If someone asks the question, “Who is God?” you might think it’s a futile quest. Maybe it’s easier to answer Canadian writer WO Mitchell’s question, “Who has seen the wind?”
Seeing the wind and knowing God are more closely connected than you might think. Just as you might not see the wind, yet you know the wind’s power, so it is with God. God is Spirit. God is not a wind-spirit, but is Spirit, in the sense of being active, powerful, and yet unseen.
Since God is not a wind-spirit, there must be something more. God, as Spirit, must be more than small limits in capacity, limited by time, space, power, or change. As Spirit, God must be pure essence.
If God is Spirit in pure and simple essence, God must be without limit in what is wise and powerful. Such essential purity would make God different from us in a drastically distinct way, so pure that if God’s infinity could be bottled it could only be brimming with goodness. Such a pure being wouldn’t merely deal in truth, but would have to be known as Truth itself.
But the question remains, not merely ‘what’ but ‘who’? Who is God? To answer the who question requires us to see that the simple essence is pure and cannot be divided. So God, whoever God is, must be one. If God is essential and pure then God cannot be cut into pieces. God is one.
Now there are large groups who claim that God is one. Ironically those who claim that God is one look back to the experience of the same man, the Middle Eastern wanderer, Abraham. Abraham had the experience of this unseen, purely separated God using the wisdom and power at his disposal to make his justice, goodness and truth known to Abraham. God did something that you would not expect from a Spirit. God committed himself to a promise. There’s no such thing as an impersonal promise maker, much less a promise keeper.
But that is what this God, who is Spirit, did. In giving a promise, God who is Spirit showed that he is both personal and living, otherwise he couldn’t attempt to stick around long enough to keep what he’d committed to.
So there is this personal story of God who is Spirit, unfolded in time and space. The story has local interest and global scope. In this narrative, God reveals a special name to a special people in a special time. It comes as no surprise that he would self-identify as “I AM WHO I AM”. It doesn’t roll of the tongue, but it’s descriptive.
In the profound ways of this God who is Spirit, there was always the hint that God would show more of himself. God revealed himself in this long narrative at a crucial point. We can see in part what was revealed when God was called, “The Father of mercies and God of all comfort”(2 Corinthians 1:3). How can God who is Spirit be a Father? How can he bring mercy? The questions converge into an answer. The Son to the Father secures mercy. More images than a family album flip through our minds as we think about Father and Son. But this Son is the singular image of God, and so the same otherworldliness of God who is Spirit marks our attempts to think about God, the Son.
That the Son secures mercy shows that the purity of God could permit no pollution. Long before ‘clean air’ became a thing, God demanded a metaphysical scrubbing of the universe. He still does, and he still will. But the Son voluntarily did two things. The Son added to himself a fully human existence (there is much more to say about this mystery, but roll with it for now). In this full humanity he lived and died, voluntarily stepping in to be scrubbed in place of the filthy— the un-scrubbable for the scrubbable. As fitting the climactic story, this event took place in a locale, seen by women and men, culminating in the courtroom-worthy witnessing of the dead man walking on the third day, ‘just as he said’(Matthew 28:6). Promises made and kept are never far when God is revealing his works and ways.
In the humanity-added Son, known locally and globally as Jesus, the Anointed, or Christ, there is comfort, because justice against moral pollution was carried out right past the verdict to the sentencing. The only way to benefit from that exhausting of God’s cosmic heat treatment, is to have God, the Spirit place you under the heat shield of Jesus’ impenetrable moral character and the costly expenditure of spilled blood that is unrivalled compared to martyrs and lambs. No blood did such spunge-work as Christ’s did when it soaked up the justice of God against sin (i.e. propitiation). Now for those who turn from self reliance in their polluted selves, they turn to this living Jesus, unseen but alive. Relying upon him, not their self-reliance, they can confidently know that the scrubbing will not fall upon them, for within Jesus Christ, they are only seen by God as clean. They know this, because God, the Spirit directs them to reliance on Jesus, like a stiff wind makes you lean on a strong wall. It is a greater dependency than from a new baby born— it’s been even called ‘born again’, or born from above from God who is Spirit (John 3:3,7-8)..
Now we started saying that God is pure and simple. Indivisible in essence. What now with Father, Son and Spirit? Ah, here is mystery, which keeps us always on our toes, always necessarily attentive to God— ‘One God in Three Persons’ is how the ancients put it so well.
Yet these descriptions are sort of like responding to the question posed at the beginning, “Who has seen the wind?”. But even if the descriptions here are addled or insufficient, there is a place where the clarity is revealed, namely the words of God, so pure and authoritative that they can be known as the Word. And by the way, this Word of God is supported by God, the Son who is also known as the Word. Do you see how God wishes to communicate truly and make himself known precisely?
To tread upon the question of “Who is God?” is to step onto holy ground, yet we are welcomed to explore what is revealed, so that we may marvel and gaze and cover our mouths.
