Who is God to me?

This piece of work started because of a thread I read in a forum where this particular person did not believe in Jesus. As I read further, it appears that this person has a poor understanding of who God is. I decided then to sit and think this out. I will draw from what I learned throughout my life and use my own understanding of who and what God is. This means, that this document has a limit. I will also try to draw upon scripture and tradition as best I can. Now compared to other writings (like the Pope’s or an expert apologist for example), this document is just a wee little baby.

Let’s start with the basic stuff. Who is this we call God? God is a being, a spirit who is all good and perfect. He created everything, all heavenly and earthly matter, all things visible and invisible, and called it good. He did not create evil because evil is the absence of good. Plain and simple logic. Evil came into the world as a result of rejecting Him. God is true, good and beautiful and anything beyond this is a lie.

God is holy. He is pure and nothing unclean shall come before Him. God sustains all life. Anything outside of him cannot exist. This means, every breath you take and every heartbeat is sustained by God. The moment He “forgets” you, you cease to exist. God is omniscient. He knows all. Nothing is kept secret from Him. God is everywhere at all times and all places. Yes, even in the bathroom and bedroom, so deal with it. God can do all things and nothing is impossible for Him. He has no limit and He can do anything He wants as He pleases. He is awesome and almighty. He created the heavens and the earth out of nothing. God has no beginning nor an end. To have a beginning and an end would deny the characteristic of being God. There is only one God and he has proven this time and time again through history. Finally, God is a mystery. He reveals what we need to know and has done such. We cannot know him fully because we are finite beings. We have limits and we can only know so much. There are things of God we cannot know no matter what we do. The best thing to do is just leave it at that and take what you can. What part of mystery don’t you understand? And in this sense, God is unfathomable and incomprehensible.

That is just a piece of who God is. It’s time to peel of the surface and delve deeper.

As mentioned earlier, God is a mystery. Part of that mystery is that God, while being just one, is three persons. Again, I’ll throw in the word mystery. There is no need to be so worked up on this. God is three persons yet one being. Who are these three persons? God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy spirit. Three unique and distinct persons yet they share the same being, same divine nature. We call it the Blessed Trinity. Three Divine perons, the same God and same nature. They are not separate but one. In fact, the three are inseparable. Mystery. I might also add, St. Augustine said that if we understood Him, He would not be God. Among the three, God the Son took on a physical human form and lived among us, humans. He is the God with the human face. We call God the Son, Jesus. He is also the Word, the Eternal Word from whom all things were created. Being that they are inseparable, wherever one of them is present, the other two persons are also present. Now if this is true that Jesus is God, then to reject Him would mean rejecting God altogether. But I will discuss that later. Right now, I wish to articulate on each person.

God the Father, the first person of the Trinity. God revealed himself as the father. Does this mean that God is male? No. Remember, God is pure spirit and thus, no gender. However, he is a father because of what we know from scripture. Let’s try to explain this concept with the use of earthly fathers. Now I understand that there are some fathers who do not know how to be fathers. Once the understanding of what a father is falls apart, then you cannot know God in the proper sense. Plain and simple. This is why men need to be men. But beside that, a father is the initiator. Being a male, characteristics in him (and in his physical body) allow him to do things outwardly. Men are external. In the same sense, God did the initiative when he created all things. Paragrapth 239 of the Catechism says: “By calling God ‘Father’, the language indicates two things: that God is the origin of everything and transcendent authority; and that he is at the same time goodness and loving care for all his children.” Aren’t fathers the authority in families? Well, sadly in today’s world it’s not the case but it should damn well be the case. Parents should take back what is due to them.

Does this mean that God can’t be a mother? No. God is the ultimate parent. He is both father and mother in a sense that despite his authority, God is also tender and loving. Since God is the origin of all things, parenthood came from him. He possesses both the characteristics of a father and a mother even though He reveals himself as ‘father’. Remember, He does not have a gender.

As a loving father, God provides just as a loving eartly father would. Asking God for anything isn’t bothering Him. It is actually a sign that we acknowledge our limits and know that we need him. In fact, He wants us to keep asking. Earthly fathers cannot top that.

He answers prayers. We have this particular saying where we say God doesn’t say ‘yes’ to all prayers. God sometimes says ‘no’ to some prayers. The Eastern Catholics/Christians take this a little differently. They would say: God says ‘yes’ to all prayers… all prayers that we are truly asking from the deepest corners of our hearts even if we are not truly aware of them. Some people get angry because their prayers are not answered. Well, there’s your answer. Perhaps what you are asking isn’t what your heart deeply desires.

