Who Is God?

3 min. read

There is so much about life and faith that we think we know. With each passing day, I’m recognizing how very little I have an actual handle on. Do you ever find yourself groping for words when you try to address the question “Who is God”? Let’s be real: many of us would rather not have to be bothered with answering this question.

And yet, we need to be able to articulate what we think we know. For Jesus-followers, describing the person of God is our foundational understanding. If we cannot find ways to talk about this God we think we know, then our whole story unravels.

So let’s plunge into 6 ways to answer the question “Who Is God?” But beware! Though these 6 ways are ancient, though they are re-imagined for our current realities, they are not the typical, boring things we might hear at so many given churches.

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God Is a Person

One of my favorite lyrics/lines from the musical “Les Mis” states:

“To love another person is to see the face of God.”

Victor Hugo could’ve been one of his time’s greatest theologians.  Instead, he wrote fiction. Thank God. And he yielded great lines like this one.

Whatever a person may or may not be, it involves relationships. To be a person means to be connected in relationships; however tenuous that connection. Relationships are our way to knowing.

The Enlightenment thinkers were wrong: we cannot know by observation. The Triune God is right: we can know by participation in relationship.

God is a being, a person, in community. Click To Tweet

When we name God (i.e., Father, Son, Spirit; Source, Wellspring, Living Water; Creator, Redeemer, Perfecter), we are not naming a static identity, nor a stagnant state of being, but an active person and relationship within the communal life of God.

God Is an Event

All that happens, happens in the life of God. All that is, exists in the life of the Triune God. The life of any person is both one event and many events.

We are known by dramatic coherence, and that coherence is found in the life of God. Dramatic coherence means that our life makes sense through the events that take place in the life of God.

God is eternal, so time is always present-tense from God’s perspective. God is always active in the present.

God is eternal, so time is always present-tense from God’s perspective. God is always active in the present. Click To Tweet

This is how we can be consumed by a breath-taking sunset and declare, “This is God.” This is how we can be in the darkest periods of life and also painfully confess, “This is God.”

The events of our lives are not separated from the person and events of God.

God Is a Decision

God is a decision because God is a person. God has intentions and acts on those intentions. Those decisions become the telling of the story of Israel, Jesus, the Church.

The grand story that is still being told, the story that makes sense of our lives, is rooted in the decisive actions of God.

We come close to articulating God as a decision when we say things like “God is our source.”

God Is a Conversation

God addressees us and calls us to address him prayerfully. This is conversation. The Christian life is a prayerful life; a life of conversation.

As a person, who is constituted by events, who decides to enter relationship with humanity, God addresses us and waits for our response. Do you see the pattern emerging of these 6 answers to the question, “Who is God?”

What we are is directly related to how we converse with God.

What we are is directly related to how we converse with God. Click To Tweet

God is Roomy

God is the kind of being that is open. He incorporates our life in such a way that he does not become less of a God. To say that God is a being who wields authoritarian control, is to negate God’s personhood and desire to be in relationship.

No authentic relationship can be had with a dictator. God is the opposite of a dictator.

No authentic relationship can be had with a dictator. God is the opposite of a dictator. Click To Tweet

God takes the surprises of our own actions into God’s life, and allows for all possibilities in God’s self.

God is Beauty

God enjoys both himself and creation. This is beautiful. God is harmony beyond our capacity to describe. God’s beauty and harmony are continually enacted, even if we do not grasp it.

We may not comprehend the beauty that is God, but we get to enjoy it.

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So, which of these 6 ways to talk about God resonate with you? What would you add to the list?