The Nature of God
By Ronald W. Ramsey
The Nature of God
Who is God? What is God? From the beginning people have asked these questions. Some have asked if there is a God, but those have always been the minority. Man has more often gone to too many gods than none at all.
Many have cried out their questions into the dark. Others have asked them of others seeking human answers. Others have written what they have learned not as a solution, but to add their discoveries to the discussion of others.
The latter is what I am hoping to do. I have no illusions that I will answer the two questions above. For in the end I believe that only God can answer them for us. But maybe I can help others know where to look and add my voice to the discussion. In the end that is all any human being can do!
Some have said there is a God shaped hole is each of us that can only be filled by God. Our attempts to fill that part of ourselves with things, money, power or sex leaves us only emptier and hungrier. That hole cannot be filled with creeds and beliefs. It cannot be filled with a denomination or a congregation. That hole can only be filled by knowing and experiencing the God who made us and who redeemed us.
Before I begin any study I pray asking God to reveal Himself to me in the midst of whatever I am studying. This is true if I am studying the Bible, history or even a tedious every day item. During the study I pray for God to keep my heart and mind on track and to open me to His revelation. After the study I pray for God to apply what He has revealed to me to my life.
This method may be of help to you as you “study to show yourself approved” unto God.
Ronald W. Ramsey
Chapter 1
The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave Him to show His servants——things which must shortly take place. And He sent and signified it by His angel to His servant John, who bore witness to the word of God, and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, to all things that he saw. Blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written in it; for the time is near. (Revelation 1:1-3 NKJV)
Defining the nature of God is by its very meaning impossible. For a God which could be explained, would be a creation. It would go against the very nature of what a God should be if any person could make a complete description, or explanation of who God is. The Greek and Roman gods were understandable but were all too human in their natures and so left much to be desired. At times they seemed even less than human in their appetites.
Many of our gods are mere extensions of our own humanity. They express either the better parts of our natures, or the worst. We often project who God is to us from our own heart of hearts.
We want God to hate the Jews because we hate them, we want God to hate Muslims because we are afraid of them, or we want God to hate Christians because they are a threat to us. God becomes a projection of our fears and hatreds and thus our fears and hatreds become holy and right because they are from God.
At that point we make God one of the many gods that inhabit our hearts and minds and dwell nowhere else.
Here are some warnings to look for. Does your God have appetites and needs? Does your God need you to do something in order to continue to be God? Does your God need you to protect Him or Her? If you answer yes to any of these questions you can be assured that you have a wrong view of God, or are creating your own God to meet your needs.
There is hope!
One may be left wondering if it is possible to discover the real God. But there is hope! Always remember that the last book of the Bible is called Revelation! Or to be more specific, The Revelation of Jesus Christ! God wants us to know Him so we must follow the admonition of Jesus and:
"Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. "For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. (Matthew 7:7-8 NKJV)
Though the task of defining the nature of God is impossible, it is in our human nature to make the attempt. Seeking to know and understand God is at the very essence of who we are, because God is the very essence of who we are.
God is the Celestial Being at the very heart of all that exists. We come from the very nature of this Being and have His nature which is to create and form. This is not a function, or duty, but the very essence and nature of God.
But merely making something or someone is not enough, for God is alive. Indeed God is life itself. So we are given life as we are drawn into the presence of God. To the earth comes the ability to produce fruit and vegetables from seed. The plants are given a lesser life that will be used to replenish the earth and feed a higher form of life, the animals.
To animals are given a higher order of self-reproduction and assimilation into families, herds or groups. They develop relationships with each other and find places and positions within their group.
Humans are often seen as animals but they are not. They are as much above the animals as animals are above plants. Humans also develop relationships with other humans like animals, but they are able to go much farther. They are capable of developing relationships at a greater level. And unlike animals their relationships extend beyond their group to animals, plants and even the earth itself.
Humans are even capable of having a relationship with God! This is perhaps the most distinct part of being human. Notice in Genesis that God gave man dominion over the earth and all the plants and animals. Creation looks to humanity even as humanity must look to God. When humanity looks away from God, or invents its own God all creation suffers!
The hope is that WE CAN HAVE A RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD! And from that we can get to know God and then we can treat creation as God treats us. As God reveals Himself to us He also reveals to us how we should relate to all of creation.
