Who Is God? The True and Living God, Clearly Explained

Sooner or later, everyone asks it. A child asks it looking up at the stars. A grown man asks it in a hospital corridor at two in the morning.

You may have typed it into a search bar tonight with more riding on the answer than you let on. Who is God? Is He real, is He good, and can a person actually know Him, or is He just a word we inherited and never examined?

That last part is the real question under the question. It reaches past what God is to whether He can be known at all, and whether He is safe to know. The Bible does not treat God as a puzzle to be solved from a distance.

It presents Him as a Person who has stepped toward us and made Himself known. So this is not a lecture about a subject. It is an introduction to Someone. Here is who He is, and how you can come to know Him yourself.

Who Is God? The Simple, Straight Answer

God is the one true and living God: the self-existent Maker and Ruler of everything, who was not created, who depends on nothing, and who has made Himself known to us.

Who is God? God is the one eternal, self-existent Creator and Ruler of all things. He is Spirit, without beginning or end, unchanging, and perfect in holiness, love, justice, and mercy. He exists as one God in three Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He is not an impersonal force but a personal God who speaks, loves, and can be known, most clearly through Jesus Christ.

Hold that sentence, because everything else fills it out. God is not a bigger version of us and not a feeling we get in nature. He is the living God, and the whole Bible is His self-introduction. Read on and He comes into focus, one true thing at a time.

What God Is Not: Clearing the False Pictures First

Most people carry a picture of God they never chose on purpose. It came from a cartoon, a hard childhood, a movie, a bad sermon, or their own imagination. Before we can see Him clearly, it helps to set down the pictures that are not Him.

He is not an old man with a white beard sitting on a cloud, watching for a chance to be disappointed in you. He is not a cosmic vending machine who owes you a good outcome if you put in enough good behavior.

And He is not a distant clockmaker who built the world, wound it up, and walked away. God says of Himself, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD” (Isaiah 55:8). He is not our idea scaled up. He is God, and He defines Himself.

God Is Not an Impersonal Force

A lot of people today picture God as “the universe,” or energy, or a kind of positive force running through everything. The God of the Bible is nothing so vague. He speaks. He acts.

He calls people by name. He came down and spoke to Moses out of a burning bush and said, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people” (Exodus 3:7). A force does not see affliction. A Person does.

God Is Not Just a Bigger Version of Us

It is tempting to assume God thinks the way we think and wants what we would want in His place. Scripture closes that door. “God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent” (Numbers 23:19).

We do not get to invent Him in our own image and then call that faith. We get to listen to how He has described Himself, and let that reshape the picture.

How God Has Made Himself Known

Here is the good news underneath the whole question: you would know nothing true about God unless He chose to show you. And He has chosen to. The living God is not hiding. He has been reaching toward us all along.

Known, but Not Fully Understood

You can truly know God without knowing everything about Him. Those are not the same thing. “The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us” (Deuteronomy 29:29).

You will never fit an infinite God inside a human mind, and that is a mercy, not a frustration. A God small enough to fully explain would be too small to trust. What He has revealed is real and enough. What He has kept back, you can leave with Him.

In Creation and in Your Own Conscience

The first way God speaks is through the world He made. “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork” (Psalm 19:1). Paul says creation leaves everyone without excuse, showing His “eternal power and Godhead” (Romans 1:20).

Something in you, standing under a sky full of stars or holding a newborn, already suspects there is Someone behind it. That witness is real. It tells you He is. It cannot, on its own, tell you all of who He is.

In His Written Word

For that, God gave words. The Bible is where He tells us who He is in His own voice. “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets” (Hebrews 1:1).

If you want to know God and not just guess at Him, this is where you go. Scripture is God-breathed (2 Timothy 3:16), and it is His self-portrait in language you can read.

In Jesus Christ, Most Clearly of All

Everything comes to a point here. If you want to see God, look at Jesus. “No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him” (John 1:18). When Philip asked to be shown the Father, Jesus answered, “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (John 14:9).

Jesus is “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15), the exact expression of who God is. Whenever you wonder what God is like, the fullest answer is a face: the face of Christ, feeding the hungry, touching the leper, weeping at a grave, dying for His enemies.

Who God Is in Himself: The Nature of God

Before we talk about how God acts toward us, Scripture shows us what He is like in His own being. This is who God is when no one is watching, the truth about Him that was true before the world began.

The Self-Existent One, “I AM”

When Moses asked God for His name, God answered, “I AM THAT I AM” (Exodus 3:14). It is one of the most loaded sentences in the Bible, and its meaning is simple.

God just is. He was not made. He did not come from anywhere. He needs nothing and no one to keep Him going.

Everything else that exists is borrowed and dependent, including you and me. God alone stands on His own. That is exactly why you can put the full weight of your life on Him. He will never run out, wear down, or need propping up.

