"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."
Genesis 1:1God is not part of creation. He is before it and the source of it.
Step 1 of 4
Who Is God?
The Bible begins with God, not with us. He is the Creator of all things, holy, light, love, and righteous in all he does.
01
Core claim
Everything starts with God, not with human perspective.
The Christian message does not begin with what we feel, prefer, or imagine. It begins with the God who is there.
That means the first question is not what kind of God we would like. The first question is who God actually is. Scripture answers that by speaking about his nature, his character, and his relation to the world he made.
Once that is clear, everything else starts to make sense. The person of Jesus, the seriousness of sin, and the meaning of salvation all depend on who God is first.
02
What Scripture Shows
Scripture describes God in ways no human invention would be able to control.
"The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein."
Psalm 24:1Everything belongs to God because everything comes from him.
"Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory."
Isaiah 6:3God's holiness means he is utterly pure and not to be treated as ordinary.
"God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth."
John 4:24God is not an object inside the world that we can reshape to fit our preferences.
"God is light, and in him is no darkness at all."
1 John 1:5There is nothing false, corrupt, or morally dark in God.
"God is love."
1 John 4:8God's love is not sentimentality. It belongs to his true character.
03
Explanation
Scripture speaks of God as Creator, holy, light, love, and righteous.
God is Creator. He did not arise from the world, and the world does not sustain him. All things come from him and belong to him. That means reality is not self-defining. It is God's world before it is ours.
God is holy. He is not morally mixed, casually indulgent, or open to corruption. His holiness means he is pure and set apart from all evil. He is light, which means there is no darkness in him at all. Nothing false or twisted can be traced back to God.
God is love. Love is not something outside God that he tries to live up to. It belongs to who he is. But his love is never soft at the expense of truth. Scripture also presents God as righteous. He always does what is right, and his judgment is never crooked or unfair.
Taken together, these truths keep us from making God small. He is not merely powerful, and he is not merely comforting. He is the living God: pure, true, loving, and righteous in all his ways.
Those two qualities sit together in a way that should stop us. A God who is only loving but not holy would have no reason to take sin seriously. A God who is only holy but not loving would have no reason to do anything about the distance between himself and us. But the God Scripture describes is both. That combination is not comfortable. It is precisely the reason why the question of how a person stands before him is not a small question. It is the most important question a person can face.
You may be reading this and asking a prior question: can this document actually be trusted? That is a fair question, and it deserves a serious answer before anything else on this page carries weight. There is a full examination of the historical reliability of the New Testament, the manuscript evidence, the dating, and what non-Christian sources say, on a separate page. If that question is in the way, go there first and come back. Is the Bible historically reliable?
04
Common misunderstanding
God is not a projection of human preference.
We do not get to redesign God to suit ourselves.
People often speak as though God can be reduced to whatever feels acceptable, useful, or comforting to them. But the God of Scripture resists that completely. He is not a mirror of human taste. He is not adjusted by public opinion. He is who he is, whether we approve of him or not.
05
Reflection questions
What kind of God have you assumed up to this point?
Three questions to sit with
- When you think about God, are you starting from Scripture or from what feels acceptable to you?
- If God is truly holy and righteous, how should that shape the way you think about human life and accountability?
- If God is both light and love, what does that challenge in the way you have imagined him?
06
Next step