Sidenote: As of September 2007, through the grace of God and the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit, whenever I say the word “Catholic”, I mean both of the Eastern and Western Rites and not just the Roman Catholic Church. Being Roman Catholic or Latin-rite isn’t the only way to be Catholic but that is a story for another time.

God the Son, the second person of the Trinity. The Divine Word, by him and through him all things were made. The only person of the divine trinity to step into time, took physical form and lived among his creation. The second person of the Trinity took on human form and played by our rules. And because of this, He is both God and man. Not separate entities but together. Again, mystery. And we call this mystery, the Incarnation. I believe that this is the core of all things, the crux of the matter at hand. For a God to take on human form and play be our rules is mind-boggling, incomprehendable but it happened anyway. Certainly not impossible. We call him, Jesus.

This is where people fall into traps. They either do not believe that Jesus is God or they don’t believe in Him, period. And there are many reasons why people reject him. Some of which can be childish in my opinion. If you cannot comprehend the concept of the trinity, then absolutely, it will be difficult to see Jesus as God. But we have evidences in scripture. He himself claimed to be God by forgiving sins, on God can forgive sins. Jesus calls God ‘daddy’ with the word ‘abba’ which demonstrates a unique relationship (which also, by the way, I want my children to call me). In John 8:58, he calls himself “I AM”, God called himself “I AM” in the Old Testament.

There are plenty more evidences in scripture but I will not name them all. Let it be enough for now that Jesus did address himself as God.

Now Jesus Christ can be only one of the three: Liar, Lunatic or Lord. If we look at it, we can say that Jesus took things to the extreme. He fulfilled prophecies and fulfilled the laws. He radicalized the ten commandments by introducing just two: Love God and Love your neighbor. He died and came back to life. If he is a liar, then why did all that he has said come true? If he is a liar, why does the sea obey him? If he is a liar, why do even the demons listen to him? If he is a lunatic, why did he come back to life like he said he would? If he is a lunatic, how come so many people died in his name? Maybe, just maybe… he’s a god? Or maybe… he IS God?

From my perspective, there was never a question that Jesus is God. Perhaps it is a grace I enjoy and that some people don’t. I was introduced to Jesus as a kid as some form of super person. He can heal and perform miracles. Instinctively, I knew he wasn’t an ordinary person. It took my adult life to actually recognize him as fully God and fully man. These two concepts are not to be separated. He is both not one or the other. Keep in mind, mystery.

God the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity. Sadly, not a lot of people focus on the Holy Spirit. He is just as important as the other two persons. It is the Holy Spirit that gives power. The Catholic church isn’t what it is today without him. Priests cannot function without him. The Holy Spirit is the giver of life. He is just as much as God as the other two. He lives within us and comes to us through Baptism and Confirmation. It is the Holy Spirit that lives within us but remember because the Holy Spirit lives within us, it also means that the other two persons of the Trinity are there as well. It is the Holy Spirit that gives us the gifts to lead and live the Christian life.

If God now is three persons, we can see that despite being one God, He is a union and communion of persons. The Eastern church tried to depict God in iconography by painting three angels. The same angels that visited Abraham. If you look at the painting, you can see that they are facing each other, bowing to each other in reverence. If we are, then, created in His image, there is no wonder why we need relationships. See the connection? Within ourselves, we have a longing for communion because this is one of the things that make us most like God. Also, if this is indeed true, to reject one person of the Holy Trinity is to reject all persons thus rejecting God in His being. It’s simple logic.

Now, we peel another part of the surface and onto something deeper.

We’ve all heard of this sentence: God is love (it is also the title of Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical). Notice that it doesn’t say God is like love. God is the personification of love itself. He IS, get it? Just as he said “I AM”. Along with this topic I will also throw in something I’ve learned from reading Dr. Scott Hahn’s works: God is family. Again, note that it doesn’t say God is like a family but it says God IS family. He is the personification of family.

One thing comes to mind: God is the origin of all things. God is love in the fact that there is a Trinitarian element in love. There is the one who loves, the beloved and the act of love itself. God the Father initiates the love and gives it freely and totally. God the Son, receives the love of the Father and reciprocates it. He returns it back freely and totally. And that (free, total, faithful, fruitful) love is personified by the Holy Spirit. In the same sense, God is a family, consisting of Father, Son and the fruit of that love, the Holy Spirit.

