All right, our shorter catechism question is, what is God? The answer is, God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.
Now, the question, what is God, is a little bit different than the question, who is God? God is one substance, the divine being, in three subsistences. We are accustomed in English to referring to the subsistences as persons. So one God in three persons.
When I first started learning my shorter catechism, I didn't understand the doctrine of God well enough to understand why the question was what instead of who. In fact, I was very offended. I thought, well, God is personal. We receive our personality from him. What do you mean, what is God? It makes him sound like a thing.
But we can't understand God at all. We need to talk about him in ways that we learn from his word either explicitly by the particular things it says or implicitly by those things that are necessarily implied or to describe it from our end, are necessary by good and necessary inference. So things that God implies in his word, which means what he says demands that it be understood that way, and then he helps us to infer it.
And this is one of the things that we infer, because there's only one God, and yet God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and the Father is not the Son or the Spirit, and the Son is not the Father or the Spirit, and the Spirit is not the father or the son, and we'll talk about that more when we get to how many persons are there in the Godhead, et cetera. But that's why the question is, what is God? What is the divine substance? What is that nature that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have one of? They are not similar in substance and equal in power and glory. They are the same. There's only one substance. It's not like the Father has a divine substance and the Son has another divine substance and the Spirit has another divine substance. No, God is one. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit have the divine substance. There is only one God.
Now, this divine substance, then, refers to the nature of God. And the nature of God, first of all, cannot change because He is outside of time. He has no beginning and no end, and there can be no changing in God. He is not affected by anything because he is the creator.
And so the very first thing that we say about God, who is this spirit, meaning that all of the things that are necessarily creaturely like a physical body, or even the spirits of men. God is a perfect spirit. Our soul is created to have some things that are analogous to or patterned after the way and the nature of who God is. But in a creaturely way, God does not have a soul. God is. the original spirit. We just use the word spirit to refer to him and then also then to refer to the way our soul or our spirit is the animating principle for our existence. But he has all life in himself and all activity in himself. And so he is a spirit. He is the original spirit. He is that great being from whom the whole idea or nature of everything that is spirit derives.
So God is a spirit. Infinite he can't have limits because he created Space he created everything that has limits But he himself is not within anything. So he is infinite eternal same idea with respect to time and if he is not in space and not in time and has no beginning and there's There's no point in space where he starts or ends, and nothing in space or time can affect him. Rather, he is the one who affects everything else. He is therefore also unchangeable, which is also certain from the fact that he is perfect. So he is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable.
And the very first thing that we say that he is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in is his being. But the fact of the matter is, because he is unchangeable, and because he is unaffected by anything else, and because he is who he is, all of the different things that we say about him are always perfectly, fully, unchangeably true at once and together. It's not like there are aspects of God that fit together, or there are aspects of God that interact with one another.
No, when we experience God, we experience the divine substance in the various ways that relate to us and the, the moment in space and time in which, in which we are. And so we experience God as wise, and we experience God as good, and we experience God as powerful, and we experience God as holy, and we experience God as just, all of these different attributes of Him. But God is just God. He doesn't have parts. He doesn't have aspects of himself, so to speak.
When we talk about his attributes, we are talking about different ways of describing the same single, we would say simple, not meaning easy to understand, but not made of complex parts when we say simple. So when we talk about his attributes, we talk about different ways that we have to try to describe the single, unchangeable, divine substance of God.
So he is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being. in his wisdom, which is to say that he knows all things all at once in themselves. He doesn't know about them. His knowledge is perfectly comprehensive and accurate and full, not just about the things that he has created, but the way that things operate and should be done according to his mind and his decree.
Being wisdom power, he's able to do all things according to his holy will. His holiness, the perfection of his devotion to himself, which when we talk about his holiness in relation to the creature then, we often talk about the idea of separateness, or consecration, but it's separated unto God, consecrated unto God. So that's how we talk about holiness with respect to other things.
But God didn't gain holiness when creatures came into existence. So holiness can't have as its essence separation because he's holy from all eternity. He doesn't change when he makes us to become holy at that point. So it's better to talk about his holiness as the purity and intensity of his devotion to himself, which when you do think then of him in comparison to the creatures, it is the idea of separator if you think of any particular creature that he has consecrated as holy, it means that that has been devoted unto him and separated from the world and other purposes in order to be devoted unto him.
His justice that he always does what is right, what is consistent with his character and his truth, that he is perfectly reliable and faithful, does not change, does not say that which is false, does not promise and fail to keep it, all of which are things that belong to those who are flawed, to those who are wicked, and to those who are changeable. But God is not flawed, so He can never change. He's not wicked, so He always says and does what is right and what He has promised, and He cannot change. He's perfectly faithful, which is what we call His truth.
So God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable. in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.
