The Attributes of God

Originally posted by twhitehead
All these properties have absolutely no meaning when refering to God. Either God is a citizen of this world, that is a being that is part of and not creator of the universe, or he is the creator of the universe including time, good, bad, etc and therefore can not be defined by the words you have given.

If justice is defined by God then he is supremely ...[text shortened]... anding of Justice, if God exists then he is most definately not Just. He is also rather selfish.

I agree with some of your post. Specifically, we are limited in our ability to either describe or understand the totality of such a being. I addressed just this idea in the first post of the thread:

"This does not address the absolute essence of His being, nor attempt to address the same."

Nonetheless, He has revealed enough to bring about man's salvation and total edification. Any variances between our understanding of any ideal and the ideal as expressed in the character of God are shortcomings of ours, not His.

Originally posted by FreakyKBH
If I was smart enough to figure out how to go back in time.

I saw a documentary on this once. Apparently all you need is a DeLorean car, a flux capacitor and Christopher Lloyd.

Originally posted by FreakyKBH
I agree with some of your post. Specifically, we are limited in our ability to either describe or understand the totality of such a being. I addressed just this idea in the first post of the thread:

"This does not address the absolute essence of His being, nor attempt to address the same."

Nonetheless, He has revealed enough to bring about man's sa ...[text shortened]... y ideal and the ideal as expressed in the character of God are shortcomings of ours, not His.

My point was actually that none of the words you have listed have any meaning at all when used in relation to God so your very long posts trying to show them to be true can not possibly make sense.
For example if God is righteous then he is only so in his definition of the word and not in mine. Since he (or you) adjusts the definition to fit him there can be no doubt that it fits. However he still does not fit my definition of righteous.

[edit]
The question I must ask is: what on earth were you trying to show anyway?

Originally posted by twhitehead
The question I must ask is: what on earth were you trying to show anyway?

That the Ctrl, c and v buttons on his keyboard are all working fine?

Love toward mankind. God's love for mankind is classified into two categories: personal and impersonal love.
God's infinite, eternal, immutable personal love is only directed toward perfect righteousness.
Divine personal love is therefore conditional; it emphasizes the attractiveness of the object. To be the recipient of His personal love, the object must possess perfect righteousness.
Of all mankind, only Jesus Christ is worthy, and only through His merits are we acceptable. There is absolutely nothing we can do to earn the personal love of God, or the right to live with Him forever; we are qualified only by nonmeritorious faith in Christ.
We become recipients of God's personal love the moment we believe in Christ and receive the imputation of God's very own righteousness.

God's infinite, eternal, immutable impersonal love does not depend on the merit of the object, but on the merit, the integrity of the subject.
Divine impersonal love is therefore unconditional, based on God's own perfect characater and His love for Himself.
God loves spiritually dead, unbelieving mankind, because of who and what He is, not who and what we are.
The impersonal love of God is the most powerful love that has ever existed; this love is the basis for our so-great salvation.

The love of God is expressed through grace. God's gracious gift of His Son is the greatest demonstration of His love toward mankind.
Although not an attribute, grace is the expression of divine love an integrity.
Grace is the policy of God for bestowing His unmerited favor on sinful humanity. Grace is all that God is free to do for makind on the basis of the saving work of Jesus Christ on the cross. Man can never accomplish or achieve the approbation or favor of God through his own efforts, work, energy, or morality. The foundation for grace is the righteousness, justice, and love of God.
Mercy is grace in action, God's infinite love toward the objects of His affection. Therefore, God's mercy extends as impersonal love toward all His creatures and as personal love toward believers who possess His own perfect righteousness.

Eternal Life
God is life. God lives. He does not possess life as we do--- life that begain at some point in time. There never was a time when God did not live. He always existed; His life is called eternal life. Eternal life has no beginning and no end. In contrast, the eternal life given to the believer is technically called everlasting life; i.e., it has no end but began at the moment of salvation through faith alone in Christ alone.
Like the other divine attributes, eternal life applies to the being, the very essence of God. Eternal life means that He has always existed and will always exist; there never was a time when He did not exist. He never had a beginning; no one preceded Him; nothing caused God to come into existence. Time is merely His invention for the convenience of His creatures.

Because God is the cause and origin of time, He is not subject to time. He invented time so He could manifest His eternal life to us, and we adjust to eternal God by possessing His eternal life thorugh faith in Christ. Nonetheless, we continue to think in terms of time, and, in fact, we cannot live without time.

Time, although without substance, is an object of God's creation. Since God was gracious and thoughtful enough to give us time, we must give time back to Him. In other words, basic giving in the Christian way of life is giving of time. Whenever we worship God in any way under the filling of the Holy Spirit, we are giving to Him. All other forms of Christian service are secondary.

