The usual list comes from philosophy. When Scripture describes God it reaches for one sentence He said about Himself, and it quotes that sentence everywhere.
The usual list of the attributes of God runs through omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, eternal, unchanging, holy, just, loving, merciful and faithful. All of that is defensible from Scripture.
But notice something. When the Bible describes God, it does not reach for that list. It reaches for one sentence God says about Himself in Exodus 34, and it quotes it over and over.
That difference is worth the whole page. The philosophical vocabulary is useful. It is not the vocabulary Scripture actually uses when it wants to tell you who God is.
These are real and worth knowing. They are mostly abstractions built from many passages rather than terms Scripture uses.
All-powerful. Job 42:2, no purpose of His can be thwarted. The word itself is Latin, not biblical.
All-knowing. Psalm 139 is the great passage, and it is intimate rather than technical. You knit me together.
Everywhere at once. Jeremiah 23:24 and again Psalm 139. Where can I go from your Spirit.
Without beginning or end. Psalm 90:2, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.
Set apart, other, not a bigger version of us. Isaiah 6 and Revelation 4 both use the threefold repetition.
He does what is right and keeps what He said. Deuteronomy 32:4 puts both together in one line.
One thing the classical tradition itself insists on is worth borrowing: these are not components. God is not assembled out of parts that could be separated. Every one of them is a way of describing the same single being.
Moses asks to see God's glory. What he gets is not a sight, it is a self-description, spoken aloud as God passes by.
“The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.”
Exodus 34:6 and 7Then watch where that sentence goes. It is picked up in Numbers, Nehemiah, Psalm 86, Psalm 103, Psalm 145, Joel, Jonah and Nahum. When the writers of Scripture want to say what God is like, this is the formula they reach for.
God as a set of properties, most of them beginning with omni, arranged like a specification sheet.
Compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, abundant in love and faithfulness. A description of how He deals with people, given in His own voice.
The most striking use is in Jonah. Jonah quotes this formula at God as a complaint, furious that mercy was extended to Nineveh. Margaret Odell of St. Olaf College reads God's relenting there as “the reversal of a decision to execute punishment”. Jonah knew exactly what God was like and that was the problem.
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Manage My Giving"Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver."2 Corinthians 9:7
This is where we differ from a lot of teaching on this subject, and it is not a small difference.
“The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being.”
Hebrews 1:3The image of the invisible God. Not a partial likeness, and not one revelation among several equally weighted ones.
Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. Said in answer to a disciple asking to be shown God, which is Moses's request again.
God spoke in many ways through the prophets and has now spoken by His Son. Many ways, then one clear one, in that order.
Where a picture of God elsewhere does not look like Jesus, Jesus is the correction rather than the exception. He is the standard, not one data point among many.
The clearest attribute list in existence is a life. If you want to know what God is like, read how this man treated people.
Here is the practical damage this subject does when it goes wrong. People learn the attributes as a list, and then they start playing them off against one another.
You will have heard the move. God's holiness demands that He deal with sin, so His love has to wait its turn. His justice requires this, therefore His mercy is limited to that. Once the attributes are separate items, they can be ranked, and in practice the ranking almost always puts wrath above love and produces a God who is barely restraining Himself.
A God at war with Himself, held back by one quality from doing what another quality wants. This is not how Scripture ever describes Him.
His justice is loving and His love is just. At the cross nobody is overruled. Exodus 34 puts forgiveness and not leaving the guilty unpunished in the same breath without apology.
1 John says God is love. It is a statement about what He is, not a quality He has a lot of, and it is the only sentence of that grammatical shape in the New Testament about God's character. We take that seriously and we refuse pictures of God that require love to be held back by something else in Him.
The other failure is abstraction. Turn God into a set of philosophical properties and He stops being someone you can know and becomes a concept you can be correct about. The Bible never does this. It tells stories, records conversations, and lets Him speak for Himself, and when it summarises, it summarises with compassionate and gracious rather than with any of the omni-words.
There is also honest tension worth naming. Scripture says God does not change, and Scripture says He relented over Nineveh and over Israel after the golden calf. We do not think that is a contradiction to be explained away by deciding one of the two is figurative. It is a God whose settled character is consistent and whose dealings with people are genuinely responsive, which is exactly what Exodus 34 describes.
Where does Scripture most often go when it describes God's character?
Compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness. Given in God's own voice when Moses asked to see His glory, and then reused throughout the Old Testament as the standard summary.
Your picture of God's character sets everything downstream, and most people's is inherited rather than examined.
If He is mainly powerful, you will relate to Him carefully, the way you relate to anything large. If He is mainly holy in the sense of easily offended, you will relate at a distance and manage your appearance. If He is mainly a set of correct propositions, you will relate by being right.
If He is what He says He is in Exodus 34, and what He looks like in Jesus, then compassionate and gracious and slow to anger are the first things true about Him in any room you are in, including this one.
That is not a softer God. Slow to anger implies anger, and the same sentence refuses to leave the guilty unpunished. It is a truer one, and it is the one He chose to say out loud when somebody asked to see Him.
For related ground, see the character of God, who God is, God is love, what God looks like, holiness and what it means that God is sovereign.
The list is useful and it is not how Scripture talks. God described Himself as compassionate and gracious, the Bible quotes that sentence more than any other, and Jesus is what it looks like.
Most people inherited that picture rather than choosing it, and it can be examined. Send it here and somebody at Sound of Heaven will pray over it with you.
The usual list runs through omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, eternal, unchanging, holy, just, loving, merciful and faithful, and all of it is defensible from Scripture. But those are abstractions assembled from many passages, and most of the terms are Latin rather than biblical. When the Bible itself describes God, it reaches for something else entirely.
Exodus 34:6 and 7, spoken aloud as He passes by after Moses asks to see His glory: the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. That sentence is then picked up in Numbers, Nehemiah, Psalm 86, Psalm 103, Psalm 145, Joel, Jonah and Nahum. It is Scripture's standard summary of His character.
Because he knew exactly what God was like and resented it being applied to Nineveh, Israel's enemy. He recites the mercy formula at God in anger. Margaret Odell of St. Olaf College reads God's relenting there as the reversal of a decision to execute punishment. The book ends with God asking Jonah whether He should not care about a city of people who cannot tell their right hand from their left.
Scripture never describes Him that way. The common move, where holiness demands something so love has to wait its turn, treats the attributes as separate forces that can be ranked, and the ranking almost always puts wrath above love. Exodus 34 puts forgiving wickedness and not leaving the guilty unpunished in the same breath without apology. His justice is loving and His love is just.
He governs it. Hebrews 1:3 calls Him the exact representation of God's being, Colossians 1:15 the image of the invisible God, and John 14:9 has Him saying anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. Hebrews 1:1 sets the order: God spoke in many ways through the prophets and has now spoken by His Son. Where a picture of God elsewhere does not look like Jesus, Jesus is the correction rather than the exception.