The God of the Judeo-Christian tradition is profoundly distinct from the so called gods described in the ancient civilizations of human history. A “short list” of the Revealed Attributes of (the Nature or Essence of) God includes that:
God is incomprehensible and Unknowable to Human Reason(I Timothy 6:16):
God is unknowable to mankind, and yet He reveals manifestations of Himself to us. We can know some things about God; it is just that we cannot know everything about Him. It is the transcendent essence of God that we can’t ever understand. Further, it is the height of human folly and impertinence for us to imagine that we can deduce important things about God which He does not choose to share with us.
God is inaccessible(Isaiah 6:9-10 & Psalm 145:3):
We don’t go to God. He comes to us at His pleasure. The highly allegorical description of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden when they were still in close fellowship with God, enjoying conversing with God directly and on a regular basis describes them living in the garden and God coming to visit them at His pleasure. As well it should be, God chooses when to interact with us.
God is ineffable(Isaiah 40:28b):
God cannot be expressed by us using words. God’s essence is beyond the limitations of the human mind and beyond the descriptive power of human language systems. His being or nature can’t be expressed in words.
God is Infinite, boundless, and limitless(1 Kings 8:27 & Revelations 4:8):
God is the creator who caused the creation of the Cosmos. More importantly His spoken word caused Big Bang Singularity (the pre-condition which became the Big Bang). God always was, is and will be. He is not part of creation; He is beyond it.
Exodus Chapter 3 describes how Moses first encountered God in the form of the light of the burning bush on the side of Mount Sinai. The bush was not consumed by the “fire,” yet that light drew Moses to the bush. The “uncreated light” of the bush was the light of God, the Shekinah glory of the divine presence of God, the true “light of the world.“
God told Moses to go to the tyrant Pharaoh and demand that he let the people of Israel go. Moses ask God who shall I say sent me, and God answered tell them: I AM WHO I AM(Exodus 3:14). The Hebrew word which is translated “I AM” is the ancient Hebrew tetragrammaton of YHWH (Yahweh) which is so holy to the ancient Hebrews that they would not even say the word. In other words God told Moses to simply tell the Israelites that He (God) exists. He IS.
God Is Immaterial and Impalpable(John 4:24):
God is not a physical or material thing. He is not a part of creation; He is beyond the physical world. Since God is immaterial He also can’t be touched or felt.
God is Invisible(Colossians 1:15):
If God is immaterial then He is certainly invisible. The results of His actions, His Creation is clearly visible, and some things about God can be deduced from his creation. By examining the watch one can discern some things about the watchmaker.
God is Impassible, in Greek, apatheia, Unchangeable or Immutable(Malachi 3:6 & James 1:17):
God does NOT change. He is the same, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. This single attribute describes God’s stability, reliability, trustworthiness. It is very important for the day-to-day lives of Christians. There are many things we don’t know about God, but what we do know (what has been revealed to us) about God are rock solid, unchanging facts.
God is Omnipresent(Psalm 138:6-9):
He is everywhere, always. Hence we are never alone, even when we seem to be or think we are. For the most part, that is good. However we are broken, imperfect creatures and when we choose to act on our own agency it means God is with us while we make foolish mistakes.
God is eternal and ever-existing – He existed before time, and will never cease to be; He is NOT mortal. He existed before he made the cosmos.
God is a most perfect being – However He is not a creature; He is not a created thing, and he is formless. God has always been; there was never a time when he was not. Even though “He is,” He was not created. In that sense, ontologically He is beyond “being.”
God is singular – Only He is God. There are no others; He IS the unity of the divine Holy Trinity.
God is a self existent and transcendent Being – God exists because of God. Of course he is not actually a “being” because he beyond the ontological concept of being. He transcends being.
God is Omnipotent(Genesis 1:3 & Rev. 1:8):
He is all-powerful. For example, God spoke and the entire cosmos came into existence: the otherwise impossible, infinitely concentrated, pure energy condition of the unstable Big Bang Singularity which immediately explored and expanded to form the entire almost infinite Cosmos was just a word spoken by God!
God is Omniscient(Psalm 146:5 & Romans 11:33):
God is all knowing. His awareness includes his infinite foreknowledge of all things past, present, and future.
God is Spirit(John 4:24):
He is spirit in the sense that He is NOT a created physical being. Again, He is beyond “being.”
God is All-Good and All-Righteous(Psalm 9:8, Psalm102:8 & I John 4:16):
He is not the author of evil, though He allows man a free will divinely knowing full well that the freedom He gives to mankind (and to angels) will lead to evils. Evil is not “a real thing”, it is the absence of good.
God is Self-Sufficing Unto Himself and “All-Blessed”(Romans 11:33-36, Acts 7:25 & I Timothy 6:15):
God does not need creation and He does not need us. We are blessed to be able to have a relationship with Him and worship Him and serve Him. He is the blesser; we are the blessed.
God is the Great Creator of All Things(Genesis 1:3 & John 1):
The entire cosmos exists because God spoke it into existence and it was the most unimaginably gargantuan flash of all times some 14 billion years ago.
God is Outside of Time:
God exists everywhere and at all times simultaneously (not in the sequential sense that we created ones experience time).
Attributes are Not the Only Descriptors of God:
Created human beings CANNOT describe or understand who or what God is.
All cataphatic descriptors (positive or affirmative statements) fall short of and therefore fail to describe the absolute transcendence of the divinity and the infinity of God. That led the ancient Hebrew patristic fathers, and the Ancient early Christians of the one, holy, and undivided Christian church of the first millennium of Christianity, to use many apophatic terms to describe what God is not. Apophatic descriptors are terms of language which describes what something is not.
Because the meanings of descriptive words have limitations to their meanings it would be fatuous, or blasphemous to try to describe God only using cataphatic descriptive words for him. Again, God is ineffable.
Even an apparently basic statement like “God is Good” or “God is the Good the True and the Beautiful” is, at least in some sense, deceptive because God is a great deal more than good and true and beautiful, and goodness is an inadequate concept for the transcendent infinity of God’s goodness, or truth, or beauty.
The semantic ambiguity of the concept of goodness (or any similar term) also implies that one can understand God’s ontological being with such terms, thereby categorizing God, i.e., putting God in a “box,” which is also, at least in some sense, is blasphemously disrespectful of God.
Solomon admonished:
“God is in heaven and you are on earth, so let your words be few.”
This is the sense of the piously respectful attitude in which the Hebrews would not presume to speak or even write the name of God. It is also the sense in which God can’t be portrayed in drawings, paintings, icons or statues.
