A Brief Statement

I hold that there is one God — the living and true God — infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in His being and perfections: a Spirit, self-existent and needing nothing, the Maker and Lord of all. He is incomprehensible, beyond the full reach of any creature’s mind, and yet truly knowable, for He has made Himself known — in the works of creation, in the Scriptures, and supremely in His Son.

He is one in essence and three in person: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, each fully God, the three coequal and coeternal. He is transcendent above His creation and yet intimately present within it; sovereign, holy, righteous, and good. And the knowledge of Him — humble, reverent, and worshipful — is the beginning of wisdom and the foundation of the Christian life.

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A Detailed Exposition

Knowing God: Revelation

That a finite creature should know the infinite God is itself a wonder, and it is possible only because God has chosen to reveal Himself. He has done so in two ways. By general revelation, He discloses something of Himself to all men through the created order: “the heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1), and His “eternal power and divine nature” are plainly perceived in the things He has made (Romans 1:19–20). But this revelation, real and universal as it is, shows that God is, and something of what He is like; it cannot, of itself, bring a sinner to saving knowledge.1 For that, we depend on special revelation — the Scriptures, and above all, the Son. “No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, He has made Him known” (John 1:18); in these last days God “has spoken to us by His Son,” who is “the radiance of His glory and the exact imprint of His nature” (Hebrews 1:1–3).² This revelation came progressively, unfolding across the centuries from promise to fulfillment, so that our knowledge of God deepens as the Scriptures themselves advance. Even so, what we know we know truly but never exhaustively: “the secret things belong to the LORD our God” (Deuteronomy 29:29), and His thoughts are higher than ours (Isaiah 55:8–9). God is at once genuinely knowable and forever incomprehensible — and reverent theology holds the two together.³

The Names of God

In Scripture, a name is no mere label; it discloses character, and God’s names are windows into His nature. The Hebrew Scriptures call Him Elohim — a plural form expressing fullness and majesty — and El, the Mighty One; El Shaddai, “God Almighty,” the all-sufficient (Genesis 17:1).⁴ His covenant name is YHWH, the Tetragrammaton, revealed to Moses at the bush: “I AM WHO I AM” (Exodus 3:14) — the name of the self-existent, eternal One who simply is. It is the most sacred of His names, written thousands of times in the Old Testament; out of reverence, the Jews would not pronounce it, reading Adonai, “Lord,” in its place, and counting it among the holy names that must never be erased.⁵ When the New Testament turns to Greek, two titles carry the weight: Theos, “God,” marking essential deity, and Kyrios, “Lord.” This second word is the very term the Greek Old Testament used to render YHWH — so that when the apostles call Jesus Kyrios and apply to Him texts spoken of the LORD, they confess nothing less than His deity (Philippians 2:9–11; Romans 10:9–13).⁶

One God in Three Persons

The God who is one in essence subsists eternally in three persons — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is not three gods, which would be tritheism; nor one person wearing three masks, which is modalism; but one undivided divine being in three distinct, coequal, and coeternal persons. The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Spirit is God, and yet there is one God. The church confessed this at Nicaea with the word homoousios — the Son is “of one essence” with the Father — to guard the full deity of Christ against every attempt to make Him a lesser or created being.⁷ The doctrine is intimated in the Old Testament and unfolded in the New: at the Jordan the Son is baptized, the Spirit descends, and the Father speaks (Matthew 3:16–17); the one baptismal “name” is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19); and the apostolic blessing invokes all three (2 Corinthians 13:14). The Trinity is a mystery to be adored, not a riddle to be solved — but it is the God who actually is.

Transcendent and Immanent

Between God and everything else, there is a difference not of degree but of kind. He alone is self-existent — He depends on nothing, “nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything” (Acts 17:25) — while all else depends upon Him for its very being. This is the Creator-creature distinction, an infinite qualitative difference that no creature can cross from below.⁸ And yet the same God who is high and lifted up is not far off. Scripture holds His transcendence and His immanence together without embarrassment: “I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit” (Isaiah 57:15); “Am I a God at hand … and not a God far off?” (Jeremiah 23:23–24); in Him “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). He is exalted above all nations, and He raises the poor from the dust (Psalm 113:4–7). His greatness does not hold us at a distance; it is the very thing that makes His nearness astonishing.