Chapter 2
And God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM." And He said, "Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’" (Exodus 3:14 NKJV)
One of the hardest things for us to grasp is the eternity of God. Perhaps the book of Revelation says it best in the following section.
John, to the seven churches which are in Asia: Grace to you and peace from Him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven Spirits who are before His throne, and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead, and the ruler over the kings of the earth. To Him who loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood, and has made us kings and priests to His God and Father, to Him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen. Behold, He is coming with clouds, and every eye will see Him, even they who pierced Him. And all the tribes of the earth will mourn because of Him. Even so, Amen. "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End," says the Lord, "who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty." (Revelation 1:4-8 NKJV)
Notice that writer begins not with the past but the present! We are a people of the present. God is a God of the always. God was, is and is to come. But God always is!
Measuring ourselves
Time is the measure by which we count down our lives. Our Birthdays form the beginning of the countdown to our unknown death. Each decade we are forced to acknowledge that we are that much closer to the end than we were before.
We are always in between. Between the beginning we know, and the end we cannot see in the hopefully distant future. Time can be seen by us as the graphic below.
WAS ------ IS ------ IS TO BE
What has been is a part of us – We are part of what will be
GOD IS PART OF IT ALL
We are always dealing with the God who is, always present with us, dealing with us in the here and now. That is why the Gospels tell us that Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us!
But who we are has been greatly influenced and only possible because of what was. God is the One who has influenced and guided what has been to make us possible! God is the One who came before us and before anything was. Our hope for grace and salvation are only possible because of what Jesus has already done!
God is part of what will be. Part of that is how He works in our lives. God will work through us to influence and guide the future. Through us God will touch lives that will change people, families, communities and even nations! We see God answering our small prayers in a moment in time because we are limited. But God was preparing the answer to today’s prayer long before you were born. Long before you asked the answer was already working its way through time to be ready when you needed it and asked.
This is why God has to be eternal. To create time He has to be beyond it. To be able to influence our time God has to be able to influence the past when it is our present with knowledge of what the future will be or should be.
This begs an amazing question, is God able to influence yesterday today? That question would only show how little we understand God and time itself. God at this moment IS! IT is all times and places to God. It is even incomplete to say what I just said, that God at this moment is for we cannot and must not limit God to a particular moment or a place in time.
From this we can see God’s power. We know that knowledge is power and so ultimate knowledge would preclude ultimate power. By extending through time God has all knowledge of what has been, what is, and what will be. This all knowing of God shows that God has the ultimate power in the universe. God has the power of the eternal!
Perhaps experiencing all of time all of the time explains what Alpha and Omega really mean! All encompassing, eternal, and existing above the influence and limitation of time God is at any time the beginning and the end! For at any time it is the beginning and the end to God.
By explaining eternal as always being we must be careful not to limit God as we are. To define eternal as merely always being limits God because God really is always being always being!
At any moment and time God is being and God is being in every moment in time every moment. God does not have to jump from time to time like some time traveler! He always is! That is why when God names Himself he says, "I AM WHO I AM." I AM the God who IS! That I AM is God’s name because it is WHO God is!
Chapter 3
The glory of the LORD shall be revealed, And all flesh shall see it together; For the mouth of the LORD has spoken." (Isaiah 40:5 NKJV)
What can we know about the nature of God? If we accept Revelation than we will see many times that God is revealed in Scripture. Lets look at the passage that helped us know to seek in the first place and see what it tells us about God.
"Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. "For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. "Or what man is there among you who, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? "Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent? "If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him! (Matthew 7:7-11 NKJV)
God reveals Himself to us even as He tells us how to seek that Revelation. He reveals Himself as a Father, but even more, a good Father! God is a Father who wants to respond to our seeking and asking by giving and answering!
When we ask for food of any kind God will give us what is good. This reveals the nature of God as good. God will not give us any bad thing. Even if we ask for it! Our selfish and self-centered prayers may go unanswered.
Yet God has allowed us our own way. When Israel wanted a King God gave them a King and even the kind they wanted. Saul was a fiasco and a failure. Saul the beautiful led His people astray from God and failed them, as well as allowing them to fail.
Even when David came, the man after God’s own heart, there was terrible sin that almost led to the destruction of David and Israel. The kings that followed were at best not terrible and often destructive to Israel. This system that led to the eventual destruction of Israel was not God’s answer to prayer, but proof that man without God’s leading is fallen and will fall.
