Every picture of God you carry has to pass one test. Does it look like the One who touched lepers, wept at a friend's grave, and prayed for the men nailing Him to a cross?
The true nature of God is seen fully in Jesus. God is exactly like Jesus, and there is nothing in God that is unlike Him.
God is love and God is holy, and the two never compete. Where an Old Testament portrait looks nothing like Jesus, Jesus gets the final word.
That is the Sound of Heaven position, and it comes straight from the New Testament. For the wider overview of names, attributes and the Trinity, start with who God is. This page asks a narrower question. What is He actually like?
Build a picture of God from the loudest Old Testament scenes or childhood fear, then fit Jesus in as the gentle exception.
Look at Jesus first and let His life define power, justice, holiness and love.
Most of us inherited a God before we ever read a Gospel, then met Jesus and quietly assumed He was the nicer half of a two-part deal. The New Testament refuses that arrangement, and it says so more than once.
Philip asks to see the Father. Jesus answers, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” Not a partial view. The whole view.
“The Son is the image of the invisible God.” The God nobody could see now has a face you can look at.
“The exact representation of his being.” Not a rough sketch. What God is, shown in a person.
This is where the Trinity stops being a classroom topic. Jesus shows the Father perfectly because He is not a messenger standing outside of God. He is God the Son: one God with the Father and the Holy Spirit, three distinct Persons, each fully God. Only God can show you God. More in the Trinity in the Bible.
Jesus is not the exception to what God is like. He is the definition of it.
“Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”
1 John 4:8John does not say God has love. He says love is what God is. We walk through that sentence in God is love, so here I want to press on one thing: how love relates to holiness.
Many of us were taught the two pull in opposite directions. Love wants to hold you, holiness cannot stand to be near you, and God is pictured as torn inside. Watch Jesus and that tension disappears.
Under the old covenant, holiness was guarded by separation. Touch something unclean and you became unclean.
Mark 1:41. A man with leprosy kneels, and Jesus reaches out and touches him. The uncleanness does not spread to Jesus. The wholeness spreads to the man.
God's holiness is not fragile. It is goodness so strong it heals what it touches.
So when Scripture says God is holy, it does not mean He is squeamish about you. It means He is wholly good, set apart from everything that destroys. Holiness is the shape love takes when it refuses to leave you the way it found you. More on the word in what holiness means.
God's holiness is not the reason He keeps His distance. It is the reason He can come close and not be stained.
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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 honest people get stuck, and they should.
“Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”
1 Samuel 15:3 (NIV)Put that next to Jesus welcoming little children and you feel the problem. Pretending you do not is not faith.
The strongest traditional answer: God gives life and has the right to take it, the Amalekites had attacked Israel's weakest stragglers (Deuteronomy 25:17 to 18), and this was a one-time judgment, never a pattern to copy. Serious Christians hold that view, and they are not cruel for holding it. A second answer notes that ancient war reports used total language for partial victories, and the Bible's own record agrees.
Saul spares the king and the army keeps the best livestock.
Years later David fights them and “none of them got away, except four hundred young men who rode off on camels and fled.”
In the days of Hezekiah, men of Simeon “killed the remaining Amalekites who had escaped.”
So the total language was war rhetoric. True, but not enough, because even the rhetoric puts words in God's mouth that Jesus would never say.
At Sound of Heaven we read Scripture as a God-breathed story told through real human authors in their own cultures, with a revelation of God that grows clearer until it is perfectly clear in Jesus. So not every sentence that begins “the Lord says” shows God as He truly is. Some show how a faithful people in a violent age understood Him.
That is not us taking scissors to the Bible. The Bible does it first. 2 Samuel 24:1 says the Lord's anger burned against Israel, “and he incited David” to count the people. Retelling the same event centuries later, 1 Chronicles 21:1 says, “Satan rose up against Israel and incited David to take a census of Israel.” The later writer, with more light, would not lay that act at God's feet.
Jesus does the same with the Law. In Matthew 5:38 to 39 He quotes eye for eye and then says, but I tell you. The older words were written. They were never the final word.
So we hold two things together. Scripture is inspired, and Jesus is its interpreter. When a portrait of God commands what Jesus forbids, the portrait carries the limits of the people who painted it, not a flaw in God. And we refuse the opposite error of discarding the Old Testament. It is the story that leads to Him.
More on this in the Old Testament and the New.
In 1 Chronicles 21:1, who incites David to take the census that 2 Samuel 24:1 ties to the Lord's anger?
The Chronicler, writing long after Samuel's account, names the adversary. It is one of the clearest places where Scripture itself sharpens a picture of God over time.
