Open Introduction

Humans have developed many complex and ethereal ideas about what God is like. But how does our loving Creator reveal Himself in the pages of the Bible? It’s both more accessible and more incredible than people have imagined. Really getting to know God will transform your life for the better forever!

Introduction

Can we get to know God? Is He so far off, so mysterious, that we could never understand Him? Or does God want to have a close, personal relationship with us? Does He reveal Himself clearly in the Bible?

Our world is filled with myriad gods and ideas about God, most of which seem inconsistent or unintelligible.

One of the most common beliefs in Christianity today is the mystery of the Trinity—that there is one God who appears as three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Many have accepted this explanation of God as the defining doctrine of orthodoxy without studying its origin.

Strangely, the word trinity is not found in the Bible. When people raise questions about it, they are

Open Chapter 1: God in the Old Testament

Chapter 1: God in the Old Testament

Many scriptures throughout the Old Testament refer to God as a singular entity. In giving the 10 Commandments, God said, “You shall have no other gods before Me” (Exodus 20:3), and God’s faithful people understood Him to be God alone.

King David prayed to God: “For You are great, and do wondrous things; You alone are God” (Psalm 86:10). Similarly Isaiah wrote, “O LORD of hosts, God of Israel, the One who dwells between the cherubim, You are God, You alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth. You have made heaven and earth” (Isaiah 37:16; compare verse 20). The same prophet also referred to God as the “Mighty” or “Holy One of Israel” (Isaiah 30:29; 47:4; 54:5).

King David and Isaiah were adhering to what Moses had told the ancient Israelites. Moses said, “Therefore know this day, and consider it in your heart, that the LORD Himself is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other” (Deuteronomy 4:39).

The oneness of God is simply st

Open Chapter 2: What Jesus and the New Testament Reveal About God

Chapter 2: What Jesus and the New Testament Reveal About God

Jesus said that He came to reveal the Father (Matthew 11:27; Luke 10:22). Jesus did this by teaching His disciples and by simply interacting with them on a human level. Because He was so much like the Father, Jesus said, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).

John, one of the disciples who was especially close to Jesus, learned much about God through his personal experience with Christ. In the books bearing his name he conveys information about God not found in the Old Testament.

John begins his Gospel account: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made” (John 1:1-3).

A few verses later, John adds: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth … No one has seen God at

Open Chapter 3: Understanding the Holy Spirit

Chapter 3: Understanding the Holy Spirit

Trying to determine what the Holy Spirit is has been a challenging quest for many for a long time. The most common explanation of the Godhead—the Trinitarian view—teaches that the Holy Spirit is a coequal person with God the Father and the Son, but is this teaching found in the Bible?

Although sorting out what the Bible says about the Holy Spirit is more complicated than learning about God the Father and the Word, a clear explanation is available if we will carefully consider the Scriptures without bias toward a particular interpretation. As we have seen thus far, the humanly devised explanations of God the Father and the Son contradict the biblical teaching that the Godhead consists of two distinct spiritual beings (1 Corinthians 8:6).

Because the Trinity is the most popular explanation of God, in this chapter we are going to consider a brief history of how and why the Trinity doctrine was devised. First, we will see how the Bible explains the Holy Spir

Open Chapter 4: God’s Purpose for Mankind

Chapter 4: God’s Purpose for Mankind

In exploring what God reveals about Himself, we have delved deeply into the Old Testament and New. We’ve looked at clear passages about God the Father and the Son of God. We have even examined several often-misunderstood scriptures and learned how the writers of the Bible and the early Church understood the Holy Spirit. But God didn’t record all this just as an academic exercise.

Based on what we’ve seen, let’s now focus on God’s purpose for creating mankind. Understanding what the Bible teaches about our potential helps us understand God’s character and rounds out the picture of who God is.

As we will soon see, this information about why we exist is ignored or suppressed by the more popular explanations of God. They fail to adequately convey the amazing destiny God has in store for humanity.

God’s plan for man revealed at our creation

In preparing the earth for mankind, God created the plants and animals each “according to its kind” (Genesis 1: