Who is God?

[Author’s Note:  Scripture Quotes are from The New American Bible.]

Who is God?  Over the millennia, many women and men far holier, far more gifted and far more intelligent than I have contemplated, prayed and expounded on this question.  God being God is so far beyond our understanding that no human or group of humans can definitively answer that question.   Yet God does reveal Himself to us…through Scripture, through His Creation, through his Son, through His very omnipresence in this world. 

Readily and humbly recognizing my own spiritual and intellectual limitations, I shall nevertheless share with you how I answer the question “Who is God?”  

God is love.  How do I know this?  Quite simply, St. John tells us this in his First Letter.  In 1 John 4:16, St. John tell us “God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.”

We also know that God is love from St. John’s Gospel.  In St. John’s Gospel Chapter 3 Verses 16 and 17, we read, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.   For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” 

This passage is one of the most widely known passages in the Bible.  And with good reason…it succinctly states Jesus’s mission on Earth and the fundamental truth about God, namely that He does not just love, He is Love itself. 

St. John writes about Christ’s Earthly mission extensively in his First Letter:  "In this way the love of God was revealed to us: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might have life through him.  In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins." (1 John 4:9-10)

God did not create Man and Woman just to arbitrarily destroy them.  He created Man and Woman to know Him and love Him in return because God is Love.  Even when they disobeyed Him by sinning in the Garden of Eden, God never stopped loving them and He never stops loving us even when we disobey Him by sinning.

Love is not something that we feel; it is something that we do, or at least something we ought to do.  God freely bestows His love upon us, but we are not to just accept this love and do nothing with it.  We are to share His love with others.

In the Old Testament’s Book of Deuteronomy, the Jews were commanded: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your might” (Chapter 6:4-5).   In the Book of Leviticus, the Jews were also commanded: ““You shall love your neighbour as yourself” (Chapter 19:18).

Jesus united and amplified these commandments during his ministry on Earth.   Questioned about which was the greatest commandment, Jesus answered, ““You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.  This is the greatest and the first commandment.  The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”  (Matthew 22:37-40). 

During his ministry, St. Paul continued with the theme of Divine Love.  In his Letter to the Romans, St. Paul writes of the power of God’s love:

Brothers and sisters:
What will separate us from the love of Christ? 
Will anguish, or distress, or persecution, or famine,
or nakedness, or peril, or the sword? 
No, in all these things we conquer overwhelmingly
through him who loved us. 
For I am convinced that neither death, nor life,
nor angels, nor principalities,
nor present things, nor future things,
nor powers, nor height, nor depth,
nor any other creature will be able to separate us
from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

(Romans 8:35, 37-39)

Pope Benedict XVI devoted his entire encyclical Deus caritas est to the subject of God’s love.  “Love grows through love,” wrote the Pope. “Love is “divine” because it comes from God and unites us to God; through this unifying process it makes us a ‘we’ which transcends our divisions and makes us one, until in the end God is ‘all in all’(1 Cor 15:28).” See https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20051225_deus-caritas-est.html 

On the night he was betrayed, Jesus gave a powerful set of instructions to his Apostles and through them to us all.  In the Upper Room, he said to them:

 As the Father loves me, so I also love you. Remain in my love.  If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and remain in his love.   I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.  This is my commandment: love one another as I love you. (John 15:10-12).

We live in a world of darkness, a world that rejects God and rejects God’s love for us.  But we are not helpless victims of this world.  Empowered by God’s love freely given us, we are called to share His love with a world so desperately in need of it.  In this world of darkness, be a light for Christ and share God’s light and love with all. 

“Who is God?”  To repeat, God is love.  Who are we if we fail to share who God is with others?