God described Himself to people who had just betrayed Him. Then He showed Himself in a person. Here is how the two fit, and how to read the portraits of God that seem not to.
The character of God is who He actually is, proven over time and under pressure. In His own words, He is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness.
The New Testament then points to a person. Jesus is the exact imprint of God's being, so every other picture of God in Scripture is read through Him.
A list of attributes of God tells you what He has. Character tells you what He does with it, especially when people let Him down.
Most English readers never notice this. The word character was Greek before it was English, and it appears exactly once in the New Testament, in the sentence that matters most for this subject.
“The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.”
Hebrews 1:3From charassō, to engrave or cut into.
The tool that does the engraving, the die itself.
The Abbott-Smith lexicon gives “a stamp or impress: as on a coin or seal”. Thayer adds “precise reproduction in every respect.”
The stamp of God's hypostasis, the word the NIV renders being. Not a resemblance. An impression.
A coin carries the exact shape of the die that struck it. You do not have to guess what the die looks like. You are holding the coin. The writer of Hebrews is saying that God's character is not something you reconstruct from scattered clues. It has been pressed into a human life you can read.
Paul says it with a different word: the Son is “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). Jesus says it most plainly of all. When Philip asks to be shown the Father, He answers, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).
Character is not what someone says about themselves on a good day. It is what comes out when they have been wronged, and that is the setting of God's most important self-description.
Weeks after hearing the covenant, Israel makes a golden calf and bows to it. Moses breaks the stone tablets at the foot of the mountain.
Moses asks to see God. God promises to make His goodness pass by and proclaim His name, but tells him, “you cannot see my face.”
God tells Moses to chisel out two tablets like the first ones. The covenant will be written again. The relationship survives.
God passes by and describes Himself. Not a show of power. A sentence about how He treats people.
“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. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.”
Exodus 34:6 to 7Read it in that setting and it lands differently. Israel has just traded God for a statue, and the first words out of His mouth about Himself are compassionate and gracious. Anger is there, and it is slow. Love is there, and it is abundant. The order is the character.
The second half is harder. I have walked through the third and fourth generation line in what the name YHWH means, and the short version is this: love to thousands, consequences to three or four, and Jesus refused to turn inherited blame into doctrine (John 9:3). If slow to anger is the phrase that caught you, there is a full page on what it means that God is slow to anger.
God gave His clearest self-description to people who had just betrayed Him. That is His character: not what He is like when you are doing well, but what He is like when you are not.
Exodus 34 is not the only picture of God in the Bible. Read straight through and you meet portraits that are hard to set side by side, and pretending otherwise helps no one.
Elijah calls fire down from heaven on a captain and his fifty soldiers, and the story presents it as God's answer.
Israel is told to destroy the nations of the land totally, make no treaty with them and show them no mercy.
God, about to judge Ephraim, stops Himself: “How can I give you up, Ephraim? ... My heart is changed within me; all my compassion is aroused.”
Jesus tells His followers to love their enemies, because the Father “causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good.”
Those are not the same picture. Jesus deals with that in a scene most people skim past.
A Samaritan village refuses to welcome Him. James and John ask, “Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them?” (Luke 9:54). They are reaching for Elijah, and some manuscripts even add “just as Elijah did.” They had a portrait of God from their own Scriptures and were ready to act on it.
“But Jesus turned and rebuked them” (Luke 9:55). Some later manuscripts add the words the King James kept, “Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of,” and most modern translations leave them out because the oldest copies lack them. Either way, the Son, the exact imprint of the Father, looked at a fire from heaven picture of God and said no.
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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
Hebrews opens by telling you how to handle this: “In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:1 to 2). Those last days were the closing years of the old covenant age that the first readers were living through. Many ways, partial and spread over centuries. Then one Son, complete.
That is what progressive revelation means. God did not change. People's understanding of Him grew, and Scripture records that growth honestly, including the places where people had not yet seen clearly.
Here is our position at Sound of Heaven. The Bible is God-breathed, and it was written through real human authors inside real covenants and cultures. Not every action or command attributed to God in its pages shows His character as clearly as Jesus does. Where a portrait of God does not look like Jesus, we do not bend Jesus to fit the portrait. Jesus is the correction.
The other view deserves a fair hearing. Many faithful Christians say that because God does not change, every portrait must be equally accurate, and that the conquest and the fire were real judgments in unique moments of history. We respect that, and we think it misses what John claims: “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known” (John 1:18). If the prophets had already made Him fully known, that sentence would not need writing.
We refuse to overstate it. This is not permission to delete the parts we dislike, and it does not make the Old Testament the bad half. Exodus 34 and Hosea 11 are among the tenderest pictures of God anywhere. Jesus is simply the standard every portrait is measured against.