The Perfections of God

God’s attributes are not parts assembled to make Him, as though He were the sum of His qualities. God is not composed; He is simple — wholly present in all that He is, so that He does not merely have love or holiness but is love and is holy.⁹ Theologians have found it useful, if imperfect, to sort His perfections into two kinds. The incommunicable attributes are those that belong to God alone and have no true counterpart in us: His self-existence, His infinity and eternity, His immutability — “I the LORD do not change” (Malachi 3:6; James 1:17) — and His omnipresence. The communicable attributes are those of which we bear some faint, derived likeness: His knowledge, power, wisdom, goodness, truth, justice, and love.¹⁰ Among them all, Scripture lifts up one in particular. The angels do not cry “Eternal, eternal, eternal” or “Mighty, mighty, mighty,” but “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts” (Isaiah 6:3; Revelation 4:8) — the only perfection so raised to the third degree. His holiness, His utter separateness and moral purity, crowns and colors every other attribute, and it is the ground of all true worship.¹¹

God and His Covenants

God relates to His creation not at arm’s length but through covenants — formal bonds in which He binds Himself to a people and unfolds His purpose to redeem. From the creation of man in His image onward, He enters into one covenant after another, each building on the last and revealing more of His character and design. Some of these bonds rest wholly on His own oath and cannot fail; others call for a human response — so that in the covenants we see, held together, both the sovereignty of God and the responsibility of man.¹² That the eternal, self-sufficient God should stoop to covenant with creatures who need Him utterly is a measure of His grace; I trace the unfolding of these covenants more fully in my paper on Dispensationalism.

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Practical Implications

Ministry Emphasis: Worship and the Knowledge of God

Theology proper reaches its proper end not in the notebook but in worship. To know God truly is to fall down before Him. When the knowledge of His holiness lands upon the heart, the response is reverence and awe — “Holy, holy, holy” — and then glad adoration. True worship is not a performance we stage for God’s benefit, as though He needed it; it is the creature’s answer to the Creator’s grace, offered in spirit and in truth, in the gathered church and in the secret place alike. Right thoughts about God are the fuel of right worship.

His omniscience — that He knows all things, my words before I speak them and my thoughts before I think them (Psalm 139:1–4) — ought not to terrify but to settle me. I am fully known, down to the pet sins I have hidden so well from others, and I am loved still. There is therefore no use in pretense before God, and no need of it.

His sovereignty — that He does as He pleases and works all things for the good of those who love Him (Psalm 115:3; Romans 8:28) — is the death of anxiety. It is not fatalism but trust: I may make my plans and even my mistakes, and a sovereign God can still bend my path to His good ends. That truth lends a steadiness and a courage to the Christian life that nothing else can give.

And His omnipresence — that He fills heaven and earth and is never absent (Psalm 139:7–10) — means I am never alone, neither on the heights nor in the valley of the shadow. In the hour of temptation, I can stop and pray, for He is right there to give wisdom, grace, and strength to do the right thing rather than the easy one. “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding” (Proverbs 9:10) — and that knowledge, humbly held, reshapes a life.¹³

Known truly but never exhausted, exalted yet near — to know such a God is to fall down and worship.

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Biblical, Exegetical, Theological, and Historical Notes

