What kind of man is God...?

[Lily of Valleys]

Also, I am having issues with what kind of God is residing inside of me, and then, the one outside of me, both of which I hear sometimes and talk with and to and am vocal about sometimes, recently it is like they are in competition, and I let them both know, I don't like it if this is to be some sort of competition or proving one over the other, or whatever it might be...

The one outside sounded like it could be God when it spoke to me recently, almost like i could mistake it for the father, but it was trying to get me to put on a superior air with it and join it in putting on a superior air with it, I've been trying to let them know that I do not like, nor want any part in any of it, but...?

Seems I'm in the middle here...?

Apostle John told us not to believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see if they are from God. Any spirit that does not confess Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, or preaches to you a different gospel or teaching that goes against the teaching in the scripture, cannot be from God.

 

[Tree of Life]

You know, I work hard to get featured threads. How threads like this become featured, I'll never know.

 

[JIMINZ]

You know, I work hard to get featured threads. How threads like this become featured, I'll never know.

.
It's a conspiracy?

 

[JIMINZ]

1) How has he shown us the Father,
2) and is he YHWH or not...?

.
John 10:37,38
37) If I do not the works of my Father, believe me not.
38) But if I do, though ye believe not me, believe the works: that ye may know, and believe, that the Father is in me, and I in him.

YHWH is a Tetragrammaton or God’s given name in the Old Testament, so yes YHWH is God, The Father, and as I demonstrated before, The Godhead.

And... what "power"...?

.
Rom. 15:19
Through mighty signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God; so that from Jerusalem, and round about unto Illyricum, I have fully preached the gospel of Christ.

1Cor. 2:4
And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power:

 

[messianist]

He is a Elohim that is:

Holly
just
love
wrath
sovereign
Mercyful
Grace
Patience

 

[Deadworm]

6 Misconceptions about Christ and God as "Persons:"

(1) Prior to His incarnation, Jesus was a guy who inhabited Heaven, right? Wrong! The Son preexisted as the "Logos," a Greek philosophical term that means " the rational Self-expression of God as opposed to God in His unknowability.
"And the Word (Logos") became flesh and lived among us (John 1:14)."

(2) Jesus thought He was equal to God, right? Wrong!
"The Father is greater than I (John 14:28)."
"He did not regard equality with God as something to cling to (Philippians 2:6)."

(3) The Bible's masculine imagery of God implies that God is a person in the sense that He is male, right? Wrong!

"I am God and not a male (Hebrew: "ish"--Hosea 11:8)."
"God is not a human being, that He should lie, nor a mortal, He should change His mind (Numbers 23:19)."

The Bible's masculine imagery of God like "Father" is not meant to be taken literally.

(4) But the earliest concept of the Trinity was dominated by the masculine imagery of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, right? Wrong!
Theophilus of Antioch (180 AD) is the first to use the term Trinity (Greek: "trias") and he identifies the Trinity as "the trinity of God, and His Word, and His wisdom."

(5) The Trinity consists of 3 Persons in 1 in the sense of 3 self-conscious individual persons, right? Wrong!
Tertullian (208 AD) is the first Church Father to associate the term "trinity" with "tres personae (Latin)," which, however, does not mean "3 persons" in the sense "3 self-conscious individual persons, as is commonly thought, but rather "legal ownership or masks worn in a theater and hence 'the 3 masks of God!"

(6) But God is a "person" in the sense that His ways and thoughts are akin to our own, right? Wrong!
"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are my ways your ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts (Isaiah 55:8-9)."

 

[Randy777]

I'd like to ask "What kind of man, or person, is God...?"

How is he like one of us, and what might one of us truly like him, look, be, and act like...?

I'm talking about the Father God, here also...

Comments...?

God Bless!

What kind of person:
If you have sen the Son you have seen the Father.
Don't you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work.

 

[Daniel9v9]

As already said, God can be fully known through the man Jesus Christ, whom the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily. Colossians 2:9

I would also venture to say that if we want to know more about God's character, we should study the Psalms. God calls David "a man after his own heart", and Jesus quoted from Psalms.

