Dr Paul Allen

Q: What are God’s attributes and why have I never heard of them before? A: The attributes of God are the characteristics that describe what he is like. The word is used by theologians but is not often heard outside the classroom, so most people are unfamiliar with it. But that does not mean that we are unaware of what the divine attributes are. Everybody knows that God is invisible, immortal, and all-powerful (omnipotent). Invisibility, immortality, and omnipotence are his attributes, and they remain the same because God’s nature does not change. One reason that we do not often talk about them is that we usually agree about them already. Nobody is going to argue that God is visible, so the attribute of invisibility is seldom if ever discussed. Then too, if God could be seen, he could be described; but because he is invisible, it is impossible to say what he is like. He is not tall or short, black or white, fat or thin—these descriptions simply do not fit with what he is. But because we

"The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else.” ACTS 17:24–25 One of the most amazing things about God—His self-sufficiency—is also one of the hardest to comprehend. It’s not very difficult to think of God being so powerful that He could create the universe. Even people who don’t think much about God can at least imagine how an almighty higher power could bring the world into existence. But the idea that God is uncreated and completely self-sufficient, that He has no beginning and has always existed with no help from any other power—well, that just isn’t comprehensible to our finite human minds. The self-existence of God is such a primal puzzlement that even a child, when told that God made the world, will often respond with the question, “Who made God?” This r