Reality Check 101

The personality of a person can make or break a relationship. I am sure that everyone can remember times when just trying to get along with another person seemed like too much work or sometimes, with some people, even painful. Those kinds of relationships are unavoidable in this life. The trick is finding people that you can be close to without all the drama!

Personality is, if you think about it, a complicated thing. There is so much that makes up the mix; morals, emotions, ways of thinking, how someone acts, and so much more. Now try to image how even more deeply complicated God’s personality has to be? If God lives, as we have seen so far, without limits of knowledge or location or power, would it not also make sense that His character and personality would have to be perfect because He uses all of those things to interact with His creation, including mankind?

The answer should be pretty obvious. But the question is, what would His personality and character be? Here is a look at some of the most important things to know about how God’s personality works.

The Most Popular Traits

Holiness

Everyone expects God to be perfectly pure. How could it be any other way? No one in their right mind would be ok with an all-powerful but shady God. That was the problem in the ancient world and in some religions even today. One Bible passage describes what happened when mankind with “darkened imaginations”, decided to worship creatures rather than the Creator with images of “corruptible man and birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures”.  Most of those gods, being the products of human imaginations, were really just frightfully powerful human-acting animals or glorified superheroes. They could be vengeful, intolerant, and act in the same evil ways as men and women on Earth.

But that is really not being genuinely divine. For God to be truly God, He must be totally different from and above anything or anyone common. It means that there can be no shadow of moral weakness or pollution from evil. He cannot be temped to do evil or cause evil Himself. In other words, wickedness cannot have any part in His thinking or anything He does. Plainly then, evil in any form cannot be in His presence, no matter how insignificant or horrendous.

The impact of God’s holiness on any kind of relationship with Him is huge. To put it bluntly, how many absolutely pure people do you know? I am thinking, none. Yet, in order to have any kind of interaction with God, somehow, we have to be acceptable to Him. Not only that, if we are able to establish a relationship with such holiness, we would have to live it out in such a way that it could not be hidden.

There has to be a solution to this situation, but I see no other way around it other than something designed by God Himself. I truly believe He has done that. But for now, let’s look at more of Him.

Love

Here is something to think about: Because God is holy, He is loving. That might sound like a weird connection, but it really isn’t. Look at it this way: True love, any kind of love, is never only a frame of mind but is always a matter of action. Without someone or something to receive love, it really has no meaning or importance. As a matter of fact, the purest form of love is also sacrificial. (Even if a person only values themselves, their love, however deformed, still has someone to receive it!)

God is no different. We know from the last chapter that God is not just “out there somewhere” but is also present and involved with His creation, to the point, as we will deal with later, of true sacrifice. That involvement means He cares. That is love in action; His holiness reaching out and treasuring not just His creation in general, but mankind in a special way.

The great news is that divine love shares in all the other qualities of God’s character. It has all His other “greatnesses”.  It is eternal and infinite, without weakness or corruption. It is completely different from and beyond any earthly kinds of love. At the same time because, as the Apostle Paul has been quoted as saying in chapter 4 (“In Him [God] we live and move and have our existence”), it is always possible for anyone to reach out to Him. As we will come to later, there is naturally a special place in God’s heart toward those who treasure His holy (sacrificial) love, just as there would be in our hearts for someone who loved us in the same way.

Truthfulness

If there is one thing that holiness and love requires, it is truthfulness. The problem nowadays is that it is fashionable to believe that everyone has the right to have their own version of “truth” as they see it. But while that kind of thinking may feel good, it really just doesn’t make much sense. Somewhere out there, there has to be a way to find a match between what someone claims or thinks or feels and what is actually real, in the physical world and in the spiritual world.

This is where understanding God and His character is so important. Holiness means purity and purity just cannot tolerate falsehood. Does that not make perfect, pun intended, sense? Would any of us ever say that another person had a pure character if we knew that they had a problem with lying?  Because we now know that God is holy and is the only possible one who determines what the truth is from of His own perfect thoughts, decisions, and actions; who else could do better?

