What Is God Like?

“No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him.” ~John 1:18

In the beginning, God made us to be like Him. He made us to be with Him. And He made us to know Him. Knowing God, then, is the great business of human life. John Calvin summed it up well in those memorable opening words of his institutes: “Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.” If we don’t have this “twin knowledge,” whatever else we might have, we don’t have true and sound wisdom. We will spend our lives like little boys, forever chasing soap bubbles– grasping things that look substantial, things that burst at a touch, things that leave us with nothing for our trouble except, perhaps, the unpleasant sting of a little soap in our eye.

How does one go about knowing God? He lives, after all, in a realm that exists mostly beyond our senses. John is refreshingly honest here: We can’t see God; none of us can.  We can’t get our hands on Him. We can’t hear His voice– at least not directly. How are we to know what God is like?

Clearly, a number of avenues lie open before us. We can, in the first place, look into ourselves. After all, we are made in His image. We are, to some extent, like God.  Profound parallels exist between the way God is and the way we are. Think of human creativity and ingenuity, our innate ability to think and reason, our appreciation of beauty, our capacity for relationships, our yearning for family and for friendship, our desire to know and love other persons, and our hunger for justice, order, meaning, and purpose.  All of the best things in human beings represent sparks of the Divine, echoes from eternity, pointers designed to lead us home to God. 

The Godward path of self-reflection, however, is not what it once was. Sin has corrupted us all. Like a dirty, jagged, rusty dagger, the line of evil runs through every human heart. Everything is out of kilter. We no longer think clearly. Our emotions are no longer in balance. Our will– our faculty of choice– too often bends away from that which is good, beautiful, and true. As Thomas Watson once said, “God made us a little lower than the angels; sin has left us little better than the devil.” Worst of all, estranged from God, we no longer want to know Him–at least not as He really is. Hostile as we now are in mind (Colossians 1:21), we would rather He were different. We joke, a little nervously, calling Him the “man upstairs,” hoping against hope that is all that He is– just a slightly bigger and better version of ourselves. Deep down, though, we know better. As a result, we no longer have the capacity to think our way to God.

Second, we can look away from ourselves to the handiwork of God in creation. Even though it labors under the curse of God (Genesis 3:17ff), the created order still glows with the glory of its Creator (Psalm 19). His voice whispers in the happy gurgling of a mountain stream. We are overwhelmed by His immensity in the starry heavens. We taste his kindness in creation’s bounty. We feel His touch in the embrace of loved ones. We sense His thunder in the mighty breakers of the ocean. As the only animals who feel the need to blush, we hear His justice in the whisper of conscience. The hurricane’s fury and the flash of lightning’s pin-point strikes remind us of His wrath.  And so, although we certainly can’t see Him directly in creation, His handiwork is quite literally everywhere we look. With that said, however, in Romans 1 Paul reminds us this knowledge can leave us without excuse, but it can’t bring us to the saving knowledge of God in Christ.

This leaves us with the third pathway to knowing our Creator and Redeemer: God’s incarnate Word, Jesus Christ. What is God like? John’s answer is as beautiful as it is simple: God is just like Jesus. What is God’s posture towards little children? Watch Jesus gather the infants of Israel up into His arms to bless them. How does God feel about His people when they reject Him? Look at Jesus weeping outside Jerusalem. How would God treat a dirty sinner? See Jesus tenderly resting His spotless hand on the leper’s diseased pate. How does God respond to our stubborn refusal to trust Him? Think of Jesus chiding the disciples, “O you of little faith,” how He reached out His hand to help Peter when he began to sink beneath the waves, and how He offered Thomas to feel his way to faith by touching His wounds, fresh as they were from the Roman gibbet.

In Jesus, all God’s perfections are shrunk down to our size. God is bigger than the man Christ Jesus, but He is not different. While there is more of God to know than the manly, finite frame of our Savior can contain, none of that “more” will leave us surprised, shocked, or disappointed. In the divine nature, there is just more– much more of the same glory, the same wisdom, the same love, the same kindness, the same patience, the same perfection, the same fellowship, and the same grace that we enjoy in the presence of our elder brother.

In that sense, Christmas is but a beautiful, yearly reminder that there is no un-Christlikeness in God at all.