In order to understand this further, however, we must know what love is. Simply put love is an act of the will, to desire what is best for the beloved. Love also has to be free, total, fruitful, and faithful. Taking this concept of love and knowing that God is the origin of things, then we can say that relationships should be modeled after God. Get it? Are you seeing how things relate? Let’s take a married couple as an example. Both husband and wife, in order to love, need to desire what is best for the beloved. This love has to be free, total, faithful and fruitful in order for it to be genuine. If given totally, faithfully and freely, the love will be fruitful... but it doesn’t have to mean children all the time.

The fact that God is love is the reason why we exist. We were created out of sheer love. God wanted to express this love and gave it freely. But something happened. Sin entered into the world, the moment we rejected this love through the disobedience of our first parents. And because sin had entered the world, evil came and everything fell apart. So don’t go blaming God for evil. He did not make it but I will admit that he allows it. Evil is not the will of God because he is true, good and beautiful. However, he does allow for bad things to happen because the way He sees things is way better than ours. He can see things we cannot. And therefore, he has plans for our own good using what is bad. Lemons to lemonades, not just sugar water.

Now, if God knows all things, why did he allow this to happen? If God is everywhere, where was he when this happened? Remember what I said about love… love is an act of the will. In a sense, God’s love was rejected by Adam and Eve. With love comes a certain degree of trust. Our first parents failed to trust. And because God loves us, he didn’t wipe us out and started over. If we are created in His image and likeness, it would also look like wiping Himself out. Instead, he let us live and promised to fix everything. God did not abort us and recreated everything, remember that. We’re that important that unlike a video game, we can’t simply abort and replay. Bad example but I do hope you get my drift.

And with this in mind, I can safely say that God is mercy. The reason that he can forgive our offenses is because of his great love as mentioned previously. We do not deserve heaven because of what we are and what we’ve become. Despite this, God paid for the guilt of sin so that we may be with Him. This is mercy. Mercy is to give someone something he doesn’t deserve. We don’t deserve this and yet God is giving it to us anyway. That’s right. We all should be punished but because God loves us so much, He doesn’t want to condemn us and keeps calling us. He wants us to partake in His very nature. Sidenote: This is also the core of the sipirtual life of Eastern Christians, a spirituality I have adopted called ‘divinization’. Again, a story for another time.

And because God does good with His promise… This is where God the Son, the Eternal Word, Jesus Christ comes in. During the course of history after the fall, no one was worthy enough to pay for the sins of man. It took God Himself to pay for it. And so the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Jesus played by our rules, took on limits of the physical nature. He showed the world the proper world view if you will, the right way of doing and seeing things. Then He showed us what it means to love… To give up one’s life for the sake of another. It is the highest form of love.

There are questions on why Jesus had to die. God could’ve simply willed our salvation but knowing who we are (because God is the smartest being), we wouldn’t learn anything. By dying on the cross, God showed us how much he loved us. He was willing to give up his own life for us. And you have the balls to say that God is a liar? By Jesus’ death on the cross, the wages of sin, past, present and future, have been paid.

So if everything was paid for, why do we still experience suffering? Jesus did not promise a rose garden. Instead, he calls us to deny ourselves which is the ideal mode of life. We still need to carry our crosses and work out our own salvation. But by dying on the cross, resurrecting and ascending, we now have a chance of being with God for eternity. Jesus showed us the way. As I mentioned earlier, He showed us the correct way to view everything. This is much so expressed in the Theology of the Body but I digress.

Once Jesus ascended, it was time for the Holy Spirit to take over. I just realized that the timeline for salvation history is Trinitarian in nature. The Old Testament reveals God the Father. The New Testament reveals God the Son. And the time of the church, which includes our time, reveals God the Holy Spirit. Isn’t that neat? Because Jesus died, resurrected and ascended, we now have the means to get to heaven to be with God and share in His divine nature. We have the mother church, the seven sacraments and all the other means to get to heaven. Now, remember that God is not limited and therefore not bound to any of these. He can still save someone because of what Jesus Christ has done. But we ‘believing’ Catholics are bound because we are accountable for our knowledge.

