WalkwithGod.com

Once you have come to know God through His Son Jesus, you will want to learn as much about Him as possible. The only way to please God is to know what He likes and what He doesn’t like. And the only way to know that is to learn about God’s character and essential being.

God is a Spirit

The first thing we want to focus on is that God is a spirit. (This is stated in the Gospel of John 4:24.) God’s nature, first and foremost, is not related to the physical realm. Just as the wind exists but is invisible to our natural eyes, so also God exists in invisibility. He is as real and as vital as the breath we depend upon, but He is as easy to overlook as air that surrounds us when there is no wind.

We are concerned primarily with the physical world around us since we live in a house called a body. Much of our time is occupied with feeding, dressing and exercising our body. We interact with others in the physical realm. And to live our lives only in this realm means we will totally miss God.

Because God is a spirit, He can act without being seen. He can bless, heal, encourage, strengthen, deliver and more without a person ever acknowledging His presence. If you want to relate to Him, the way to do this is through your own spirit which God has given you. Since we are created as a living being with spirit, soul and body (1 Thessalonians 5:23), we have a spirit that can communicate with God in the same realm in which God exists.

God is Holy

Another major aspect of God’s being is that He is holy. Although much has been written about this, the basic point is that God exists in perfection in His character. Everything He is, He is perfectly.

Imagine you had a friend who could be utterly trusted. Anything you ever told this friend, no matter how dark the secret or how humiliating the experience, would never be repeated as gossip. Imagine that this friend would be utterly loyal, never degrading you or hoping to show you up in any way. Imagine that this friend would always seek your good, no matter whether or not you treated him the same way. Imagine such a friend, and then realize that God is just that friend.

His holiness means that He can be completely trusted with your life.

God is love

This statement sums up so one of the most important aspects of God’s character that you or I will ever know. Without knowing this, we would live our lives in dread of a God who is completely perfect and who is all around us living in His invisible realm.

But God IS love. (He tells us this in 1 John 4:8.) And because He is love, we know that He cares for us beyond our imagination. The God of the universe who does everything perfectly and in excellence of character loves us. He loves us perfectly.

Because He loves us perfectly, we understand that nothing He does is out of sheer meanness or a desire to cause needless grief or suffering in our lives. Do we suffer and feel grief in this world? Surely we do. Yet, we have to remember that this is not God’s primary desire for us. He loves us not simply in a philosophical sense, but as a father loves his children. This tender and mature love desires our supreme good, not just our temporal emotional satisfaction.