A bad prayer
There is a story in scripture (2 Kings 20) where an answer to prayer was destructive to Israel. Hezekiah was a King who was faithful to God. In the midst of life threatening disease He asked Isaiah for a word from God and the word came back to prepare Himself for death. Hezekiah prayed for more time and God heard Hezekiah’s prayer and added 15 years to his life. Hezekiah would invite Babylonian representatives to come to see his great city in answer to a “get-well” card.
Because of that visit and the bragging of Hezekiah the Babylonians would come and destroy Israel to pillage their riches. When told of this Hezekiah was glad that it would not happen in his day!
Sometimes it is hard for us to understand God and His ways. They are so much beyond us!
We ask for more, (have we ever asked for less?) always wanting more time, more money, more comfort, more luxury and more health. But it is our appetites that often draw us from God and from knowing Him better.
God answered Hezekiah’s prayer and a shallow man lived long enough to show his shallowness. What a sad ending to a faithful life. What a sorry statement for a healed heart to be happy that others will suffer in his place!
We play with prayer like an Ouija Board. It is all a game to us. But it is not a game to God!
Why do the good suffer?
That is the big question isn’t it? We ask this question even though scripture tells us that no one is good. Even though Romans 3:23 says, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,”.
I remember a lady who said that all she wanted from God was what she deserved. She became very insulted when I told her that Scripture says quite plainly that we all deserve death.
We deserve hell, yet God made a way for us to be in heaven! We deserve to be spurned by God yet He made a way for us to come to Him!
God’s goodness is seen in that we all do not suffer all the time for our sin. God’s goodness is seen in that we all have a hope for redemption and to not get what we deserve!
Goodness of God
The goodness of God is seen in that we don’t have to get what we deserve! We can have the hope of God’s forgiveness and richest blessing if we but call upon Jesus.
Chapter 4
Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross. Therefore God also has highly exalted Him and given Him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, and of those on earth, and of those under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:5-11 NKJV)
My favorite revelation of God is seen in Paul’s description of Jesus in the book of Philippians. From this passage I discovered the true nature of God.
At first I thought this was a change from the Old Testament, but as I looked deeper I saw that this is a very clear view of God there too.
Then the LORD God said, "Behold, the man has become like one of Us, to know good and evil. And now, lest he put out his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever" — therefore the LORD God sent him out of the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken. So He drove out the man; and He placed cherubim at the east of the garden of Eden, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life. (Genesis 3:22-24 NKJV)
Let us be honest, we often see God as the Celestial Spoilsport, or as the Hanging Judge. God’s main purpose seems to be giving us laws to obey that we cannot obey.
When I was young I saw the pain in people’s lives and a nation torn apart by the Vietnam War. I remember the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and watching his funeral on TV.
What kind of a God would allow this to happen? I came to believe that God was like a terrible puppet master who put us in situations we couldn’t succeed and enjoyed watching our suffering. I recoiled from a God like that and fell into despair and sin. This perversion of Calvinism left me afraid of God and fleeing Him rather than the wrath to come.
We often let our times, or the life situations we face determine who God is. We see God in our results rather than in what God has done.
In Philippians we see God defined by what He has done. Paul looks at the life of Jesus and says, “this is what God is like!”
Bible Study
Let’s look at what Paul tells us about Jesus in this passage from Philippians.
being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God Jesus was and is God and it was not something bad or wrong for Him to proclaim it. Jesus had every right to announce He is God and had every right to use the power and authority of God since He is God!
but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men Jesus put aside His position and authority as God to become human. Only by becoming human could Jesus understand our struggles with sin, and only by becoming human could Jesus the perfect and holy sacrifice for humanity.
He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross Jesus did not call us to an obedience that is without meaning, but to an obedience which He Himself lived for the Father! Jesus did not come to judge us (John 3:16-17) or to kill us, but He came to die for us! You will never sink as low for God as Jesus sank for you! And it was not enough that Jesus died for you, He had to die in the most painful and humiliating manner possible.
All of this is to show the depth of love that God has for His creation and His creatures! For God to die as a common criminal and suffer the humiliation of the cross shows the true character and personality of God!
