
God's Communicable Attributes
By “communicable attributes” of God we mean those particular qualities in God that He can convey to a man so that a man can understand them. There is no way on earth the finite mind can grasp God’s immensity or His eternity or His immutability. Try as we can, we cannot imagine a Being who has always lived and always will live. This is the educated man’s alibi for rejecting God: since he, the finite brain, cannot grasp or understand the essence of God; therefore, God doesn’t exist. It is like a twoyear-old who can’t explain the rattles on a rattlesnake, so he pretends that rattlesnakes don’t exist, and he goes out and plays in a rattlesnake den. It is stupidity, and whether it’s educated or uneducated stupidity, it amounts to the same thing.
Here we deal with God’s communicable attributes. When we say “communicable” we mean that God can communicate them—they can get across. We hear a lot today about “sharing” and “communicating.” We hear a great deal about it from people who do not communicate with God, and God does not communicate with them. (Very unfortunate, but that is sometimes how it goes.) Now, these are things that God has communicated to man that man can grasp.
God Is Holy
The first of these is that God is holy. We can understand that if only by analogy. We can understand that we are sinful, and we are not in the least like God. We can understand that by studying God’s dealing with nations and with people. We can understand it by studying God’s dealing with sin. We do not have to have a Bible necessarily, although it is helpful in understanding God’s attitude about holiness. The Bible says, “Be ye holy; for I am holy,” 1 Peter 1:16. And we read in Exodus 34:14, ”For the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.” Notice in particular Exodus 15:11, “Who is like unto thee, O Lord, among the gods? who is like thee, glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing wonders;” and also Isaiah 6:3, “And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.” However, you wouldn’t have to have these passages to know that God is no respecter of persons and that God deals with sin
God Is Righteous
God’s next communicable attribute is His righteousness. God is righteous. In Psalm 116:5 we read, “Gracious is the Lord, and righteous; yea, our God is merciful.” And in Ezra 9:15, “O Lord God of Israel, thou art righteous: for we remain yet escaped, as it is this day: behold, we are before thee in our trespasses: for we cannot stand before thee because of this.” Among the many passages dealing with righteousness in the book of Romans, we find the great passage in Romans 10:3–4, which says, “For they being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone that believeth.” The righteousness of God is the great theme of the book of Romans. Romans 9:14 says, “Is there unrighteousness with God? God forbid.” Notice also Romans 8:10, “But the Spirit is life because of righteousness.” Righteousness. That is the great theme of the book of Romans. Romans 6:18, “Ye became the servants of righteousness.” Romans 6:19, “Your members servants to righteousness.” Romans 6:20, “Ye were free from righteousness.” Notice this thing over and over again. Romans 6:13, “As instruments of righteousness unto God.” Notice how it keeps cropping up and cropping up and cropping up throughout the book of Romans. Romans 5:21, “Might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life.” Romans 5:7, “For scarcely for a righteous man will one die.” And over and over and over. Notice in Romans 3 how righteousness keeps coming out. Romans 3:26, “To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness.” Romans 3:21, “But now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested.”
This is what the unsaved man doesn’t want—”the righteousness of God.” What a man wants is his own righteousness, and the Bible says in Isaiah 64:6, “All our righteousnesses are as filthy rags.” Even after a man is a saint, a saved sinner, the Holy Spirit has to help him produce what we call “fine linen” which the Bible says is “the righteousness of saints.”
God is Merciful
God is merciful. We know this about God. This is a communicable attribute. God can communicate His mercy to man. Notice Psalm 103:8, “The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy.” There isn’t anyone reading this booklet who hasn’t experienced the mercy of God. Whether you recognize this or not, or acknowledge it or not, is beside the point. The point is, it has been dispensed to you. There has been sometime in your life when you said, “God be merciful to me” or “God help me” or “God have mercy on me” or “God get me out of this,” and God helped you and got you out. The fact that you may have reciprocated by rejecting His Son is your personal matter, not mine. The fact that you may have reciprocated by studying geology fifteen years to disprove Genesis 1 is your funeral, not mine. But God is merciful; His tender mercy is over all His works. The Bible tells us in Psalm 103:8, “The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy.”
Psalm 86:15 reveals this great truth about God, “But thou, O Lord, art a God full of compassion, and gracious, longsuffering, and plenteous in mercy and truth.” One of the great attributes of God is His longsuffering (His putting up with sinners, His mercifulness to bad, wicked men), mentioned in Numbers 14:18 and again in Exodus 34:6–7. He “sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust,” Jesus Christ says in Matthew 5:45, telling us that often the mercy of God is mistaken for salvation.
