What are the attributes of God?

Ishmael LaBiosa: Welcome to the You Ask Podcast, where the goal is to answer common questions about Christianity. Let's listen in as Pastor Rusty answers today's question. Today's question is: what are the primary attributes of God? For example, omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, immutability, holiness, love, justice. Well, this is a big question as well today when we talk about. The attributes of God. To understand the attributes of God, the attributes of God actually fall into two categories. And if you read various theology textbooks on this topic, the two categories are named in different ways. Some textbooks will say that when we talk about God's attributes, it's like the greatness of God or the goodness of God. Other textbooks will say the non-moral attributes of God and the moral attributes of God. Probably my favorite term, because I think it communicates well, is some of God's attributes, we have zero point of correspondence. And these attributes are called, listen carefully, the N. Communicable attributes of God, meaning they don't communicate. And then there's a secondary group of the attributes of God called the communicable attributes of God, precisely because these attributes are things that God has and we also have as well. So let's go into a little deep waters here. But I think understanding some of these concepts is going to be really important to understand who God is. So let's talk about these attributes, which we don't have a point of correspondence. Now, we as humans possess a body and a soul, but the Bible is very clear that God in his essence is spirit. God is non physical. John 4 24, it says God is spirit, and thus we must worship him in spirit, in the realm of the spirit, and in the realm of truth. So it is hard for us to conceive of a spiritual being, but God is indeed a spiritual being. Now, God helps us out because in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament, God is described oftentimes via analogy. And some of those analogies are God's body parts. There are several passages where, for example, in the book of Isaiah, is God's arm, Isaiah says, too short to save. Now we have to think about this for a moment. God is spirit. Isaiah is saying is God's arm. Arm too short to save. God doesn't have an arm because God is in his essence non-physical. So when we're reading, especially the passages in the Old Testament, we have to pick up on these analogies and notice that to interpret these texts properly, we can't interpret them overly literally, because God is communicating. something about himself via analogy. For example, the idea is God's arm too short to save communicates, no, indeed, God has all the power he needs to save us. It's not like he's going to reach out his arm and it won't be long enough. Reading the Old Testament, there are a lot of these what theologians, I know you may not want big words today, called anthropomorphisms, meaning Describing God in the language of body parts, yet we know God is spirit. That's one of the ways that we don't relate to God because we are not merely a spirit being. Now, one of the interesting things is that in the New Testament, God takes on flesh in the incarnation, but Jesus existed without a body before taking on flesh. Another one of these Kind of incommunicable attributes of God is God's life. God's life is different from every other living being because we all derive our life from somebody else, our parents. But God derives his life from no one. God exists from himself, for himself, and has a different relationship to life. Than us. Also, we ought to note that God is infinite and he is not limited by time, by space, by knowledge, by power. Oftentimes, when we're talking about these incommunicable attributes of God, we use the word omni. We say he's omnipresent or he's omnipotent. And these are basically saying. God is not bound by space. God is not bound by time. God is not bound by knowledge. God is not bound by power. Now, one other little concept we ought to throw at you is that God is also different than us because God is constant. And the Bible says Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever. One of the areas that I also think we might misunderstand the language, especially in the Old Testament, is when it talks about the anger of the Lord burns, or we get not the language of body parts, but the language of analogy. And here's the deal: if God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, God's emotional states Are not up and down and all around like our emotional states are. So when we read about God having emotions in the Bible, we should realize that God's relationship to emotions is different than our relationship to emotions because God is constant. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He's not moved around. And so the language of emotionality. is an accommodation to try to speak to us in ways that we can somewhat understand, realizing God in his essence is beyond our full understanding. I do think that gazing into the heavens and contemplating God is actually very important. A famous quote by A. W. Tozer says we might be wise to follow the insight of the enraptured heart rather than the more cautious reasoning of the theological mind. He also says the greatness of God rouses fear within us, but his goodness encourages us not to be afraid of him, to fear and to not be afraid. This is the paradox of faith. I do think that sometimes we make God too small, and God Is different than us. He's a being like no other. We not only have the incommunicable attributes of God, these aspects of God, that we don't really have points of correspondence, we have communicable. And these are sometimes called the moral. And let me just list some of these. Righteousness, we understand that to some degree. Justice, these are all found in the heart of God. Faithfulness, ⁓ love, grace, mercy. These are in fact found in the heart of God. And God possesses all of his qualities all the time. When he is loving, he is always just. When he is merciful, he is always faithful. And I think oftentimes we grab onto these more common ideas: God's mercy, his justice, his love, his faithfulness, his holiness. These are the ideas that we grasp upon because these are the ideas that we relate to. So simply, what are the primary attributes of God? Simply put, God's attributes usually fall into two buckets. The first bucket are what we call the incommunicable attributes of God. These are aspects of about God of which there is really no point of correspondence. And a good case study for these are like God's not bound by time, space, knowledge, or power. It's kind of bucket one. The other attributes of God are called the moral attributes or the communicable attributes. And these are indeed holiness, love, justice, mercy, faithfulness. These are concepts that we understand more intuitively as humans and can relate to on a more basic level. This is what we call in Christian theology theology proper as we think through the attributes of God. I hope this has been helpful. Thank you for listening to the You Ask Podcast. This is a ministry of Liberty Baptist Church, and we pray this podcast enables you to more faithfully live out your Christian life.