 

[rockytopva]

If E = mc2 then we can divide and conclude that...

Mass (m) = Energy (E/c2)

And there are three varieties...

Natural E/c2 - All mass is basically cooled plasma
Mental E/c2 - Mentally, A mathematical formula, but this has chemical and spiritual properties as well.
Spiritual E/c2 - E (motivation, warmth, love) / c2 (faith, hope, charity, joy)

God is the God of all light and energy... Mentally, Materially, and Spiritually. He can turn mass into plasma, and plasma back into mass, all to his will and liking.

 

[Derek Meyer]

Maybe God doesn't have any genitals.

 

[Gregory Thompson]

I'd like to ask "What kind of man, or person, is God...?"

How is he like one of us, and what might one of us truly like him, look, be, and act like...?

I'm talking about the Father God, here also...

Comments...?

God Bless!

I think John 14:6 and on covers this, if we've seen what Jesus acts like, then we know what the Father acts like, and Jesus did come to earth as a man.

 

[aiki]

YHWH could be God the Son, in a more immature form as well...

The Trinity is made up of three distinct and separate Persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. The words "distinct" and "separate" are important for they properly indicate that God is not merely manifested in three different forms (the heresy of modalism or Sabellianism) but that there are three separate beings who share one divine essence/nature.

Also, I am having issues with what kind of God is residing inside of me, and then, the one outside of me, both of which I hear sometimes and talk with and to and am vocal about sometimes, recently it is like they are in competition, and I let them both know, I don't like it if this is to be some sort of competition or proving one over the other, or whatever it might be...

??? Whatever voices you're hearing, they aren't God. Why do you think they are?

Seems I'm in the middle here...?

This may be, but what you are in the middle of has got nothing to do with God.

 

[Marvin Knox]

...............I don't think it's simply understood, which is what I'm after, but, thanks anyway...

You aren't going to get "simply understood". The reason is that we only have what we are given in the scriptures and it isn't simple.

Any attempt to make it more simple would be to present His nature differently than He has chosen to present it. That would be adding to or changing the scriptures.

Most of the pertinent scriptures have been cited for you already in this thread. There's nothing more to add.

Read your Bible and forget the voices.

 

[aiki]

We are only like God in very superficial ways. We can reason; we have a moral sense; we are able to appreciate beauty, humor, complexity, justice, etc. These few characteristics we share with God do not make us very much like Him at all, however. We are not perfect in character, capacities and condition as God is; we don't exist necessarily but contingently; we have a starting point, God doesn't; we don't know what it is to live in absolute holy purity, to have always known all things fully and completely, never to be deceived, as God does.

God is not what He has created. But, since we live in Creation, since it is our fundamental frame of reference, we talk about God in terms of it. As soon as we say "God is like...," however, we begin to diminish Him, to think of Him by way of that which is less than He is. We can see something of an artist in his painting: his color preferences, his interest in a particular subject, his degree of mastery over his tools, and materials, and painting procedures, his awareness of/interest in detail, etc. But we would never look at his painting and say, "This painting is the painter," or "This painting is just like the painter" (even if it was a self-portrait). The painter of the painting is not a two-dimensional image on a canvas surface made up of a mixture of various colored paints. If he was, he would not have been able to produce a painting! So, too, with God. He is not what He has created and would not have been able to create the universe if He were.

We need to resist the tendency to think of God in terms of what He has made, to think that He is just like us. He isn't. When we get to thinking that He is, we have begun to make God small in our minds, to bring Him down, to reduce Him, and thus to distort and corrupt the truth of who He is.

 

[he-man]

I'd like to ask "What kind of man, or person, is God...?"

How is he like one of us, and what might one of us truly like him, look, be, and act like...?

I'm talking about the Father God, here also...

Comments...?

God Bless!

God is not a man or person, where did you get that from?

 

[dqhall]

God is not a man or person, where did you get that from?

God has awareness more than a man.

John 3:8 "The wind blows where it wants to, and you hear its sound, but don't know where it comes from and where it is going. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit."

 

[pshun2404]

I'd like to ask "What kind of man, or person, is God...?"