God reveals Himself in two ways. General revelation, through creation and conscience, makes His existence, power, and divine nature known to all (Psalm 19:1–4; Romans 1:19–20; 2:14–15), leaving men without excuse but not, of itself, saving them. Special revelation — Scripture, and supremely Christ — discloses God as Redeemer. The two are treated in greater detail in my paper on Bibliology.
Christ is the climax of God’s self-disclosure: “No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, has made Him known” (John 1:18); He is “the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of His nature” (Hebrews 1:3) and “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). To have seen Him is to have seen the Father (John 14:9).
Revelation is progressive, unfolding from promise to fulfillment across the canon, so that later Scripture builds upon earlier. Yet God remains incomprehensible: we know Him truly, as He has revealed Himself, but never exhaustively. “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us” (Deuteronomy 29:29; cf. Isaiah 55:8–9; Romans 11:33–36). To know truly without knowing fully is the creature’s proper portion.
El (אל) denotes might; Elohim (אלהים), the ordinary word for God, is grammatically plural — a plural of fullness and majesty, not of number; El Shaddai (אל שדי), “God Almighty,” names the all-sufficient One (Genesis 17:1). Jewish tradition counts seven names of God which, once written, may not be erased.
YHWH (יהוה), the Tetragrammaton, is God’s personal covenant name, connected with the verb “to be” and explained at the burning bush: “I AM WHO I AM” (ehyeh asher ehyeh, Exodus 3:14). It bespeaks His self-existence and unchanging constancy. It is by far the most frequent divine name in the Old Testament (well over six thousand occurrences); out of reverence, it was left unpronounced, Adonai (אדני), “Lord, Master” (some 430 times), being read in its place — the practice reflected in English Bibles by the rendering “the LORD.”
In the New Testament, Theos (θεός, “God,” over 1,300 times) marks essential deity, and Kyrios (κύριος, “Lord,” some seven hundred times) carries authority and lordship. Significantly, the Septuagint had used Kyrios to translate YHWH; so when the apostles confess Jesus as Kyrios and apply to Him passages spoken of the LORD (Philippians 2:9–11; Romans 10:9–13, citing Joel 2:32), they ascribe to Him the divine name and nature.
The doctrine of the Trinity confesses one God in three persons — against tritheism (three gods) and modalism (one person in three modes). The Council of Nicaea (325) affirmed that the Son is homoousios (ὁμοούσιος), “of one substance” with the Father, against the Arian claim that He was a created being. Scriptural foundations include the Old Testament’s plural intimations (Genesis 1:26; Isaiah 48:16), the baptism of Jesus (Matthew 3:16–17), the triune baptismal name (Matthew 28:19), and the apostolic benediction (2 Corinthians 13:14).
God’s aseity (self-existence) sets Him infinitely apart from creation: He is “not served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:25). The phrase “infinite qualitative distinction” (Kierkegaard) names this Creator-creature gulf. Yet transcendence and immanence are held together in Scripture: the high and lofty One dwells also with the contrite (Isaiah 57:15; Jeremiah 23:23–24; Acts 17:27–28).
Divine simplicity means God is not composed of parts; His attributes are not components added together, but the one undivided divine essence considered under different aspects. Hence God does not merely possess His perfections; He is them — “God is love” (1 John 4:8), “God is light” (1 John 1:5) — and no attribute may be played off against another.
Theology has traditionally sorted God’s perfections into the incommunicable attributes, which belong to God alone (aseity, infinity, eternity, immutability, omnipresence), and the communicable, of which redeemed creatures bear a derived likeness (knowledge, wisdom, power, goodness, truth, justice, love). The division is useful but not absolute, since every attribute is finally God’s alone. His immutability deserves note: “I the LORD do not change” (Malachi 3:6; cf. James 1:17; Numbers 23:19).
Holiness is the attribute Scripture most exalts. The seraphim’s cry, “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts” (Isaiah 6:3; Revelation 4:8), is the only divine perfection raised to the third degree. Holiness denotes both God’s transcendent separateness and His perfect moral purity; it crowns the other attributes and is the foundation of acceptable worship.
God administers His relationship with creation through a succession of covenants, binding Himself to His people and advancing His redemptive purpose. Some are unconditional, resting on God’s own oath; others include conditions that call for a human response, together displaying divine sovereignty and human responsibility. I treat their unfolding in my paper on Dispensationalism.
“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10; cf. 1:7). True worship is the creature’s response to the Creator, not a performance staged for a God who needs nothing (Acts 17:25); it is offered “in spirit and truth” (John 4:24), in the gathered assembly and in private devotion alike. Right knowledge of God is the spring of right worship of God.