I hope I am making sense so far. So what does all this mean now? To continue, I’d like to track back to the beginning again. God is love. From that love we were created. Not simply created as an animal but we are created in God’s image and likeness. Again, God is a trinity, three Divine persons, one God. God is family being Father, Son and Holy Spirit. If we are created in the image and likeness of God and God is both love and family, then we must be capable of loving and being loved. This must also mean that we mirror God in some way and that we need relationships in one form or another. Then take the Incarnation. God, from outside of time, came into time and became human. This is what Pople John Paul II calls the nuptial mystery. Remember the joke, if you love it so much why don’t you marry it? Well, God wants to marry us and be intimate with us (If you knew the proper meaning of the word intimacy, you wouldn’t have dirty thoughts after reading that word). That’s how close He wants to be with us. That’s how much He loves us. We were created out of sheer love and He want’s to share, no, give that love to us. And know that He loves us despite our rejection of Him (or of any person of the Trinity). He loves us more than we know, more that we love ourselves, more than anyone else could.

God sees all and knows all. There are a lot of people who struggle with this. And it compromises their faith sometimes. As Catholics, this should not be an issue because we do not believe in dichotomies. Catholics should be more integrated because we do things “according to the whole.” No ‘either ors’… it’s ‘both and.’ If God sees all and knows all then this means He knows our future, He knows what we’re thinking, and He knows every decision we make. So what does it matter whether we choose to do good or bad if He knows where we’re gonna end up? This is not how a Catholic should think. If we go “according to the whole” instead of segregating this idea, we can find our proper answer.

God can certainly see everything: past, present and future. He know what will happen to us. He knows what we will decide. He sees our entire lives like a huge piece of tapestry. Since he is out of time, he can easily see everything in one glance. But because He loves us, he gives us the freedom to choose. Obviously, He wants us to choose the good but at the same time He respects our choice. To take away free will is to take away love. Remember that love is an act of the will. To remove this would make us automatons. Where is the love in that?

Let’s take a small example… say you ask someone to complete the following: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the ________.” The obvious answer is earth. We know it’s earth but just because we know it’s earth doesn’t stop the other person from saying something else like ‘dirt’ for instance. Do you follow? Of course, being humans, we can’t read minds so we won’t know the other person’s choices. For God, he’d know what our choices are and still allow us to make choices of our own.

Another stumbling stone would be, if God knew bad things are gonna happen, why did He allow it? When God sees something, He sees beyond our imagining. Remember, one big giant tapestry. Remember, God is a parent. The cheapest example I can give is a parent having a child get vaccinated. I remember the story of my wife taking our daughter to get vaccinated. Vaccination involves pain. Now to my daughter, she’ll have no clue. All she knows is that it’s painful. But as parents, we see value in this. We get her vaccinated so she won’t get sick later on. We know she’s gonna get sick in the future so we go ahead to get her vaccinated so she won’t have to suffer it later. Get my meaning? The same thing with God only on a much much higher degree. Why do we have collapsing bridges? Look what happened after that? All bridges are being inspected.

God’s foreknowledge is different from our foreknowledge. Different principles apply. Since God is outside of time, he see’s the whole story, from beginning to end, all at once. This is called the Eternal Now. He is equally present at all points in time, at every moment. So from the moment he creates us, He immediately sees our end, the decisions we make. This is a tough subject so I won’t venture on it too much. But if I must make analogies with the comic book stories I read, it’s like God can see all possible timelines (including the branches) all at once. Since He is outside of time, time does not restrict Him and he is able to see the possible paths of all our decisions so He sees all different ends. At the same time, He knows what we’re going to choose but lets us choose anyway. It’s a thorny subject and what I wrote is just my two cents. Just take it for what it’s worth.

One mistake we can do is to compare God with our standards. Big, big, big, big mistake. Never compare God to our own level because He transcends everything. I’ve seen this as a habit to some Christians as well and this makes them stuck in their level of spirituality sometimes. God does not have boundaries and if we box Him in, he tends to kick through the box. God is beyond everything and has no limit.

God never leaves us alone, really. The sufferings we endure are really nothing but we should endure them anyway because God always pays us back. Perhaps not in this life but definitely in the next. Just for enduring suffering, we are paid back. God makes things right in the end. Sadly, some people don’t see it this way. They see it as complete abandonment. God does not abandon you even if it looks that way. We just have to trust Him simply because He is true, good and beautiful. But this falls apart really if we have issues with our own earthly families. Some women for example, see God as a tyrant. That’s possibly because their fathers weren’t the best fathers. Some men don’t know how to be men because their fathers didn’t really teach them the truth and were succumbed to the garbage. See how important a father is? But I digress.

