Blog

by Charlie Wolcott

This will be my final post on this series on the attributes of God and I am going to wrap it up with a bang. I do pray you have learned more about who God is and what he is like. When we really boil it down, we are trying to describe an infinite being with our finite understanding. We simply cannot truly fathom the words that would be necessary to describe God. When Moses asked how he should identity God, God’s response was: “I am that I am.” God called himself the “I AM.”

What does this mean? So often, we hear these descriptions and almost blow it off, simply because to dig deeper blows our minds too much. But let us dig deeper anyway. “I AM” is another way to describe ‘self-sufficient,’ ‘everything you need to know ,’ and ‘all that there is.’ God is not just a God of love, justice, holiness, mercy, grace, an intercessor, a trinity, sovereign, immutable, faithful, and a father. He is so much more.

God is eternal. He exists outside of time. God did not hang out in heaven twiddling his thumbs for billions of years in the past waiting for the time to create the universe. He exists in past, present, and future all at the same time. In fact, time is really something only for man to use. God’s time is not merely when God chooses to do something. It is also simply the best way we have to describe how God interacts in our space-time continuum. Using the weak analogy of an author, I can see the whole picture of my novels. I can see forwards, backwards, and the present all in one go. I am by no means perfect at it like God is, but it’s the same general idea.

God is omniscient, or all-knowing. He knows everything and everything there is to know. Yes, that includes our thoughts and what we will do before we do it. Parents can do this to a slight degree with their children, because parents know their children very well. God knows every aspect about us, every detail. That is why there is no such thing as a “hidden sin,” because God knows of it. You can’t hide it from him. You can try to do so with family, friends, or even yourself, but you can’t do that with God. What’s more is that unless God is omniscient, we cannot know that we know anything. Every source of true knowledge must appeal to something to validate it. This chain of appeals must end somewhere, and it does so with God. To suggest otherwise is to question any valid claim of knowledge. You cannot know that you know if it was any different. To know anything, we must either be omniscient ourselves, or we must get that knowledge from someone who is omniscient. There is a lot of false knowledge out there too, but that is just a corruption of what is true. There is nothing unique. No lie is unique. It is always a corruption of the truth.

God is omnipresent, or everywhere at once. God cannot be pinned down to one location or time period. This is a VERY different concept than pantheism, the idea that God is in everything. That is not omnipresence. Omnipresence means God is in all places, all locations, and in all times, all at once. God is right next to me as I type this, right next to you as you read this, helping the pastor down the street to prepare his sermon, comforting someone as they deal with a loss, on the other side of the planet working on the hearts of any who would hear his name, and on the far sides of the universe keeping all things in order, all at the same time.

God is omnipotent, or all-powerful. He created the entire universe in six days with nothing else but the power of his spoken word. Some will say, “Isn’t God’s power on greater display if he created everything this other way?” In a word: no. God’s power is also on display in his ability to communicate his word clearly and understandably to all peoples of all nations, of all times, and of all cultures. God did not write Genesis with scientific language, because he wanted something that could be easy to understand even without scientific background. But all science reflects his creative nature, which includes structure and order. God did not merely show his power to create the universe. He displays his power through using weak, sin-corrupted humans to carry out his will. God does not need us to do his will but he chooses to use us, which is actually a greater testament of his power had he merely done it by himself, because he can take error-prone people and get it done. Just look at the writing of the Bible. Had it been merely written by man, there would be no way it would have survived this long. Its existence today alone is solid evidence that God is indeed all-powerful.

God is everything that there is and everything we need to consider. He is the only one that can fully satisfy our needs. We may seek pleasure or rest or comfort in many other things, but only God can truly meet that need. He is our shelter, our tower of strength, our provider, our deliverer, our healer, our sustenance, our companion, our father, our caretaker, our defender, our champion, our Lord, our king, our counselor; I cannot even think of enough adjectives to put on this list. He is the I AM. He is the Holy One. The Everlasting God. The one who will bring Justice. The one who will punish the unjust and rescue and deliver the justified. The one who longs that none perish but that all would repent and find salvation through Jesus Christ. He is the greatest friend one could ever have, one who laid down his own life so that we might live. Do you know him?

Listen to these two short videos by Eric Ludy and S.M. Lockridge titled “He Is” and “That’s My King.” Do you know him? I pray that through this series, you have gotten a much better picture of who God is.

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