How is he like one of us, and what might one of us truly like him, look, be, and act like...?

I'm talking about the Father God, here also...

Comments...?

God Bless!

God is not a man, nor like a man, but came in the form of a man for our sake. We were made to be in His SPIRITUAL image (male and female).

 

[Ronald]

6 Misconceptions about Christ and God as "Persons:"

(1) Prior to His incarnation, Jesus was a guy who inhabited Heaven, right? Wrong! The Son preexisted as the "Logos," a Greek philosophical term that means " the rational Self-expression of God as opposed to God in His unknowability.
"And the Word (Logos") became flesh and lived among us (John 1:14)."

(2) Jesus thought He was equal to God, right? Wrong!
"The Father is greater than I (John 14:28)."
"He did not regard equality with God as something to cling to (Philippians 2:6)."

(3) The Bible's masculine imagery of God implies that God is a person in the sense that He is male, right? Wrong!

"I am God and not a male (Hebrew: "ish"--Hosea 11:8)."
"God is not a human being, that He should lie, nor a mortal, He should change His mind (Numbers 23:19)."

The Bible's masculine imagery of God like "Father" is not meant to be taken literally.

(4) But the earliest concept of the Trinity was dominated by the masculine imagery of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, right? Wrong!
Theophilus of Antioch (180 AD) is the first to use the term Trinity (Greek: "trias") and he identifies the Trinity as "the trinity of God, and His Word, and His wisdom."

(5) The Trinity consists of 3 Persons in 1 in the sense of 3 self-conscious individual persons, right? Wrong!
Tertullian (208 AD) is the first Church Father to associate the term "trinity" with "tres personae (Latin)," which, however, does not mean "3 persons" in the sense "3 self-conscious individual persons, as is commonly thought, but rather "legal ownership or masks worn in a theater and hence 'the 3 masks of God!"

(6) But God is a "person" in the sense that His ways and thoughts are akin to our own, right? Wrong!
"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are my ways your ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts (Isaiah 55:8-9)."

You are wrong on five counts, #6 is good
1. Logos is God. John 1:1, 2 "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He (the person, the Son) was with God.
2. God emptied Himself into a human, lower than the angels, relinquished His glory and so as a man, the was greater than Him. But Jesus is the CREATOR (Col. 1:16, 17). During His ministry He submitted to the Father. But after His death, resurrection and ascension, He was glorified once again, receiving ALL AUTHORITY IN HEAVEN AND EARTH. That requires omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence.
You also misinterpreted Phil. 2:6."Who, being in the very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, "
Jesus did not expect man to grasp His equality with God, because He took on the nature of a man, a servant. When He returns, He will come in quite a different manner, God, not as a suffering servant, but as the Almighty in His wrath and judgment.
3. The masculine nature of God is not to be taken in a physical, human sense, but as the nature of GOD in every other sense: the Head of the Church, the Master, the Creator from which the seed of life itself originates, our Provider, Protector, Author of our faith, Dominant, Sovereign, Daddy. Father is appropriately used to convey our dependence on Him spiritually and physically.
4. Who gives a hoot what Theophilus thought? The trinity, is God in 3 persons.
5. Lol, "The trinity instead refers to 3 masks worn in a theatre? So I guess you are into this Oneness theology where God manifests Himself in different modes. That would be fine if scripture supported it. It just doesn't harmonize with that concept. God is one, in three persons. The Father sent "another helper". And obviously, the Son wasn't praying to Himself switching off into different modes. "This is my beloved Son, Whom I am well pleased (as the Spirit descended down upon Him). Three, present simultaneously. Actually, the Spirit is the Father and the Spirit of Christ. "The Father is in Me as I am in the Father. When the Holy Spirit dwells in us, the Father is in us and the Son is in us.

 

[pshun2404]

Why does it not appear, or at least from any truly objective point of view, it does not appear, or maybe it at least gets thrown into some doubt, that maybe, perhaps, the God or the OT is not the Father God, or Jesus Father...?