God is a jealous God. Does it mean that God has emotions? No. What this means is that God wants to be the lead in your life. Like a tender and loving mother, God is always seeking us. Even as we run away from Him, he still comes after us.

Let’s take a look at the Gospel story of the woman at the well (John 4: 5-42). This Gospel story can be interpreted in so many levels but for the purpose of this paper, I will focus on the theme of ‘thirst’. We ‘thirst’ for God but did you know that He also ‘thirsts’ for us. Allow me to demonstrate. Let’s start off with the story with Jesus sitting by the well at high noon (sixth hour). A woman comes to the well and they encounter each other. The woman can very well represent humanity. Humanity thirsts and therefore seeks a well to quench it. Jesus, on the other hand, asks her for a drink. In other words he’s saying he’s thirsty. Here in this scene, the thirst of God and the thirst of man meet. As a side note, look at how God and man are represented. God is imaged as a man and we are imaged as a woman. This alone tells us who we are in relation to God. Going back, we can say here that Jesus thirsts for our faith and we thirst for him. However, we quench our thirst for God in all the wrong things. In this story, this represents the well. Everyone who drink of this water will be thirsty again but Jesus offers living water, in our terms ‘grace.’ It is clear that he is saying that God is the only one who can satisfy.

Moving further into the story, Jesus asks the woman for her husband and she replies that she has no husband. Then Jesus answers, “You are right in saying, ‘I do not have a husband.’ For you have had five husbands and the one you have now is not your husband.” What the Lord answered is packed with meaning: historical, spiritual and even literal. The number five has meaning. St. Augustine interpreted them as the five senses. We seek to satisfy ourselves through the five senses. And the husband can be interpreted as the things that govern our life. Tracking back, you can at least see now the idea of God wanting to marry us? God wants to be our ‘husband’, the one who governs our life. God should be our all and He is our hope. He is the great hope.

God deserves our worship. He is God after all. Society has lost the sense of what is sacred because of science or technology. We think we can do all things because we’ve learned how to maniplulate creation. This is good in some aspects but we must remember that we are creatures ourselves. I would believe that this is the fault of the ever famous phrase, “I think therefore I am.” Perhaps it is not Descartes fault but simply the thought itself has fault. The proper phrase should be “God is therefore I am.” I exist because of God, I don’t exist because I simply think. This is a thought that incites dualism which we should never succumb to (as Catholics anyway). Now, since God is all holy, powerful, almighty, etc., He deserves to be worshiped the way a God is worshipped. I guess what I am trying to say is that we need to give Him our all. This is what we Catholics do at Mass (or Divine Liturgy for Eastern Catholics) as we sit, stand, kneel and bow. We offer to God, we give Him ourselves. However, this is not for God’s benefit but ours. He is awesome and therefore feared. Fear in a good way, the fear that gives respect not the fear that deprives. Simply put, God loved us with His all, if we are created in His image and likeness then we should also love Him with our all (free, total, faithful, and fruitful love).

All I have written here is just the collection of what I have learned since childhood but only deepened in my late twenties. I recently read the Catechism to justify my writing. All that I wrote is in there. If you wish to consult the Catechism, read part one, section two. This leads me to believe that my teachers had been teaching Catholic Catechism all this time. Of course, this writing also includes some of my musings but in general, I hope I have kept to what the church teaches and I do believe I have. I added side notes because my thoughts tend to wander and I have to be faithful to the scope of my paper. Anything beyond will have to be a story for another time. Most of my thoughts have been influenced by JP2’s Theology of the Body and Eastern Catholic mysticism.

I am sure of one thing however. This is the same teaching taught before; this is the same teaching taught now; and this is the same teaching that will be taught in the future. God never changes, He is constant. This would also mean that the Old Testament God is no different from the New Testament God. Careful reading of scripture will tell you that despite the wars and the violence. You can’t just take the wars alone and base God on it. Taking things out of context will never give you the real truth. Remember, “according to the whole”, that is what we Catholics are all about… no dualisms, no dichotomies. On a final note as I part, Theology of the Body also teaches that if we want to know more about God, all we have to do is to look at our own bodies.