Is God a person?

Question 2095

Scripture presents a personal God who knows, wills, speaks and loves, rather than a blank force humming somewhere behind the universe. To ask whether God is a person is to ask whether the One who made us is a Someone or a Something. The Bible answers from its opening line, where God is already speaking, choosing and acting on purpose, and a personal God is the only kind of God it ever sets before us.

This matters more than it may first seem. A great many people today are happy to believe in a higher power of some sort, an energy, a ground of being, a friendly universe that nudges things along. That is a very different claim from the Christian confession of a God who has a name, a settled character and a will of His own, and who can be known and loved in return rather than only sensed or guessed at.

What we mean by a personal God

When we call God a person we do not mean that He is a human being with a body somewhere in the sky. We mean that He has the marks of personhood. He thinks, He intends, He feels, He decides and He enters into relationship. A rock has none of these. A law of physics has none of these. The personal God of the Bible has them all in perfection, and He had them in Himself before any creature existed to share them with Him.

This is one reason the doctrine of the Trinity matters so much here. God was never a solitary self waiting through eternity for company. Within the one divine being there has always been a fellowship of knowing and loving between the Father, the Son and the Spirit. He did not become personal on the day He made the world. He has been giving and receiving love from all eternity, which is part of what John means when he tells us that God is love.

Personhood in God is therefore the original, and our own personhood is the copy. We are persons because we were made in the image of a God who is personal, and not the other way round. When men project themselves onto a blank cosmos they invent idols and call them gods. When God reveals Himself as personal, He is telling us the truth about a reality that was personal long before any of us arrived to think about it.

The personal God who speaks and acts

Walk through the Bible and you meet this God on every page. He speaks creation into being with a word. He walks in the garden in the cool of the day. He calls Abram by name and binds Himself with promises. He hears the groaning of slaves in Egypt and remembers His covenant with their fathers. None of this fits an impersonal principle. Forces do not make promises, and energies do not remember the cries of the oppressed.

Above all, the personal God has spoken to us in His Son. Jesus is God made visible, the Word who was with God and was God, now dwelling among us in flesh and bone. When Philip asked to be shown the Father, Jesus answered that whoever had seen Him had seen the Father. You cannot get more personal than a human face, a living voice and a wounded hand held out to a doubting friend in a locked room.

Because He acts, this God also governs. He is not a watchmaker who wound the world up and then wandered off to leave it ticking. He upholds and directs all things toward His purposes, a truth we open up in our study of God’s providence. The personal God is involved, attentive and near, working in the small details of a single life as readily as in the long sweep of nations and centuries.

Personal does not mean human

We have to guard the truth from one side and then the other. To say God is personal is not to drag Him down to our own level. He does not have a body, for God is Spirit, and we have explored that further in our answer on what it means that God is Spirit. He does not learn new facts, He does not change His mind under pressure, and He does not love in the unsteady, fading way that we so often do.

When the Bible speaks of God’s mighty arm, His watching eyes or His shining face, it is using human pictures to teach us real things about a God whose life is higher than ours. These are gracious accommodations to our weakness, true descriptions handed to us in language we are able to hold. The personal God feels deeply, yet His emotional life is perfect and unshaken, a point we take up when we ask whether God experiences emotions as we do.

This is also why the question of why Scripture names God as He, rather than as it, runs so close alongside this one. The personal pronoun is not an accident of an old and patriarchal culture. It safeguards the truth that we are dealing with a Someone and not a thing, a subject Ian has handled in our piece on why God is referred to as He. The boundless greatness we considered in our study of the infinity of God does not push Him away from us. It is the very thing that lets a personal God give Himself wholly to each of His children at once.

Three persons, one personal God

Christians do not believe in a lonely deity who needed the world in order to have someone to love. The one God exists eternally as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three persons who share one undivided being. This is the deepest ground for calling God personal at all. Love has always been flowing within the Godhead, given by the Father, received and returned by the Son, carried and poured out through the Spirit.

Some people hear the word person and worry that three persons must add up to three Gods. It does not. The persons of the Trinity are not three separate centres of being competing for room or dividing the work between them. They are distinct yet inseparable, each of them fully God, and together they are the one personal God whom ancient Israel confessed as the Lord who is one.

This shapes our whole hope of salvation. When the personal God draws near to rescue us, the Father plans it before the world began, the Son accomplishes it on the cross, and the Spirit applies it to our hearts and seals us. We are not adopted by a committee or rescued by a blind force. A God who is personal, in three persons, has set His love on us by name and at cost.

Why a personal God matters

If God were impersonal, then prayer would be a kind of nonsense. You cannot really talk to gravity, and you cannot pour out your grief to the laws of thermodynamics and expect to be heard. Because God is personal, prayer becomes conversation with One who listens, who cares about the detail, and who answers in His own wisdom and time. The whole life of faith assumes a personal God on the other side of every prayer we whisper.

An impersonal universe also has no love to give you back. It does not know your name, it has no plans for your life, and it will not weep beside you at a graveside. The God of the Bible made you on purpose and for relationship with Himself, a theme we explore in our answer to the question of why God created us. You are not an accident thrown up by blind and indifferent processes. You are known, wanted and loved by a personal God.

And only a personal God can be trusted with your future. Forces have no intentions, so they cannot keep faith with you, and they cannot promise anything at all. A God who is personal, who has bound Himself by His own word, can be leaned upon with your whole weight, because His tested character stands behind every commitment He has ever made.

So, now what?

If God is personal, then the most reasonable thing you can do is to come to Him as one person comes to another, honestly and humbly and without pretence. He is not waiting to be analysed or solved like a problem. He is waiting to be known. The invitation of the gospel is not to grasp an idea about God but to be reconciled to Someone through the death and rising of His Son.

Let this reshape the way you pray. You are not addressing the ceiling or sending good thoughts out into empty air. You are speaking to a personal God who has searched you and knows you, who discerns your thoughts from far off, and who has counted even the hairs of your head without ever losing interest in you.

And let it comfort you in your loneliness. There is no moment when you are truly unaccompanied, because a God who is personal, and who never sleeps, is present with His children through the night. To know Him is the beginning of the very life we were made for, and it is a life that even death cannot bring to an end.

“O LORD, you have searched me and known me! You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar.” Psalm 139:1-2