Chapter 5
“16 "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. 17 "For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.” (John 3:16-17 NKJV)
There are two times that the phrase “God is love” is found in the Bible and both are in 1 John chapter 4!
“7 ¶ Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. 8 He who does not love does not know God, for God is love. 9 In this the love of God was manifested toward us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him.” (1 John 4:7-9 NKJV)
The term for love in both of these passages is agape. Strong’s says about agape:
agaph, used exclusively to express that spiritual bond of love between God and man and between man and man, in Christ which is characteristic of Christianity. It is thus distinct from filia, friendship (#Jas 4:4 only), storgh, natural affection (in the NT only in its compounds, v. s. astorgov 794) and erwv (eros) sexual love, which is not used in the NT, in its place being taken by epihumia
So agape is a spiritual love that is sacrificial and which has its source directly in God. John tells us we can see the true nature of God as love by the giving of God’s only begotten Son that we may receive life through Him. A sacrificial act where God gave what we couldn’t give so we could receive what we could never get for ourselves.
“14 ¶ And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son [as] Savior of the world. 15 Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. 16 And we have known and believed the love that God has for us. God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.” (1 John 4:14-16 NKJV)
Here we see the idea of God is love expressed in the word abide. We usually think of the word abide meaning to dwell with someone. But the true meaning of abide is to chew or to digest.
Just as we receive Jesus in the Lord’s Supper and we chew and digest Him until Jesus becomes part of every cell in our bodies that is what it means to abide. Jesus actually abides in us. Look at John 17 and you will see this explained by Jesus Himself.
Love is not mentioned as an emotion you feel about another person. Instead love is expressed as the sacrificial giving of oneself for another and for becoming part of someone to the point that you actually become one!
In verse 16 we see this unity to the point that if you truly abide in love you are abiding in God! You cannot truly love someone without God. And that love is defined by a willingness to sacrifice you for them. Love is a desire to give up your pleasure for their need or even their pleasure. A willingness to do or say what is needed to help them even if it causes them to turn from you! Your desire is in their welfare, not the return of their love!
John tells us that we don’t know God if we do not love. God is so united with love that you really can’t “have one without the other”. Too often our love is really a form of sympathy or caring. We care enough to feel their pain, but not enough to help them carry the burden or to show them how to cast off that burden
Is not this love evident as you see Jesus upon the cross! As Jesus forgives, but then calls them to sin no more. Can you see that is why Jesus had to point out the sin so that they could find the forgiveness they needed? Dare we do less and say that we love?
Look at 1 Corinthians 13 and write a brief definition of love.
Compare that definition of love to Jesus dying upon the cross.
Chapter 6
Summation
It would be very human to call this chapter the conclusion but that would be incorrect and might lead someone astray. There never will be a conclusion to the study of the Nature of God. There never must be a conclusion to that study until we see Him face to face!
But I do believe I can sum up what I have tried to say about the Nature of God.
God can only truly be known in how He reveals Himself.
Humanity has a deep desire to know about God and to know Him. Always remember these are two different things!
God must be sought in the two words: Scripture the Written Word and through the Living Word Jesus Christ.
Bible Study is our best method of seeing God in the Written Word.
Deep prayer of listening as well as speaking is the best way to experience the Living Word Jesus Christ.
Studying and discussing with others is a great way to learn about both the Written and the Living Word.
Be careful to not define God by what happens since our own free will affects the outcome of matters.
Be careful what you pray for, you might get it!
Never presume what you will discover about God and what it means.
Never give up seeking God and you will find Him!
It is my hope and prayer that everyone who reads this will receive a hearts desire to learn about God. That their hearts will burn with a hunger and thirst deeper than that for food and drink. It will be hunger that will only be fulfilled when we see God face to face.
There is so much more that we could discuss but in this last session I want you to teach. Looking at the list above and from the other lessons please write a short statement about the Nature of God. You can write this in any way but it should be in your own words, or the words given you by the Living Word.
Pray before you write this, pray as you write this, and pray after you write this. And then pray as you listen to others and learn from them. Keep this and you will be able to update it and add to it as God speaks to you and you grow nearer to Him.
Here are three headings to help you write your short personal statement about the Nature of God.
What have you learned from this study about the Nature of God?
What did you already know about the Nature of God?
After a time of prayer what has God told you about Himself?
Put those together and come up with your own summation about the Nature of God.
