Who Is God?
Who am I?
No, I don’t have amnesia. And, no, I am not having an existential crisis. I’m seriously asking the question, who am I? Who would you say I am?
I’m Pete Metzger, son of Paul and Norine, husband to Lydia, father to Franklin, brother to five siblings, uncle to who knows how many nephews and nieces anymore.
I’m Pastor Metzger, called servant of Jesus Christ and called to serve St. Peter Lutheran Church in St. Albert, Alberta, Canada.
I’m an Enneagram 5. According to Gretchen Rubin I’m a Rebel. According to WizardingWorld.com I’m a Ravenclaw.
Who am I? That’s a complicated question. We can base our identities on our relationships, on our responsibilities, on our characteristics. But you can’t just pick any one of those things; you are all of those things put together. That’s what makes us unique and special, but that’s also what makes us complicated.
It’s hard enough to nail down someone’s identity even if you have tools like the Meier’s Briggs personality test or a magical sorting hat that can read your emotions. What if I were to ask you, “Who is God?” We can’t plug him into an online questionnaire; he isn’t a character in some fictional story, whose author can give us more information about him. But thankfully we don’t have to rely on those kinds of things, because we have something better. We have God’s own Word to tell us who he is. It doesn’t make the answer any less complicated, but it does make the answer certain and clear.
I said before that we can base our identities on our relationships, responsibilities and characteristics. We can do the same for God, remembering that he is not just any one of those many things, but he’s all of them, all at the same time.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Even before we follow this very simple, three-part approach to who God is, what do we call him? You can call me “Pete,” but what do you call God?
It turns out that God has many names. Just think of the different ways we start our prayers, e.g. “Heavenly Father,” “Lord Jesus Christ,” “Holy Spirit,” etc… There are many names for God, many of which he gives us himself, but the one that comes closest to capturing his essence is the name he used when he spoke to Moses.
Before Moses was willing to go to Egypt and demand that Pharaoh let all the Israelite slaves go free, he was worried that people wouldn’t believe that God had sent him, so he asked God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?” To which God replied, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I am has sent me to you.’”[1]
As a footnote for the next time we do Bible trivia, this is God’s name Jehovah or Yahweh. This is the name God uses when you see “Lord” in all caps in your Bible. This is his most special and revered name.
It is also the perfect name for God, and as maddening as it is puzzling, it actually tells us so much about our God.
“I am who I am.” He is like no one else. No one else is like him. He is entirely unique. He doesn’t have to define or describe himself in comparison or in relation to anyone else. He is in a league entirely of his own. He is who he is. But he is. And that is one of the characteristics that we can know about our God.
He is.
One of our hymns calls him “the everlasting instant.”[2] Or to put it the way that the writer to the Hebrews does, “[He] is the same yesterday and today and forever.”[3] It’s a paradox. How can you be both present and past and future all at the same time? Well, that’s one of the things that makes him God! He is incredibly unique. And even in his name we learn something special about God, i.e. that he is eternal. He is everlasting. He has no beginning, no end. He was here before the world was created, and he will continue to be long after this world has ceased to exist. God is. He is eternal. That is one of his characteristics.
It’s hard to comprehend, isn’t it? Everything we know has a shelf-life, an expiration date. After enough time even the mountains erode and the stars in the sky explode. Nothing lasts forever, except for God. God is eternal. God is “I am who I am,” the Lord. That’s what he calls himself in Exodus 3.
But that name poses a problem when we read Genesis 1, i.e. the first chapter of the first book of the whole Bible, because there God says, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”[4]
If God calls himself – if God’s name is – “I am,” what sounds a little off when we hear him say, “Let us make mankind in our image…”?
Not to get too grammatical, but one is singular and the other is plural.
Is God having an existential crisis here? Does God suffer from a multiple personality disorder like schizophrenia? How many Gods are there? Well, this is where it gets a little trippy.
In Deuteronomy 6:4, God tells Moses to say to the Israelites, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.”[5] In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, 2,000 years later, Paul says, “There is no God but one.”[6]
There is only one God. Christians are monotheists. We only worship one God.
But God himself still says in the very first chapter of the very first book of the whole Bible, “Let us make mankind in our image…” How can this be? The short answer is: the Trinity, i.e. God is Triune.
Quick question, how many wheels does a tricycle have?
