Explore faith

Who is God?

God is love.

God created and sustains everything, and only he is worthy of our worship.

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

All these things are pretty difficult for us to get our heads round, but perhaps that’s just the way it should be when we are talking about the creator of the whole universe!

Three in One

So where do Jesus and the Holy Spirit fit in?

Christians understand God the Father and his relationship with Jesus and the Holy Spirit as ‘the Trinity’, or three in one. Not three gods, but three expressions or forms of the one God. Just as one man can distinctly yet simultaneously be a son, a father and a brother, so too is God one but three.

The Trinity is how we get to know God and how we 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 and because of his Father-Son relationship with Jesus.

God’s fatherhood can be seen in the way he cared for Israel, his chosen people, and subsequently for all believers everywhere. Jesus himself calls God ‘Abba’, which simply means Dad.

Through Jesus, God is our Father too, and we can have a relationship with him as a child has with their parent.

Jesus is both fully God and fully human; he has both God’s nature and our nature.

God came to live with us through Jesus so that people could see and know God first hand (John 1:14). If we want to know what God is like, we look at Jesus. Jesus is God perfectly revealed in human life. Jesus is the human face of God.

The cross of Jesus is central to the Christian faith and is the greatest expression of God’s love for humanity – it is at the very heart of God’s rescue plan for his world.

God created us to enjoy friendship with him and to work with him in the world he created, but we turned our backs on him by making selfish decisions. As a result, the whole of God’s good creation, including the relationships between humans themselves and God, has been dislocated and distorted. 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 the death and resurrection of Jesus, the whole world can be rescued from lives distorted and dislocated by selfishness, by sin. Through the cross God overcame the separation caused by sin, and people were once again brought back into a right relationship with him.

This reconciliation is called the Atonement, which literally means making at one, or ‘at-one-ment’. God has made us at one with himself.

The third person of the Trinity is the person of the Holy Spirit; sometimes called the Divine Wisdom. He is the Spirit of God and the Spirit of Jesus. He is the presence of God in our lives and in the world.

Before Jesus died, rose again and returned to heaven, he promised his Spirit. He explains that the Holy Spirit ‘will teach you everything and will remind you of everything I have told you.’

An important part of being a Christian is learning to listen to the prompting of the Spirit. 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.

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

As we allow the Holy Spirit to work within us, we begin to see more and more evidence of the fruits of the Spirit in our lives, and he helps us as we seek to love God and love each other.