Who Is God?

Everyone has an idea of God. For some, He is distant, like a watchmaker who wound up the world and then stepped back. For others, He is a kind of personal genie, ready to grant wishes. Many of us project our own family experiences onto Him — especially the way we related to our dads. If your father was distant, you may picture God as distant. If your father was hard to please, you may assume God is always disappointed with you. And some imagine Him as a “God of the gaps,” just a placeholder for what science hasn’t yet explained.

But none of those are the God who actually exists. Which leaves us with the most important question we can ask: Who is God, really?

Show Me Your Glory

God’s revelation of who He is comes at one of Israel’s lowest points. Moses had gone up the mountain and received the Ten Commandments, only to come back down and find the people dancing around a golden calf. In anger and despair, he smashed the stone tablets. Then he climbed back up, exhausted, and pleaded with God: “I can’t do this without you. Show me your glory.”

God agreed to pass by Moses, hiding him in the cleft of a rock. And instead of dazzling lights or thunder, God revealed Himself with His name and His character:

“The Lord, the God of compassion and mercy. I am slow to anger and filled with unfailing love and faithfulness. I lavish unfailing love to a thousand generations. I forgive iniquity, rebellion, and sin. But I do not excuse the guilty. I lay the sins of the parents upon their children and grandchildren; the entire family is affected—even children in the third and fourth generations.” (Exodus 34:6–7)

Richard Bauckham points out: Moses may not see who God is with his eyes, but he hears who God is. And that’s the point. God reveals Himself from the outside. Not our projection, not our imagination, but His own name and character.

The Hebrew word for “glory” is kabod — literally “weight.” God is revealing the full weight of who He is. And this is why the Bible refers back to this passage over 120 times. Yet Western Christians often skip over it, because it doesn’t fit neatly into our tidy categories.

Yahweh: The One Who Exists

God begins with His name: Yahweh. For Hebrew people, names carry weight. They are not just labels but reflections of character. Most scholars agree Yahweh means “the one who exists” or “the one who causes existence.” God isn’t an idea. He is the source of reality itself, the one who brought everything into being.

Then He gives a description of His character — and it’s all about relationship. On one side we hear compassion, grace, forgiveness, and unfailing love. Isn’t that beautiful? On the other we hear justice, truth, boundaries, and consequences. Both belong to God’s glory. Both are essential if the world is to make sense.

And Moses’ response? He immediately fell to the ground in worship and pleaded: “Please travel with us… forgive our sins… claim us as your special possession.” When we see who God really is, worship and dependence are the only fitting responses.

Mercy and Justice Together

Deep inside, we resonate with this two-sided glory. We come alive in the presence of mercy, compassion, and grace. But we also ache for justice, fairness, and truth. Why? Because we are created in God’s image. His nature is stamped on us.

The Bible insists these qualities are the moral foundations of the world. As James Anthony Froude once wrote: “This world is built somehow on moral foundations, that in the long run it is well with the good, and in the long run it is ill with the wicked.”

Cecil B. DeMille, who filmed The Ten Commandments, put it like this: “We cannot break the Ten Commandments. We can only break ourselves against them.” Ignoring God’s design doesn’t make it disappear. It only leads to damage. Test it in your own life — every time you cross a boundary, someone gets hurt.

And we see this damage in our society too. In Tasmania, just in one month, poker machines drained $18 million from families — mostly from those who could least afford it — and funneled it into the pockets of a wealthy few. That is injustice in plain sight. At the same time, compassion is often missing. As Mother Teresa said, “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”

God’s glory calls us to hold justice and mercy together.

Central to God’s People

Jewish tradition treats Exodus 34:6–7 as central. They call it the 13 attributes of God. It is chanted on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, and woven into their prayers. Rabbi Josh Jacob once said: “When folks find Jews on this earth in 500 years, we’ll still be chanting the 13 attributes.” For them, this is not a side passage. It is the heart of knowing God.

And the prophets echo it again and again. Zechariah says: “Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor.” (Zechariah 7:9–10) Why those groups? Because they are the least powerful. The measure of whether justice and mercy are real in a society is how the most vulnerable are treated.

This theme runs like a thread through Scripture: Exodus 22, Deuteronomy 10, 14, and 24, Psalm 68 and 146, Isaiah 1 and 10, Jeremiah 7 and 22, Ezekiel 22, Malachi 3. Over and over again, God asks: what about the widow, the orphan, the foreigner, the poor?

And looking at our own community, with news headlines full of abuse, neglect, and exploitation, we have to admit: we’ve got work to do, don’t we?

A Vision of Glory

The prophets not only confront injustice, they also promise hope. Habakkuk warns those who build wealth through corruption that it will all come to nothing. And then he declares: “For as the waters fill the sea, the earth will be filled with the awareness of the glory of the Lord.” (Habakkuk 2:14)

One day, the character of God — His justice and mercy — will be the atmosphere everyone breathes. That is the hope Scripture holds before us.

Israel’s Calling—and Ours

This has always been God’s purpose for His people. To Abraham He said: “All the families on earth will be blessed through you.” (Genesis 12) At Sinai He told Israel: “You will be my kingdom of priests, my holy nation.” (Exodus 19)

Israel was never meant to be a holy club. They were chosen to represent God to the nations, to live out His glory in public. And that calling has now been extended to the church.

The New Testament makes this clear:

• “This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit.” (John 15:8) — the fruit of the Spirit, which produces justice, mercy, compassion, grace, and truth: the very nature of God in time and space.
• “We rejoice in the hope of the glory of God… suffering produces character, and character produces hope.” (Romans 5:2–4) — even our suffering is used by God to shape us into people who can reflect His glory.
• “Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.” (1 Corinthians 10:31) — glory is not about applause or lights, but about reflecting God’s nature in the everyday.

The Cost of Glory

On our own, we fall short of this. Paul says it plainly: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23)

That’s why Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s warning still matters. He called it “cheap grace”:

“Cheap grace is forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”

Put simply, cheap grace is wanting forgiveness without repentance, baptism without accountability, communion without confession, comfort without the cross.

God doesn’t call us to a cheapened version of Himself. He calls us to open our lives to His Spirit. As Paul writes in Colossians 1:27, the mystery is this: “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

We cannot pull this off by ourselves. We need Jesus. Only He can form His character — His mercy and His justice — within us.

Do Justice, Love Mercy

So what does it look like to live by the glory of God? Micah 6:8 sums it up: “What does the Lord require of you? To act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”

Or as we might put it: to do what is right. To do what is just and merciful. To keep the boundaries firm, but make sure you’re loving. That’s the framework.

And this isn’t abstract. Think about your own family. Where is the pain? Almost always it’s in the places where justice has gone missing or where grace has gone missing. The same is true in our communities and our world. God’s glory — His justice and His mercy, His truth and His grace — is the framework in which everything makes sense.

So the question is: are you willing? Are you willing to put aside your agenda and open yourself to His agenda? Are you willing to let the God of glory be your God?

Look to Him, and you will find He is beautiful.