Three, of course.
How many wheels does a unicycle have?
One, obviously.
There you have the root of the word “Triune,” i.e. 3 and 1.
There is only one God, but there are 3 distinct persons within that one God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Throughout the Bible they pop up in different places and do different things, but they are nevertheless united in everything they do. I’ll give you two examples.
The first words of the Bible are: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.[7]
How many members of the Trinity do you see in Genesis 1?
It’s fairly easy to see two members of the Trinity in the first two sentences. Often, when you just see the word “God,” that refers to God the Father. Creation is his main responsibility – that will be our entire focus in worship next week; more on that then.
But the Father didn’t create the world all on his own. In the very next sentence, we read that the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. The third member of the Trinity was there too, working together with the Father to create the world. Two out of three!
The third – or rather, the second member of the Trinity – might be harder to see. Where is Jesus, the Son of God, at creation? Let’s jump to John 1 for some more information.
It starts the same way as Genesis, “In the beginning,” but then John uses a special title for Jesus; instead of calling him the Son of God, he calls him “the Word.” He says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made.”[8]
Jesus, the Son of God, was there at creation too! He was active in collaborating with the Father and the Spirit to bring this whole universe into existence. And with this information from John 1, when we go back to Genesis 1, we can see Jesus there. John says that Jesus is ”the Word;” in Genesis whenever anything is created, God speaks, e.g. “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”[9] That’s Jesus – the Son of God – in action.
So, when it comes to the responsibility of creation, all three members of the Trinity were present and active. That’s your first example. And, by the way, that gives us more characteristics about God too. He is all-powerful – to create everything out of nothing – and he is infinitely wise – to create ecosystems and planetary orbits, stars that mark out seasons and days and years. That’s your first example of the Trinity being distinct but united.
The second example fast forwards a couple thousand years and takes us to the baptism of Jesus. Jesus met John the Baptist by the Jordan River and insisted on being baptized by him. This was kind of weird; John objected, because baptism is for people who are sinful. Jesus didn’t commit any sin – he was holy (which is another characteristic of God, by the way) – so John said, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?”
Jesus replied, “Let it be so now; it is proper for us to this to fulfill all righteousness.”[10] – I’ll explain that in a second – Then John consented. As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”[11]
How many members of the Trinity do you see in Matthew 3?
We see the Spirit of God descend onto the Son of God while God the Father speaks from heaven. All three are present. All three are distinct. But all three are working for the same goal.
The reason the Father was pleased with his Son – the reason the Son was set apart by the Spirit – was because of the work that the Son had come to do. Jesus was born to be your righteous Saviour, to do everything that you were expected to do, but to do it perfectly, on your behalf, and then die on a cross in your place to forgive all your sin.
Now this is just the beginning of our series on the Trinity. We will talk much more about each of the members of this Trinity, about what happened to God’s perfect creation and how Jesus entered into it. We will talk much more about the work of Jesus and the work of the Holy Spirit and the work of Christians who believe in them. But it starts here with the Trinity – three persons in one God united by their love for you. That’s the last but certainly not the least characteristic of our Triune God, i.e. he loves you.
Father, Son and Holy Spirit were all active in bringing you into this world. Father, Son and Holy Spirit are all active in bringing you into heaven. The Father loved you so much that he sent his Son to be your Saviour. The Son loved you so much that he sacrificed his life to save you, so that your sin could be forgiven. The Spirit loves you so much that speaks to you through his Word so that you can believe in Jesus and be saved.
The Trinity – this incomprehensible unity in diversity – loves you. And if you know nothing else about the Triune God, know how much he loves you, because salvation is found in no one else. There is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.[12] But thanks be to God that he has revealed himself, i.e. the Triune God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – our Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier; three in one and one in three, united in love for you and me. May we always treasure the Trinity. Amen.
[1] Exodus 3:13,14
[2] You, Lord, Are Both Lamb and Shepherd, text by Sylvia Dunstan, 1955-1993.
[3] Hebrews 13:8
[4] Genesis 1:26
[5] Deuteronomy 6:4
[6] 1 Corinthians 8:4
[7] Genesis 1:1-3
[8] John 1:1-3
[9] Genesis 1:3
[10] Matthew 3:14,15
[11] Matthew 3:16,17
[12] Acts 4:12