Topic overview
God's Character
If you have a vague impression of God from somewhere — culture, religion, family, a bad experience — it's worth checking against what's actually being claimed. Plain language, no religious background required.
2 min read · Envoy Mission Editorial Team
A lot of people who land here have a strong sense of God from somewhere — a parent, a religious upbringing, a culture, a bad experience, a movie — and have never asked carefully whether that sense matches what Christianity actually claims. It is worth checking. The God Christianity describes is more specific than most secondhand impressions, and surprisingly different from the God most people think they are rejecting (or accepting).
This section of the site is for people who want to investigate the question carefully. You do not have to be religious to read it. The pages below lay out, in plain language, what Christianity claims about who God is — and let you compare that against your own picture, your own questions, and your own evidence.
A few things up front
- The Christian shortcut to "what is God like" is: look at Jesus. Whatever else this religion claims, it claims that the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth — a Jewish religious teacher who lived in first-century Palestine and was executed by the Roman government around 30 AD — is the clearest available picture of what God is like. An early Christian writer called him "the exact representation of God's being." Jesus himself, according to one of the four early biographies of his life, said: "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father." If you want to know what the Christian God is like, the question is not "what does my intuition say" — it is "what was Jesus actually like."
- The God described in the Old Testament and the New Testament is the same God. (For readers without the background: the Bible has two parts. The Old Testament is the older, longer part, written between roughly 1500 BC and 400 BC — it is also the Jewish scriptures. The New Testament is the first-century AD writings about Jesus and his followers.) The popular idea that "the Old Testament God is angry, the New Testament God is nice" does not survive careful reading of either. The character is consistent across both.
- God's character, in this tradition, is multiple things at once. Loving, just, holy, merciful, patient, present, sovereign. Trying to flatten any one of these into the others — making him just-but-not-merciful, or merciful-but-not-just — produces a god who is not the Christian God.
The questions in this topic
These are the questions people most often ask when their inherited picture of God runs out. None of them are settled before you read them.
A note before you keep reading
If your question about God is wrapped up with pain — "where was he when X happened?" — those questions belong in the Pain & Suffering section, and they deserve their own pages. This section is more about the broad question of who God is, which is upstream of those.