God is not in time, but time is in God.

God transcends all creation, including time. To Him, one day is as thousand years, and a thousand years is as one day.

God is logical and therefore does not need to be chronological, but He can be chronological if He so chooses. For example, time began with creation, and since the succession of history truly exists, God, who sees according to the truth, recognizes time. Furthermore, God always accomplishes in time what has to be done in time as part of His plan. Thus, the variations of blessing and adversity that come in our day-to-day lives are merely part of an overall plan to bless us in eternity, as well as to provide security and blessing for us in time.

Time, which is finite, has both succession and duration. The duration of time is measured by its succession; for example, the duration of a day is measured by the succession of minutes or hours.

In contrast, eternity, which is infinite, has duration only. Duration without succession is still duration, only immeasurable. Therefore, infinite, eternal God has duration only. In fact, eternity is infinity in its relation to time. Time is a line of succession as far as man's perspective is concerned, but eternity is beyond man's perception, reaching into infinity.

The eternal life of God is imputed to all who believe in Christ. Jesus Christ is "the way, and the truth, and the life." He is life; never was there a time when He, in His deity, did not exist. Eternal life has always resided in Him: "This is the record, God has given unto us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He who has the Son has life; He who has not the Son has not life." Furthermore, as the Creator, the Lord Jesus Christ is the source of all life. God the Father is also the source of life, not from the standpoint of creation, but as the one who breathes the "spark of life" into the fetus when it emerges from the womb at birth. Moreover, God the Holy Spirit is the source of life as the agent of regeneration and as the one who places each Church Age believer into union with Christ at the moment of faith in the Gospel. Through the baptism of the Holy Spirit at the moment of salvaton, the eternal life of Jesus Christ becomes our eternal life. Thus the members of the Trinity are related to life in specific, different ways that never contradict each other and are totally compatible with the operation of the Godhead.

Omnipresence
God is eternally, wholly, and simultaneously present everywhere.

This is not pantheism, as pantheism denies the existence of the life and personality of God. Pantheism is the belief that God is in every object, thereby making God an impersonal force and deifying nature.

God is the totality of His essence. Without diffusion, expansion, multiplication, or division, He penetrates and fills the entire universe and everything beyond the universe to infinity.

God is free to be local. He is personally there, eyewitness to every activity of every life of all human and angelic history.

Omnipresence describes space in relation to God; immensity describes God in relation to space.
God is not subject to the laws of space. He invented and created space, just as He invented and created time. Space is large, but not as large as God.
God cannot be more or less than He is.
God is the cause of space. He put order into space, which extends for immeasurable light-years. Space is one of two boundaries God has given to creatures, the other being time.
In relation to space, God is immanent--- in space, and transcendent--- outside of space. Immanence means His entire essence is always present everywhere in nature, in history, in all the affairs of mankind. Transcendence means He is independent of the created universe so that no particular place exclusively contains Him
If space were defined as having boundaries, God would exceed those boundaries to infinity because God is the Creator, the cause of space.
God fills space and time with His presence, sustains both, and gives both purpose and value. He is the Lord of both time and history. Jesus Christ controls history and in time God’s plans and purposes are fulfilled.

God may be self-limited, as in the case of the incarnate person of Jesus Christ in the hypostatic union. God’s infinity is intensive rather than extensive. That is, God is not to be thought of merely as extending infinitely beyond time and space but possessing within Himself infinite resources. He is the perfect person who passes beyond all phenomena and constitutes the basis for all, as possessing within Himself a boundless supply of the infinite energy of his spiritual life and personality.

Omniscience
God is wise; He has perfect wisdom. He knows perfectly and eternally all that is knowable, whether actual or merely possible. Everything that has been known or ever will be known has been known to God since eternity past. Never was there a time when He did not know everything that is knowable. God never learns anything, because He has always known everything. He knows the end from the beginning.

Omniscience can be categorized three ways:
Eternal: because God is eternal life and omniscient, He has always known everything.
Incomprehensible: the infinite is incomprehensible to us, but because of His infinity, everything is clearly comprehensible to God. The Bible reveals only a small fraction of God's knowledge.
Wise: total wisdom as well as total knowledge belong to God's omniscience.

Every detail of all creation and history is in God's mind at all times and always has been from eternity past. This is God's mentality connected with His infinity.

Therefore, the future is as perspicuous to God as the past.

God foreknows the future. Since all events take place according to His counsel, the divine decree, He foreknows, but His foreknowledge is not predetermination. He knows every step you will take, but He never interferes with your volition.