“God Is Jealous”
Nahum 1:2 says the Lord God is a jealous God. Now, it is hard for the unsaved man to figure this out. As a matter of fact, I Corinthians 2:14 says, “But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.” It is impossible for an unsaved man to figure out how God—if He is God and perfect— could be jealous. But this is stupidity on the part of the blinded sinner in failing to realize that every attribute of man is magnified a thousand times in God. After all, if the Bible is correct (and we say it with no doubt in our own mind that it is), then God made man in His own image, and if this is true, then the attributes which can be found in man will be found also in man’s Creator. Every attribute manifested by human beings will be magnified a million times so that it would be impossible for you to imagine the intensity. No man reading this book can imagine the agony Jesus Christ felt when he knelt in the Garden of Gethsemane and contemplated becoming sin, turning into sin for sinful man, becoming a curse under the Father’s wrath, after He Himself, the Lord Jesus Christ, had never had an impure thought one time in His life.
Jealousy is a genuine motive. It was given to guard things that are right. When Paul spoke of his jealousy in 2 Corinthians 11:2 he said, “For I am jealous over you with godly jealousy.” When the Bible says, “The spirit that dwelleth in us lusteth to envy,” in James 4:5, it means the Holy Spirit is concerned about His private property which belongs to Him.
You have to face the Biblical facts: God can be jealous! God will not tolerate His children messing with the world! God loves His children and wants them for His own. “God is merciful.” “God is a consuming fire” (His wrath) and “God is a jealous God.” Joshua 24:19 says, “And Joshua said unto the people, Ye cannot serve the Lord: for he is an holy God; he is a jealous God; he will not forgive your transgressions nor your sins.”
God is Love
All right, “God is love,” l John 4:8, but love is not God. First John 3:16 tells us God is love as does John 3:16. “God so loved the world, that he gave” [past tense] “his only begotten Son.” “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us” [past tense] “and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10). All the real love that God ever had to show for this world was manifested at Calvary. “So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy,” Romans 9:16. God has chosen to show mercy to the unregenerate world at Calvary, and if you want God’s love and God’s mercy you go to Calvary; there you will find God’s wrath and God’s blood in the same place. As a matter of fact, it’s called “God’s blood” in Acts 20:28.
Love and mercy show up in the same place where God’s wrath against sin is manifest and God’s jealousy for righteousness is manifest: at a painful, shameful, wooden, nail-pierced, whip-marked, bloodstained Cross.
God has showed you mercy, and God has showed you the place where He had mercy upon you, and until you come to that place, the sword of God’s wrath has its point against you. God will not put away that sword unless you come to the place where He put it away in the helpless, bleeding back of the “Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29).
“God Is Faithful”
Concerning God’s faithfulness, notice Deuteronomy 7:9, “Know therefore that the Lord thy God, he is God, the faithful God, which keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations.” Deuteronomy 34:4 says, “And the Lord said unto him, This is the land which I sware unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, saying, I will give it unto thy seed: I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes, but thou shalt not go over thither.” We have a great promise for the Christian in the New Testament in regard to God’s faithfulness. First Corinthians 1: 8, 9 says that God will “confirm you unto the end, that ye may be blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful, by whom ye were called unto the fellowship of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord.” We may not be faithful, but thank God, “God is faithful” and will “confirm us” unto the end. Notice Philippians 1:6, “Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.”
Conclusion
God is compassionate; 1 Kings 8:23, “And he said, Lord God of Israel, there is no God like thee, in heaven above, or on earth beneath, who keepest covenant and mercy with thy servants that walk before thee with all their heart.” “God is true”; Jeremiah 10:10, “But the Lord is the true God, he is the living God, and an everlasting king: at his wrath the earth shall tremble, and the nations shall not be able to abide his indignation.” God is uncorruptible; Romans 1:23, “And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.” “God is gracious”; Psalm 116:5, “Gracious is the Lord, and righteous; yea, our God is merciful.” God is invisible; 1 Timothy 1:17, “Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise God, be honour and glory for ever and ever. Amen.” God is upright; Psalm 25:8, “Good and upright is the Lord: therefore will he teach sinners in the way.” God is perfect; Matthew 5:48, “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” And to wind it up and put the capstone on, there is none like Him, Exodus 9:14, “For I will at this time send all my plagues upon thine heart, and upon thy servants, and upon thy people; that thou mayest know that there is none like me in all the earth.” There is nobody like Him; Deuteronomy 33:26, “There is none like unto the God of Jeshurun, who rideth upon the heaven in thy help, and in his excellency on the sky.”
In view of the fact that our God is a great God, “King of kings,” “Lord of Lords,” Who has “a name which is above every name”; in view of the fact that our God is God of gods, the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Savior, we should love Him. We should worship Him. We should fear Him. We should serve Him. We should obey Him. And “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” Proverbs 9:10.
Source: Theological Studies Vol. I - The Personality of God by Dr. Peter S. Ruckman
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