What Is God Like?

The doctrine of God is the study of His character traits. We call the character traits of God His attributes. God’s attributes describe who He is, and they imply how He acts.

When Paul addresses the Athenians on the Areopagus, he remarks on having seen an altar with the inscription, “To the unknown god” (Acts 17:23 ESV). Paul then announces good news of a particular kind: the Christian God is knowable. He is knowable, and He makes Himself known.

The attributes of God are typically organized into two categories: incommunicable and communicable. But these terms themselves can be difficult to understand. When we speak of a disease being communicable, we mean it is able to be transmitted. Similarly, when we speak of incommunicable or communicable attributes of God, we mean those that are transmittable or non-transmittable.

God’s incommunicable attributes are only true of God. They cannot be communicated (or transmitted) to humans. They set Him apart from His Creation. God’s communicable attributes are true of God but can also become true of us. They can be transmitted to humans.

This is the gift we receive as those with a knowable God: we can discern the truth from a fake.

The Bible gives us the knowledge of God, but it does this not just so that we can know Him. It does this so that we can worship Him as He deserves. We know that only One belongs on the throne. When we devote ourselves to the knowledge of God disclosed to us in His Word, we learn to recognize Him rightly and to offer Him the right worship.

But we also gain something else: we learn how to adore Him rightly. The more we grow in our knowledge of God, the more we grow in our love for Him. We perceive with ever-increasing depth His value and worth as an object of our adoration. We become less and less capable of being fooled by or satisfied with a substitute. We also become less and less prone to creating a substitute, whittling God into our own image by choosing only some of His attributes to celebrate and ignoring or downplaying others.

And we gain yet another gift in our knowing of God: the ability to understand ourselves in relation to Him.

He is wonderfully unlike and like us. We need both of these perspectives to bear His image as we were created to do. We cannot conform to the image of a God we do not know, nor can we worship Him as we were created. In knowing Him, we know ourselves and our fellow humans rightly. Our identity is derivative of His.

The more we learn of Him, the more we love Him. The more we learn of Him, the more we love ourselves and our neighbors as we ought. And the more we want to proclaim to everyone we meet: “I know Him!”