In Luke 9 a Samaritan village refuses to welcome Jesus, and two of His friends have a Bible story ready.
“Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them?” But Jesus turned and rebuked them.
Luke 9:54 to 55 (NIV)In 2 Kings 1, Elijah called fire down on soldiers sent by the king of Samaria. James and John had precedent, Scripture and the same region. Jesus rebuked them anyway.
An honest note. The famous line, “You do not know what manner of spirit you are of. For the Son of Man did not come to destroy men's lives but to save them,” is in the King James and New King James, but missing from the oldest manuscripts, which is why most modern translations leave it out. The point stands without it.
The cross finishes the thought. When the world did its worst to God in the flesh, He did not call down fire. He forgave. That is not a footnote to His character. It is His character. We work through the anger passages in what the wrath of God is and in what the cross represents.
Archbishop Michael Ramsey said it in one line: “God is Christlike and in him is no un-Christlikeness at all.” Brad Jersak has spent years unpacking that sentence, and our conversation with him is here: Brad Jersak on what God is really like.
Jesus had a Bible story that justified fire, and He still said no.
If Jesus is the true picture, some pictures have to go. These three are the most common.
A furious God who has to be managed with performance and fear. Jesus never asked anyone to calm His Father down. He said the Father Himself loves you (John 16:27).
A God who wound up the universe and stepped back to watch. Jesus shows a God who notices sparrows and weeps at a friend's tomb (John 11:35).
A God so soft He never says no. Jesus looked at the rich young man, loved him, and told him the one thing standing in his way (Mark 10:21).
This cuts both ways. If you are recovering from the tyrant, do not swing into the grandfather. Love that never confronts is indifference with a smile. And if the tyrant feels safer because it takes sin seriously, look at the cross. Nobody has taken sin more seriously than the God who went there to end its hold on us.
Some people learned about God through fear, from a parent, a pulpit or a youth night that used Him as a threat. That picture gets used most on children and on people with no way to push back, and it leaves real wounds.
You do not have to repair your view of God in an afternoon. Read one Gospel slowly and at every scene ask, is this what God is like? Then let the answer be yes. If you would like someone to pray with you, send us a prayer request.
It comes down to one habit. When you read, pray or hurt, ask: does this look like Jesus?
If the God in your head is angrier, colder or softer than Jesus, He is a draft. The finished portrait has scars in His hands, and He is not holding them against you.
That is where confidence comes from. There is no hidden God standing behind Jesus who feels differently about you, and the Spirit He gave is forming that same likeness in ordinary people right now.
For related reading, see the character of God, the attributes of God, loving your enemies and the image of God. And if you are on Long Island, come see us in Deer Park.
God is exactly like Jesus: love that is holy and holiness that heals, with no un-Christlike corner anywhere in Him, which is why every harsh portrait in Scripture gets read through the One who refused the fire and forgave from the cross.
You do not have to sort it out alone. Send us your questions or a prayer request and someone at Sound of Heaven will walk through it with you.
The true nature of God is revealed fully in Jesus Christ. Jesus said anyone who has seen Him has seen the Father, and Hebrews calls Him the exact representation of God's being. So God is love, God is holy, and those two never compete. He moves toward broken people and forgives His enemies. A picture of God that does not look like Jesus is incomplete.
No. There is one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and He has never changed. What changed was how clearly people saw Him. Scripture is a progressive revelation written through real human authors, and some portraits carry the limits of the people telling the story. Jesus is the full and final revelation, so He is the lens for every earlier page. You can watch it happen when 1 Chronicles 21 retells 2 Samuel 24.
Honestly. 1 Samuel 15:3 is a hard text. The Bible's own record shows the total language was war rhetoric, since Amalekites appear again in 1 Samuel 27 and 30 and a remnant is still around in Hezekiah's day. At Sound of Heaven we go further and read the passage through Jesus, who refused to call down fire on a hostile village. The command shows how Israel understood God then. Jesus shows what God is truly like.
No. Under the old covenant, holiness was protected by separation, but when Jesus touched a man with leprosy in Mark 1:41, the uncleanness did not spread to Him. His wholeness spread to the man. That is what God's holiness is like. It is not a wall. It is goodness so complete that it heals what it touches, which is why Jesus ate with the people religious leaders avoided.
Because love is not indifferent to what destroys the people it loves. In Scripture, wrath is God's settled opposition to sin and harm, not a temper that needs calming down. It is read through the cross, where God answered the worst humanity could do with forgiveness. Love and wrath are not a split personality. Wrath is what love looks like when it stands against the thing that is killing you.