The Doctrine of God
By Jerry Batson, Th.D.
Special to The Alabama Baptist
Christians have historically confessed the Bible to be the inspired written record of God’s self-revelation. That being so, what we mortals can know about God is best learned from our Bibles. Without this authoritative source, we would be left to our own imaginations and deductions which would likely result in portraying God after our own likenesses.
Thus, the authoritative and accurate window through which to see God and understand Him is the Bible. It is the appropriate seedbed from which to harvest our highest thoughts about God. With this as the primary premise, we begin this week to explore the biblical doctrine of God.
What a person believes about God or doesn’t believe about God is of ultimate importance in time and eternity. Thus, to seek to understand what the Bible reveals about God is not merely a casual quest to be pursued leisurely when nothing else is pressing for our attention and time.
The Bible’s witness about God begins with its opening verse, one that draws our attention immediately to God as Creator (Gen. 1:1). If we understand that the Bible is primarily God’s self-revelation, then He wants us to recognize and confess Him as the Creator of “the heavens and the earth.”
Since the created order is the handiwork of God, the Bible teaches us that by means of creation we can know certain truths about God. One of the best-known declarations of this fact is Romans 1:20: “For since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead.”
Of course to experience the fullness of God’s blessings, we must know more than God’s power and divinity as shown from His creating work. We must come to know Him where He has most fully revealed Himself, namely in the person and work of Christ, who became the visible image of the invisible God.
As we focus on the most central theme in theology, the doctrine of God, we note the very term “theology” itself is formed on the Greek word for God (theos) with a suffix (-ology) that together indicate a study of God.
While many topics are appropriate for the discipline of Christian theology, none is more basic than the inquiry into what we believe about God Himself. Admittedly, the study of an infinite God is a daunting task for mortal minds. While we cannot wrap our finite minds totally around our infinite God, we can gain insights that inform and inspire us.
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