Who Is
This God?

A Picture Worth a Thousand Doctrines

There is a moment in the Gospel of Luke where a father sees his son coming home after years away. The son had taken everything he was owed, left, wasted it all, and hit rock bottom in a foreign country feeding pigs. He rehearses an apology on the road home. Maybe his father will take him on as a hired worker. He has given up any claim to being a son.

But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him. The father had been watching the road. And he did not wait for his son to arrive and prove himself. He ran. He threw his arms around him. He called for the best robe, a ring, a feast. “This son of mine was dead and is alive again. He was lost and is found.”

Jesus told that story when religious leaders were grumbling that he spent too much time with the wrong kind of people. He was describing the character of God. And that story is the lens through which everything in this series should be read. Whatever else you have been taught about God, whatever picture you carry from childhood or church or bad experience, put it next to that father on the road. That is who we are talking about.

God Is Love, Not Just Loving

1 John 4:8 makes a claim worth sitting with slowly: “God is love.” Not that God is loving as a personality trait, the way someone might be described as patient or generous. The claim is that love is what God is at his core. It is not something he does. It is something he is. Everything else flows from that.

That distinction matters. A person who is loving can have bad days. They can withhold love when they are hurt or tired or afraid. But a being who is love at the center cannot help but love. When God pursues, it is not a strategy. When God forgives, it is not a policy. It is who he is.

The clearest picture we have of what that love looks like in practice is Jesus. In John 14, a disciple named Philip asks Jesus to simply show them the Father. Just give us a direct view. Jesus responds: “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” If you want to know what God is actually like, watch Jesus. Watch who he stops for. Watch who he eats with. Watch what makes him angry and what makes him weep. That is God.

Love Had to Have Somewhere to Go

There is a problem hiding inside the sentence “God is love,” and it is worth pulling out into the open. Love is not a solo activity. You cannot be patient with nobody. You cannot be generous toward nothing. Love requires someone on the other end of it. So if God is love, and God existed before he made anything at all, who was he loving?

The Bible's answer is strange the first time you hear it and then difficult to stop thinking about. There is one God. Not three. But this one God has always existed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three persons in a relationship so complete that they are one. Not three gods working together. Not one God wearing three different masks depending on the day. One God who has never been alone.

You can see all three in the same frame at Jesus's baptism. Jesus comes up out of the water. The Spirit descends. The Father speaks from heaven. Nobody in that scene is competing for the microphone. What you are watching is a relationship that predates the universe, briefly visible.

This is not a puzzle to solve before you are allowed to believe anything. It is the reason the rest of the story makes sense. God did not create people because he was lonely and needed something to love. He already had that. He created people because a love that full does not stay contained. It makes room. It sets more places. Community is not an accessory God added to Christianity later. It is what God has been doing forever, and it is what he made you to be part of.

The One Who Made It and Still Holds It

The father in the parable is warm, and warmth is where most people need to start with God. But warmth on its own is not enough to build a life on. A God who is only kind is not necessarily a God who can do anything about your situation.

So the Bible says more. This same Father is the source of everything that exists. He made it, and more than that, he holds it together right now. Paul, standing in Athens talking to people who had never opened a Hebrew scripture, put it like this: he is not far from any one of us, because in him we live and move and have our being. Not a God who built the world and stepped back to watch. A God whose sustained attention is the reason there is anything here at all, including you, this morning, reading this.

And he is described as just and holy alongside merciful and gracious. Those are not opposites in tension with each other. Think about what it would mean if God were endlessly warm and completely indifferent to evil. Every wrong thing anyone has ever done to you would simply be waved off. That is not love. That is not caring enough to be angry. The justice of God is not the fine print underneath his love. It is the promise that the things that have wrecked people will not be allowed to stand forever.

Slow to anger, the Bible says, and abounding in steadfast love. Slow to anger means there is anger, and it is aimed at what deserves it. Abounding in love means that is not where he lives. The father running down the road is also the God who holds the universe together and will eventually deal with everything that has broken it. Both of those are the same person.

Why Free Will Is the Most Important Thing

Here is a question worth asking before we go any further: if God is love, and God is all-powerful, why did he not just make everything perfect? Why create a world where people could hurt each other, walk away from him, or end up far from home in a foreign country feeding pigs?

The answer is that love cannot be forced. This is not a limitation on God. It is a definition of love itself. Think about it this way: a husband who commands his wife to love him has not produced love. He has produced compliance, maybe fear, maybe performance. But not love. Love, by its very nature, must be freely given. The moment it is coerced, it becomes something else entirely.

So God, who wanted beings who could genuinely love him back, had to create them free. Not free in a limited, controlled sense. Actually free. Free enough to say no. Free enough to walk away. Free enough to take their inheritance early and waste it in a foreign country. Because without that freedom, the yes means nothing. And God, who is love, wanted a real yes.

That freedom is the most precious and dangerous thing God gave us. It is the source of every beautiful thing human beings have ever done for each other. It is also the source of every terrible thing. We will come back to this in lesson 3, because it is the hinge on which the hardest question anyone asks about God turns. But carry this with you in the meantime: God has not left the broken world to run its course forever. The story we are tracing through this entire series ends with a specific promise, and knowing the ending changes how you read everything in the middle.