Featured Attributes of God

I'm not ignoring your questions, just entering a comment. God IS. He is far beyond our most fervent calculations. God's Word is True. We're not here to analyze its content. We're here to praise Him for our eternal salvation. The day is coming when ALL will be made known. And right now there is Faith, Hope (calm, confident assurance) and Love.

 

God's wrath is one of his passions, God's holiness is part of his essence. Both are perfect, yet as such they can't be equal.
Wrath is by itself an attribute. As is justice while being expressed. While justice itself is part of the essence of God. Of which wrath is a by product.

I see God's holiness as his transcendence and separation from us. Making it part of his essence. Love expressed is God's greatest attribute. Love as part of God's essence produced as a passion is the algorithm through which all his other attributes flow. Proceeding from live all other attributes can be said to be perfect.

Love motivates God's creation.

 

Hello, and welcome to CF.

You are going to get wildly different responses depending on who you ask.

God is agape/love, and that is the underlying factor within the Holy Trinity and of all creation.

God's "wrath" has been misunderstood by many in the past few centuries. Christ is God Incarnate, and it is through Him that we can know God.

I can't help with breaking down God into a set of attributes and comparing them. God is Who He Is. Assiging values to different descriptions of His essence and setting them in a kind of hierarchy or cause/effect or comparison to one another is likely to lead into misconceptions.

Again, welcome to CF. Let us know if you need help finding your way around.

God be with you.

 

Hi, Francisco!

I don't have a theology degree, but I have had many theology courses, and I'll tackle this to the best of my memory:

Before I answer these, let me say this:

God has two types of attributes: natural attributes and moral attributes.

His natural attributes include omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, immutability, transcendence, and a couple of others I can't think of right now.

God will not share His natural attributes with anyone.

His moral attributes consist of love, joy, peace, anger, jealousy, mercy, truth, justice, grace, and a host of others.

Many of which are transferred to the believer via the Holy Spirit.

Now to your answers:

1.Yes

2. Both. God has three ways in which He judges people:

1. justice - giving people what they deserve (eye for an eye)
2. mercy - not giving people what they deserve (Hell)
3. grace - giving people what they don't deserve (Heaven)

3. I doubt it.

4. Love. Love demands an object, and God created us to love us.

Hope that helps!

 

Let me recommend a book to you: "The Holiness of God" by R.C. Sproul


God's wrath is a direct consequence of His holiness. Since God is holy, and we are made in His image, we are required to be holy. Since we are not holy (due to our sin which mares His image), God must defend His holiness, which requires wrath. Thankfully, for our sake, Christ has taken on to Himself the wrath that we (those who believe) deserve.

The Simplicity of God: None of God's attributes are greater or lesser. He "IS" His attributes. God is infinite, holy, just, all knowing, all powerful, etc. And, His holiness is infinite, just, all knowing, all powerful, etc. And, His justice is holy, infinite, all knowing, etc. In other words, His attributes are all in all.

God created everything out of His love for His Son.

 

Those are good questions. I am going to ponder them for a while.

 

I think two greatest attributes of God are:

God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.
John 4:24

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God, and knows God. He who doesn't love doesn't know God, for God is love.
1 John 4:7-8

We know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and he who remains in love remains in God, and God remains in him.
1 John 4:16

And I believe love is the reason for creation.

 

If you want to know what God is like you just have to look to Jesus since one of the reasons He came to earth was to show us what God is like.

We are to be objective driven and Christ was objective driven, so we should expect God to be objective driven.

Just as Godly type Love should compel us to do all we do, God’s Love would compel Him, so Love (which is also God) compelled God to make humans not for some need He had, but because God could make beings who He could gift with the greatest gifts possible including the gift to become like God Himself (with Godly type Love). God’s Love compels God to make humans for the sake of those few humans who will humbly accept God’s charity (mercy/grace/Love/forgiveness) and thus become Like Himself. The way this happens is from what we know and Jesus’ teaching: “…he that is forgiven much Loves much…”, so if you have accepted forgiveness of an unbelievable huge debt created by sin, you will automatically obtain an unbelievable huge Love (Godly type Love).

Since God is Love we would expect God to do and/or allow all He can to help humans fulfill their earthly objective and that is what we see, with that “all” including: Christ going to the cross, Satan roaming the earth, All kinds of tragedies, Hell, sin, God’s wrath, and God’s judgement.

Look at the prodigal son story to help you understand God’s Love, justice and “wrath”

1. God as a good father would know what His son would do, yet God allows His young son to get into huge trouble. (God is not trying to “keep” the sinner from sinning, since it should help him down the road in accepting God’s charity [forgiveness and thus obtaining Love]).
   
   
2. God does not send servants to “recue” the son, but knows the son will come to his senses and thus be able to make the free will choice to stay in the pigsty where he deserves to be or wimp out and humbly accept the Father’s help (forgiveness/Love).
   
   
3. The young son could have been macho after he came to his senses and paid the piper by staying and dying in the pigsty, he could have avoided his brother’s ridicule and not disturbed his father anymore. In this way we could see the father’s judgment and wrath coming down on the son, but it is really the son’s choice and it would not please the father.
   
   
4. The prodigal son when he came to his senses could see where he was headed, just as the sinner can come to his senses and see where he is headed if he does not give up.
   

God does not have a problem with anger or being just without it being Loving justice. The issue is not with God or does punishing the sinner with hell help that sinner. Hell like everything else is to help the individual still able to make the choice to accept or reject God’s charity, it is a real alternative to not humble accepting God’s charity, but it is not like putting a gun to the head of the sinner since the sinner has to believe there is a God and a hell, so it is part of the saving faith believe.

 

I would refer people to Arthur Pink's book, The Attributes of God. It's a good layman's read.

The Attributes of God

 

Before sin existed, wrath did not exist, therefore it is not an attribute of God.

God's holiness is from his condition of purity and goodness, so it cannot be his greatest attribute. It is arguable what his greatest attribute is, but my guess is that it is his eternal existence (which is both backward and forward in time). He is "I am".

It would be a good trick to argue that it was just one attribute. He expressed his creativity + love + relational nature in creating everything. Note that it is the nature of Godly love to demand expression (I just mean that it is not a feeling.)

 

The link I provided is the book. Just follow the link and read. It's written for anyone to read.