God foreknows the function of every free will; He knows what other beings will choose. He knows we have a free will--- in fact He gave us our volition--- and He knows which way we will decide in the function of our free volition in every situation in life.

Although He never interferes with free will, God gracious and all-wise. Therefore, He does not merely sit on the sidelines.

God's knowledge is not subject to development, reasoning, regretting, or foreboding. His knowledge is always total and perfect; therefore His knowledge cannot develop beyond what it already is. God knows all the conclusions as well as all the premises; hence, even though He is totally reasonable and rational in all things, He never needs to reason things out. We cannot second-guess God, nor improve on His system. We can simply go along with His perfectly wise policy, which has our best in mind.
Satan is the best illustration of what happens to someone who tries to outsmart God. The devil's entire strategy boils down to an attempt to outsmart, second-guess, and outmaneuver God. Satan thinks he has a better plan than God's and wants to put it into effect and take God's place. The result of Satan's brilliant though arrogant efforts to improve on the divine plan is the confusion and evil we find in the world today. Eventually Satan's rival plan will result in his own destruction in the lake of fire forever. While believers will never see the lake of fire, their imperfect and unwise plans can create misery for themselves and others.
Since God is not subject to regrets, foreboding, or depression, all that He knows never makes Him unhappy. If we knew just some of the details God knows, if we could see the future, we would be immediately upset.

"God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth." The Westminster Divines.
Why are atheists posting on this thread, I thought it would be a sensible discussion on the attributes of God from a religious perspective.

From the Wisdom of Jesus:

The Savior said: "He Who Is is ineffable. No principle knew him, no authority, no subjection, nor any creature from the foundation of the world until now, except he alone, and anyone to whom he wants to make revelation through him who is from First Light.
...
For he is immortal and eternal. Now he is eternal, having no birth; for everyone who has birth will perish. He is unbegotten, having no beginning; for everyone who has a beginning has an end. Since no one rules over him, he has no name; for whoever has a name is the creation of another.

And he has a semblance of his own - not like what you have seen and received, but a strange semblance that surpasses all things and is better than the universe. It looks to every side and sees itself from itself. Since it is infinite, he is ever incomprehensible. He is imperishable and has no likeness (to anything). He is unchanging good. He is faultless. He is eternal. He is blessed. While he is not known, he ever knows himself. He is immeasurable. He is untraceable. He is perfect, having no defect.
...
He is called 'Father of the Universe'
...
he embraces the whole of the totalities, while nothing embraces him. For he is all mind. And he is thought and considering and reflecting and rationality and power. They all are equal powers. They are the sources of the totalities. And their whole race from first to last was in his foreknowledge, (that of) the infinite, unbegotten Father."

Originally posted by FreakyKBH
He penetrates and fills the entire universe and everything beyond the universe to infinity.

I know you dont actually understand much of what you are posting but I thought I would ask: What does "beyond the universe to infinity" mean ?

Originally posted by twhitehead
What does "beyond the universe to infinity" mean ?

Ask Buzz Lightyear.

Originally posted by Bosse de Nage
Ask Buzz Lightyear.

Buzz lightyear goes to infinity and beyond past the edges of God!

Originally posted by twhitehead
I know you dont actually understand much of what you are posting but I thought I would ask: What does "beyond the universe to infinity" mean ?

Bosse's suggestion notwithstanding...

If the universe were a plate, infinity begins at the edge of the plate. And, whatever is beyond said infinity, the One who holds the plate, created infinity, is beyond both.

Omnipotence
God is all-powerful; His power is infinite. Omnipotence emphasizes the eternal supremacy of God's power.

God's omnipotence guarantees that "nothing will be impossible with God."

God is able to do all things within the range of His holy character; i.e., He can do all things which are not self-contradictory or contradictory to His own nature. For Him to do contradictory things would not imply power but imperfection and impotence.

God will never make right wrong, nor will He act foolishly. He never abuses His power; His power is perfect and behond our comprehension.

If God is limited at any time, it is because of a self-imposed limitation consistent with His plan and essence.

God can do all He wills to do, but may not will to do all He can do.


Infinite energy and power belong to God. He does not sleep; He never gets tired. After billions of years, He is still not worn out, and He never will be. We need to adjust to that: God is compassionate, but He is not absurd, so He does not sympathize with our excuses for failing to accept salvation and further, to grow spiritually. Whatever is required for either of these imperatives, has been provided by Him. God never condones giving up, and to do so one develops maladjustments to the grace and power of God.

The universe is held together by the omnipotence of Jesus Christ.

God has made His divine power available to every Church Age (current age) believer for the execution of the unique spiritual life: the power of the Word of God circulating in our souls; the unique assets of the Church Age; the filling of the Holy Spirit; and the function of spiritual gifts.