Before deciding what a hard passage says about God, look at how Jesus treated sinners, enemies, outsiders and the people who killed Him.
Ask who wrote it, to whom, under which covenant and in what kind of literature. An ancient war report and a prophet's poem do different jobs.
Where the pictures agree, rejoice. Where they do not, trust the one Hebrews calls the exact imprint.
In Luke 9, what did James and John want to do to the Samaritan village?
They were reaching for 2 Kings 1, a real portrait of God from their own Scriptures. Jesus turned and rebuked them. The Son corrected the picture on the spot.
Every portrait carries the same weight, so the God who sends fire and the God who sends rain on His enemies sit side by side, and fear quietly wins. People raised this way often love Jesus and are wary of the Father.
The Old Testament God is angry and the New Testament God is kind. Marcion taught a version of this in the second century and the church rejected it. It also ignores Exodus 34, Hosea 11 and Jonah.
Both errors split what Jesus joined. He did not come to introduce a nicer God than the one who spoke to Moses. He came to show that same God accurately. One God, Father, Son and Spirit, each fully God, so the character you see in the Son is not a softer department of heaven. It is God.
Love belongs here briefly. John says God is love as a statement about what He is, not a mood He is sometimes in. So love is not one trait competing with the others. It is the shape all of them take. Anger is real, and Scripture speaks of the wrath of God without embarrassment, but it is the anger of love against what destroys people, and it is slow.
None of this makes Him small. God is sovereign, and He rules with this character.
Jesus never taught the character of God as information to agree with. He taught it as a family resemblance: “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:44 to 45). Children resemble parents. The passage ends with “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (5:48), and the perfection it means is love that does not stop at the edge of who deserves it.
“And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.”
2 Corinthians 3:18That is the Kingdom at work now, not someday. The Spirit takes the character stamped in Jesus and presses it into ordinary people: patience at work, kindness at home, faithfulness when nobody is checking. Paul calls it the fruit of the Spirit, and read next to Exodus 34 it sounds very familiar.
Some people learned God's character from a pulpit that used Him as a threat, or from someone who shouted in His name. If that is you, the picture you carry is not your fault, and it is not the final word. Watch Jesus with the children, with the woman caught in adultery, with Peter after the denial. That is what the Father is like toward you.
If it would help to talk it through, ask us to pray with you, or come sit with us on a Sunday in Deer Park.
God reveals His character so it can be reproduced. The goal was never a correct definition. It was a people who look like Him.
Moses asked to see God's glory and could not see His face. He got a sentence instead.
We got the face. Paul says the knowledge of God's glory is “displayed in the face of Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6). So whenever you are unsure what God is like, in a hard passage or a hard season, go to the Gospels and watch Jesus. He is not a hint about God's character. He is the stamp.
For related reading, see what God looks like, the Old Testament and the New, whether Jesus is God, the image of God and holiness.
The character of God is compassion, grace, patience, loyal love and faithfulness, spoken to Moses after a betrayal, stamped exactly in Jesus, and reproduced by the Spirit in the people who follow Him.
Send us the text that troubles you or the question you are carrying, and someone at Sound of Heaven will pray and work through it with you.
The character of God is who He is in how He treats people, consistently and under pressure. God described it Himself in Exodus 34:6 as compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness. The New Testament then points to a person. Hebrews 1:3 calls Jesus the exact representation of God's being, so the clearest look at God's character is the way Jesus lived, loved, forgave and died.
It is God's own description of Himself, proclaimed as He passed by Moses after Israel worshiped the golden calf. He calls Himself compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin, while not leaving the guilty unpunished. The same formula echoes through Numbers, Nehemiah, the Psalms, Joel and Jonah as the standard summary of who God is.
No. God does not change, and the church rejected the second century idea that the Old Testament God is a different, harsher deity. What changed is how clearly people saw Him. Hebrews 1:1 and 2 says God spoke through the prophets at many times and in various ways, then spoke by His Son. Some earlier portraits are partial, and Jesus is the standard every portrait is read through.
The Greek word is charaktēr, the source of the English word character. It meant an engraving tool and then the stamp or impression it left, like the image on a coin. Hebrews says the Son is the charaktēr of God's being. Jesus is not a partial likeness or one hint among many. He is God's own character pressed into a human life, which is why He told Philip that anyone who has seen Him has seen the Father.
By becoming like the One they look at. Jesus told His followers to love their enemies so they would be children of their Father, who sends sun and rain on everyone. Paul says believers are being transformed into the Lord's image by the Spirit. In ordinary life that looks like patience, kindness, faithfulness and forgiveness, the same traits God named in Exodus 34, growing in people over time.