On Knowing God’s Attributes
Adapted from A.W. Tozer’s "The Knowledge of the Holy" (1961).
If an attribute is something true of God, it is also something we can truly conceive of Him—because He has revealed Himself. An attribute, as we can know it, is a mental grasp of God’s self-disclosure: an answer God gives when we ask who He is.
What is God like? What kind of God is He? How may we expect Him to act toward us and toward all He has made? These are not academic curiosities. They reach into the far depths of the human spirit, and the answers shape life, character, and destiny.
God reveals Himself in creation (general revelation) and in Scripture (special revelation), with the fullness of light in Christ. Scripture says creation speaks: “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1; cf. Romans 1:20). Isaac Watts put it well:
“The heavens declare Thy glory, Lord,
In every star Thy wisdom shines;
But when our eyes behold Thy Word,
We read Thy name in fairer lines.” — Isaac Watts
Yet the sun-blaze of revelation is the Incarnation: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14; cf. Hebrews 1:1–3). Even so, these answers are not found on the surface. They must be sought in prayer, in long meditation on the written Word, and through steady, disciplined labor. However bright the light, only the spiritually prepared see it: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8).
If we would think accurately about God’s attributes, we must police our language. Words like trait, quality, and characteristic serve us when we speak of creatures but mislead when we speak of the Creator. Words shape thoughts, and the wrong words breed wrong thoughts. As Thomas Traherne said, “As nothing is more easy than to think, so nothing is more difficult than to think well.” If ever we must think well, it is when we think of God.
Why the caution? Because we are composite; God is not. A human being is the sum of many parts and fluctuating traits. Memory, reason, will, sensation, temperament—these come and go, wax and wane. The kind thirty-year-old can grow cruel at fifty. We are made; we are compositions. By contrast, God is self-existent and simple (not made of parts). As the Athanasian Creed says: “The Father is made of none, neither created nor begotten. The Son is of the Father alone, not made, nor created, but begotten. The Holy Spirit is of the Father and of the Son: not made nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding.” God’s being is from Himself; His substance is indivisible. He is one—not a balance of parts but the absence of parts.
This matters for attributes. God never suspends one attribute to exercise another. There is no internal conflict in Him. All that God is acts in all that God does. His justice is never at odds with His mercy; His power never contradicts His goodness. The harmony of His being is the unity of a simple, uncomposed God.
Therefore, an attribute is not a part of God. It is how God is as He reveals Himself. We may say (as far as reason can go) that attributes describe what God is, but not in the way creaturely parts describe what we are. Of what God is conscious when He is conscious of Himself, only He knows: “The things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God” (1 Corinthians 2:11, KJV). Only an equal could fully receive the mystery of the Godhead—and to suppose God has an equal is absurd.
Take love. Love is not a trait God “has” today and could “lose” tomorrow. God’s love is the way God is; when He loves, He is being Himself. And the same holds for His holiness, wisdom, omniscience, omnipotence, immutability, and all the rest. The divine attributes are the steady ways God is toward His creatures, consistent with His undivided being.
In the end, study of the attributes is not an intellectual hobby but worship’s pathway. We study to adore, and we adore to live rightly before Him:
“One God! One Majesty!
There is no God but Thee!
Unbounded, unextended Unity!
Unfathomable Sea!
All life is out of Thee, and Thy life is Thy blissful Unity.” — Frederick W. Faber
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