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Who is God?

Christians believe that God created everything, is limited by nothing, is all powerful, and all knowing. Perhaps the most important thing to realise about God is that he loves each one of us.

Christians use three technical terms to describe God:

God is omnipresent – he’s everywhere at once, not limited by time or space
God is omniscient – he knows everything
God is omnipotent – he has unlimited power

God is Three in One

In order to gain a greater understanding of God, Christians find it helpful to think about him as three persons: God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. These three definitions of God make up the Trinity. The Trinity is not three separate gods, but three expressions – or forms – of the one God.

If it sounds confusing, think of it this way: Just as one man can distinctly yet simultaneously be a son, a father and a brother, so too is God one but also three.

The Trinity enables us to get to know God by helping us to discover who he is and what he desires for our world and our lives.

God is called Father because he is the creator, life-giver, law-giver and protector. He’s a Father because he has a Father-Son relationship with Jesus. Jesus calls God ‘Abba’, which simply means Dad.

God’s fatherhood can be seen throughout the Bible in the way he cared for people but also in the ways he cares for people everywhere today. Jesus tells us that God is a Father who listens when we talk to him and that we can have a loving relationship with him as a child can have with their parent.

Why do we celebrate Father’s Day?

Jesus is both fully God and fully human; he has both God’s nature and our nature. Through Jesus, God came to live with us so that people could see and know God first hand. If we want to know what God is like, we look at Jesus. Jesus is the human face of God.

The cross on which Jesus was crucified is central to the Christian faith because it expresses God’s love for humanity. It was his rescue plan for a world in which people mess up.

Here's how:

Though God created us to enjoy friendship with him and to work with him in the world he created, we can take ourselves away from him through the bad decisions that we make. As a result, the whole of God’s good creation, including the relationships between humans themselves and God, dislocate and distort. God’s world is still good, but it has a deep divide running right through the centre of it. Jesus came to heal this divide.

Through Jesus’ death and resurrection, the wrongdoing of humankind and the world’s broken relationship with God could be restored. Because Jesus took the blame for our mistakes, we can be saved from living lives that are distorted and dislocated by selfishness, by ‘sin’.

The reconciliation between God and humanity is called the atonement, which literally means making at one, or ‘at-one-ment’. Through Jesus’ death on a cross and resurrection, God made us at one with him.

The third person of the Trinity is the Holy Spirit. He is the Spirit of God and is the presence of God in our lives and in the world.

Before Jesus died, rose to life and returned to heaven, he promised to send his followers a helper. In the Bible, Jesus is recorded saying the Holy Spirit ‘will teach you everything and will remind you of everything I have told you’ (John 14:26).

Through the Spirit we become more aware of God’s presence. The Spirit also helps us understand the things that separate us from God and others, and encourages us to quickly seek forgiveness and change our behaviour.

The qualities of the Spirit are listed in the Bible as: ‘love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control’ (Galatians 5:22 and 23).

As we allow the Holy Spirit to work within us, we begin to see more and more evidence of these qualities in our lives, and they help us as we seek to love God and love each other.