God’s truthfulness means then, that He can never lie, or deceive, or even “fudge” the truth. When He interacts with anyone, He always does so with absolute, unchallengeable truth. His motives and purposes have to be totally “on the up and up”, no matter what. It also means that anyone who claims to care about God or value His part in their lives, always has an absolutely rock hard, reliable place to go for true truth. The only thing that remains is to find out where God has given out that truth. In Jesus’ ministry, he said that he was that place – something to think about!

Faithfulness

Truthfulness leads right into the next part of God’s character, faithfulness. Think of it this way, the one of the biggest ways for God to show truthfulness is to practice what He preaches.  It means that He totally dependably keeps His promises – in short, being faithful is really just putting truth into practice. Just like everything else in Himself, any commitments He makes are going to be permanent and pure. If He would ever be able to act in another way, He would have to turn His back on Himself! There can be no one else in the entire universe who can claim to be perfectly reliable.

This is, to say the least, a big deal for us humans who have to live in a very troubling world. Witnesses in secular history and the historical records of the Bible have testified to what it was like for them when God was faithful to their faithfulness. Once again, if it is true that God loves His creation and all of us in it and that people can and have reached out to and lived under that love, then the normal thing to expect is that when God promises to rescue those folks and give their lives meaning, He is self-obligated to make it happen. Such surety is a source of great strength.

Righteousness

Righteousness just naturally follows truth and faithfulness, doesn’t it. It flows out of God’s character in the same way that truth does – determined by God because of all the other perfect things about Him. Righteousness then, is what happens when God perfectly puts into action toward someone else all the character traits of holiness, purity, truth, and faithfulness.

In a lot of ways, the idea of righteousness can be warped in the same way that truth can. Without a way to understand what it means and without a final authority to give it direction, each person can decide to act out in any way they choose and feel perfectly fine with the results, no matter how others may suffer. On the other hand, with a person’s recognition of God’s righteousness, an anchor is created by which to live.

By the way, one of the big claims by Jesus was that He actually came to reveal what God’s righteousness looks like and to totally live it out so as to demonstrate that kind of life in the real world. It is one of the main reasons that the religious authorities of His day were so angered by Him – He claimed to actually be on the same level of righteousness as God and to be there to give people the anchor they needed.

Goodness

Have you ever thought about what it means to be good? I believe that goodness is a way to demonstrate what is right. In other words, no one can claim to be good if they don’t live righteously. I don’t know of anyone whose life I’m familiar with, whom I would consider a good person, that also isn’t well known for a devotion to trying to do the right thing as much as they can.

It can’t be any different with God. Everything we know about Him continues to flow into the new things that we talk about. Goodness is no different. If God is purely righteous, holy, loving, and faithful: He is good. Like all the other traits, God’s goodness is endless, unchangeable, and cannot be polluted or defeated. Not only that, but it also means that everything He does toward us or thinks about us, radiates from His goodness.

In a world that sometimes seems to thrive on inflicting disappointment and pain, understanding that God is not only present but is also immeasurably good, means that hope is alive and well. A relationship with Him is a relationship with the fountain of goodness. As a matter of fact, since He is the Creator, all the goodness we experience has its beginning from Him.

God is Just

After everything covered so far, there is one glaring personality trait of God that has to be one of the most misrepresented or misunderstood traits by huge numbers of people – that is the issue of God’s absolute need to be a just God, even while being loving and good at the same time. The question is; if God is so deeply loving and good, how can He possible justify punishment or discipling of wrongdoing? Would not love and goodness require forgiveness of bad actions?

I purposely saved justice (later grace and mercy) for close to the end of this chapter. The only way to understand how justice must work is to be able to see it in its place alongside the other characteristics of God’s personality. Too often, we tend to latch on to, shall we say, the warmer more pleasant-feeling things like love and in our minds make them the “be all” of God. The truth is it just can’t be that way.

What does it mean for anyone to do justice, but especially for God?  The first thing to remember is that if evil did not exist, there would be no need for justice.  Justice is really just using goodness or rightness to correct evil or unrighteousness.  Justice can only be true if it works from a position of purity. 

At this point, we understand that God is holy, good, and righteous.  It has to follow then, that when He is confronted with unholiness, evil, or unrighteousness, He must address the situation or be impure Himself.  The stakes couldn’t be higher. God’s judgements are nothing more than Him applying His holiness, goodness, and righteousness to evil.  In that sense, judgement is simply the natural consequence of God’s character.  By that standard, it is always impartial – no matter what. 