Jesus says no man has ever seen the Father at any time, neither have they heard His voice. Yet YHVH does appear many times in many forms to many people in the Tanakh. How is this possible? Because the Word/Son declares or reveals Him to humankind. Whenever YHVH was seen in the Old Testament it was the Word/Son. The Jewish Rabbis called this one "The Memra" and the closest Greek equivalent was the "Logos" though being unable to correctly imply YHVH manifest in this sense, the Apostle John goes on further in the passages that follow so that the unbelieving Rabbis and Jewish people would understand to whom he was referring. YHVH manifest tabernacling (dwelt - skeenoo - to pitch tent) with humanity (the fullness of Deity bodily, the brightness or visible aspect of His glory, the visible image of the invisible God, the person of God)...for Jonathan ben Uzziel and Onkelos the YHVH-Memra IS the Word of God (there is only one YHVH unmanifest as Father and manifest as Son and experienced as the Spirit)

 

[Deadworm]

2. "God emptied Himself into a human, lower than the angels, relinquished His glory and so as a man, the [sic!] was greater than Him."
And you imagine that I deny this?

Ronald: "But Jesus is the CREATOR (Col. 1:16, 17)."
Jesus is NOT the Creator; God the Father is. Christ is "the firstborn of all Creation (Colossians 1:15)." As John 1:1, 14 makes clear, Jesus is the Logos, the rational Self-expression of God as opposed to God in God's unknowability. In the Colossian hymn this same notion is expressed by the line "In Him all things hold together (1:17)."
Ronald: "During His ministry He submitted to the Father. But after His death, resurrection and ascension, He was glorified once again, receiving ALL AUTHORITY IN HEAVEN AND EARTH. That requires omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence."

You overlook the fact that even the risen gloried Christ is destined to be subjected to "God:" "The Son Himself will be subjected to the One who put all things under subjection to Him, so that God may be all in all (1 Corinthians 15:28)." Notice that Paul distinguishes the exalted Christ from "God."

Ronald: "You also misinterpreted Phil. 2:6."Who, being in the very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, "
No, you haven't bothered to read what I said carefully. I never said Jesus did not preexist as fully divine. And you have overlooked my point about Jesus' own admission that "The Father is greater than I."

Ronald: "3. The masculine nature of God is not to be taken in a physical, human sense, but as the nature of GOD in every other sense:"

No, you overlook my point that God not only denies that God is human; God denies that He is even "male." Do you understand the concept of figurative speech? And do you grasp the significance of God's implicit denial of Personhood when God insists that His ways and thoughts are not ours, but are much higher than ours?


Ronald: "4. Who gives a hoot what Theophilus thought? The trinity, is God in 3 persons."
Well, who gives a hoot about Columbus's discovery of America? What you don't get is that, despite Matthew 28:16-20, "The Trinity" is never mentioned in the Bible and Theophilus is the first Church Father we know of to come up with the concept and his concept does not mention God or Christ's masculine gender.

Ronald: "5. God is one, in three persons."
You apparently don't realize
(1) that the word "person" is never applied to God in Scripture and
(2) that the Church Fathers who developed the doctrine of the Trinity spoke Latin or Greek, but not English!

Ronald: "Lol, "The trinity instead refers to 3 masks...?"
Yes, that is the meaning of Tertullian's Latin use of "persona." In the OT God is evasive in response to questions about His identity to Jacob, Moses, and Samson's parents. In stead of the divine name requested by Moses, God substitutes the phrase "I am who I am" or more accurately, "I will be whatever I will be." God's point is that He is far too profound to be adequately represented in simplistic phrases. The 3 Trinitarian masks are images that help us grasp the paradox that, despite God's ultimate unknowability, God wants us to experience Him as loving and desirious of an intimate relationship with us. The Holy Spirit is a mask of God in the sense that the Spirit is God insofar as God can be experienced and God's saving power in action.

Ronald: "So I guess you are into this Oneness theology where God manifests Himself in different modes."
That is your basic problem: You "guess" and put words in people's mouth to suit your agenda. You have not grasped the significance of Jesus' status as the Logos. I repeat: In the first century, this is a philosophical concept that designates Jesus not as a Person, but as the rational Self-expression of God as opposed to God in His unknowability.