Question: Who or what is God
I would like to know if there is a God but don’t know what God is and where I can find out about him.
1. Approaching an Answer:
If you are really serious with your question, my answer will need to be more than a few lines long, because if I give you a short answer, you will say, “How do you know that?” or “On what basis do you say that?”
2. A Short Answer
God is the Ultimate Being,
- in essence, Spirit,
- in nature, Love,
- in expression, Personal
- in ability, Unlimited,
- in size, Unlimited
3. An Expanded Answer
Let’s take each of the above and slightly expand it.
a) Ultimate Being
- there is no one or no thing greater than God
- He is self existing and everlasting.
b) Spirit
- immaterial (non-material) entity that is ‘alive’ and purposeful
c) Love
- benign in nature seeking the wellbeing of all humanity
d) Personal
- thinks, reasons, communicates
e) Unlimited in Ability
- all-knowing, all-wise, all-powerful
- Creator of all of existence
f) Unlimited in Size
- exists everywhere
4. How can we know?
Philosophers throughout history have struggled with the concept of a Supreme Being and have sought various philosophical approaches as to why God MUST exist.
Observing the human race throughout history there have always been many peoples who have believed in a deity. Philosophers would suggest that such a belief suggests there must be something behind the belief.
World religions are essentially records of how different peoples have claimed spiritual experiences which point to the existence of deity or deities (philosophically ‘deities‘ never seem sufficient because, although our minds cannot really cope with it, ultimately, we rationalise everything to One Supreme Being.)
Examine many world religions and they appear to Western educated minds to simply be expressions of cultural questions or experiences. Judaism is an exception in that in what we now call the Old Testament of the Bible, (actually 39 ‘books’ with many different writers) we find records stretching over roughly two thousand years, of the dealings of the Supreme being we have described above, first with a few individuals in the Middle East and then with what became the nation of Israel. From observing those records we can draw conclusions as to the nature of this Supreme Being.
Christianity goes a stage further and the New Testament of our Bible (actually 27 ‘books’ with probably 8 or 9 writers) records the arrival and life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ about 2000 years ago, claiming that he is God’s Son. (It was his death and resurrection that separate out and make unique Jesus Christ).
Again observation of these records adds to the Old Testament picture of this Supreme Being and fills out the descriptions we have given in the first two parts above.
The Bible is unlike any other book or collection of books in the world, in that it puts History as the context of this Supreme Being’s interaction with mankind.
To see this in much more detail we suggest you go to other sections of this site.