God’s justice is a kind of self-declaration of two things; the natural need for evil to be judged and equally that His judgements and punishments show Him advocating for victims with love, compassion, patience, and blessing.  All of this is why, in the Bible, God calls on all people to live justly themselves as a reflection of His standards.  He makes it clear that no one can borrow or steal real justice from Him.  He can’t be bribed or coerced into ignoring injustice.

God is Merciful:                   

But what does God do with those of us who know we can’t live up to being 100% pure all the time?  Or, for example, what about folks who struggle with, shall we say, “the dark side” of life?  Is there anything in God that moves Him to help the helpless or reach out to the lost, sometimes in spite of themselves?

So, how does mercy have to operate?  Probably the most glaring thing is that, like love, mercy has to have someone who needs it from someone who is willing to give it!  With mercy there is always a giver and a receiver who is in distress or has acted badly enough toward the giver that they can’t fix it by themselves.  That is when mercy kicks in.

The compassionate side of God is His mercy. It is something within Him that wants to find a way to be lovingly kind, even when a person’s circumstances make it seem impossible.  We are talking about the consequences of not living up to the holiness and love of God.  It is God reaching out to the ones of us who do wrong or feel alienated or, to use an old term, feel downtrodden.  This kind of situation is a big enough deal that there is no way to rack up enough “brownie points” or good works to get out of it. 

God’s mercy causes Him to see our pain or worst behavior and exercise His love toward us in spite of it.  Someone has said that, when a person is offensive to God, His mercy is the act of not giving that person what they deserve, judgement.  Mercy always makes the first move toward someone, sometimes even when that person is more of an enemy than a friend or when they feel like they don’t’ need mercy at all.  This is true compassion from God Almighty, not just religion.

God is Gracious

Why in the world would a holy, loving, good, and just God be merciful to people who are unholy, unloving, morally corrupt, and unjust.  One word really says it all: grace. Grace is a lot like mercy because both of them come out of God’s goodness and love. The simplest way to compare the two is to understand that grace is giving us what we don’t deserve, mercy!  Grace deals with us based on what we need, not on whether or not we are deserving or worthy of it.  It is a free choice by God and is given without the need to be good first.

The most important part of grace is what it does.  Grace is the open door for anyone who wants to experience God and all the great things about His personality that we have looked at so far.

But God does more than share His personality.  Grace is what brought Jesus to live on Earth to finish a mission which made it possible to connect God to us. He has made grace real.  We will deal with that much more later, but for now there are some things that might show the value of God’s grace.

Because God is everything we now know about, none of us can ever just walk into Heaven, so to speak, carrying all our baggage of unholiness.  All any of us have to do to know what I’m talking about is to honestly look into our own past lives to recognize our moral failures and offenses toward others, if not toward God Himself.  What grace offers is the chance to be rescued from all of that.  It gives us all a chance to be blameless before God and live out the rest of our lives under His care and acceptance.  This is the most important need out of all the others that there is.

God is Persistent

When I talk about God being persistent, I mean that He never gives up on us. He is always constantly working to fulfill the promises toward mankind.  He never stops working out what He has made up His mind to do through perfect truth, goodness, righteousness, and justice.  He is perfectly faithful to those who have chosen to love Him. The bottom line is that He cannot and will not ever fail.

There is a danger here that understanding this will lend itself to a kind of lackadaisical attitude toward God.  If there is any understanding now of who God really is, to put it in strong terms, it is a dangerous game to play when we are tempted to blow off His tolerance.  By the same token, if anyone is “with Him”, they can face discouragements and live life without being derailed along the way.

God is Incomprehensible:    

One final thought.  It is, as they say, “a fool’s errand” to think that anyone, no matter how smart they are or what titles are by their name, can understand absolutely everything about an infinite and eternal God.  There will always be mysteries about His unimaginable knowledge, presence, and power.  There is no way to search out the whys and wherefores of some of the things He does.

Our minds can only handle so much, our moral flaws short-circuit us, and we know only what He has given us to know.  But that’s ok.  The gifts of knowledge about Himself that He has given us should cause us to be grateful and hopefully generate reverence for Him.