We are going to look in this article at the character of God. I want us to home in on what A.W. Tozer calls, “the knowledge of the Holy.” His book The Knowledge of the Holy is one I would strongly recommend for your reading. This is one of those Christian classics that is timeless and deals with the attributes of God. I want to look at two kinds of attributes: God’s communicable attributes and God’s incommunicable attributes. These so-called incommunicable attributes are attributes of God that only He possesses, and He does not fully share these with us—or they are a lot less shared with us than the communicable attributes.
We really have to use our mind’s eye when we speak of God’s eternity because God has no beginning and He has no end; He does not have a condition in which He is bound to the progression of time and space. He is unchangeable; or sometimes the term is immutable; He doesn’t change. We change and things around us always change. The fact is that God is omnipresent and omnipotent. We do have some of these things, but we clearly are not omnipresent. We do not have the ability to be everywhere at once.
As to the communicable attributes, these are areas such as knowledge, justice, love, and mercy. We can share and have some understanding of what it means to experience those things.
Having said that, I want to stress something right from the beginning. There is a sense in which no one of these things can we fully possess. The fact is that God has attributes within Himself that we do not fully share, but some are more shared with us and some are less shared. But, even if we speak about God’s love, or God’s mercy, there is no way in which we ever fully experience what all that means.
I want to unpack all of this tonight by first focusing on those areas in which we share things less with God than other things. I want to stress as well that the Scriptures reveal much about Him in terms of names and various kinds of analogies that are used.
I would like to mention a few of these. The names of God are actually an interesting subject. On the one hand there is a sense in which God has no names, because no one can understand all of His character. But, there is also a sense in which He has many names and that all these names taken together can give us some sense of what He is like. So, in one sense He is utterly mysterious and transcendent and in another sense He has revealed Himself truly, but not exhaustively, to us. As we look at the Scriptures, and look at these names and attributes, we will see that there are things that will stretch our minds about who He is. Many of the names given to God in Scripture refer to aspects of His character.