God Is Spirit

“God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24). This answers the honest question people ask: what does God look like? In His own nature God is not made of flesh and is not confined to a body.

He does not have a location the way a mountain does. That is not God being far away; it means He is not limited the way physical things are. And when He wanted to be seen, He gave us Jesus.

God Never Changes

“For I am the LORD, I change not” (Malachi 3:6). “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever” (Hebrews 13:8). With God there is “no variableness, neither shadow of turning” (James 1:17). People change.

Moods shift, promises get broken, love cools. God does not. His character today is exactly what it was a thousand years ago and exactly what it will be a thousand years from now. For anyone whose life feels like shifting sand, this is where you find rock.

Eternal and Without Limit

“Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God” (Psalm 90:2). He has no beginning and no end. His power has no ceiling, His knowledge no gaps, His presence no edge. There is nowhere He is not and nothing He cannot do that fits His character.

There Is Only One God

Whatever else is true, this stands: there is one God, not many. “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD” (Deuteronomy 6:4).

God says it plainly through Isaiah: “I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God” (Isaiah 44:6). Hold onto that as we come to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It never turns into three gods.

What God Is Like: The Character of God

Now to the heart of it. What is God actually like? The Bible does not hand us one trait and stop. It gives us a whole character, and the wonder is that every part of it is fully true at the same time.

God Is Holy

“Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts” (Isaiah 6:3). Holy means He is pure, set apart, without a trace of sin or shadow. There is nothing corrupt in Him and never has been. For a person hiding sin, that is a fearful thing, and it should be.

But for anyone who has come to Him through Christ, God’s holiness becomes the best news there is. It means He will never fail you, never turn petty, never let you down the way even the best people eventually do. His holiness is the guarantee that His love is safe.

God Is Love

“He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love” (1 John 4:8). Notice it does not only say God loves. It says God is love.

Love is not a mood that comes and goes in Him; it is who He is at the center of His being. It is why “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son” (John 3:16).

If you have ever wondered whether God could love someone like you, the answer was settled long before you asked. Read also: Reflection on God’s Unconditional Love.

God Is Just and Righteous

“Justice and judgment are the habitation of thy throne” (Psalm 89:14). God always does what is right, and He will finally set every wrong thing right. His anger against evil is not a bad temper He loses.

It is the steady response of a good God to what destroys the people He made. A God who shrugged at cruelty and abuse would not be loving. He would be indifferent. Because God is good, He takes evil seriously.

God Is Merciful and Gracious

When God passed before Moses and described Himself, this is what He led with: “The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth” (Exodus 34:6). Mercy means He does not give us the punishment we have earned. Grace means He gives us good we could never earn.

“For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8). You do not clean yourself up to earn His welcome. His welcome is what cleans you up. Read also: What Does Grace Mean in the Bible.

God Is Faithful and Good

“It is of the LORD’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness” (Lamentations 3:22-23).

He keeps His word. “The LORD is good; his mercy is everlasting; and his truth endureth to all generations” (Psalm 100:5). Whatever He has promised, He can be trusted to do.

God Is Sovereign, All-Powerful, All-Knowing, and Everywhere

Nothing is too hard for Him. “Ah Lord GOD! behold, thou hast made the heaven and the earth by thy great power and stretched out arm, and there is nothing too hard for thee” (Jeremiah 32:17). His understanding is infinite (Psalm 147:5).

And there is nowhere you can go from His presence. “If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there” (Psalm 139:8). The God who runs the universe is also the God who is right here, right now, closer than the page you are reading.

The Names of God and What They Reveal

In the Bible, God’s names are not labels. Each one opens a window into who He is. He is Elohim, the mighty Creator, in the very first verse: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). He is Yahweh, the LORD, the covenant name tied to “I AM,” the God who binds Himself to His people by promise.

He is Adonai, Lord and Master, the one with the rightful claim on our lives. When Abraham needed provision, he met God as Jehovah-Jireh, “The LORD will provide” (Genesis 22:14). And to everyone who comes to Him through Christ, He is Father (Romans 8:15). Each name is another true thing about the same God, given so you would have something solid to hold when you call on Him.

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: One God in Three Persons

Here is where many people feel lost, so we will take our time and be honest about it. The Bible teaches that God is one, and yet He exists as three Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The word Christians use for this is the Trinity. The word itself is not in the Bible, but the truth it describes runs all the way through it.

One God, Three Persons

This is not three gods, and it is not one Person wearing three masks. It is one God who has always existed as three distinct Persons who love and know one another. Jesus told His followers to baptize “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” (Matthew 28:19), one name shared by three.

Paul blesses the church with “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost” (2 Corinthians 13:14). No human picture captures it fully, and Scripture never pretends to hand us a tidy diagram. It hands us the truth and calls us to worship.

Why the Trinity Is Good News

This is not a strange piece of math to get past. It is the deepest reason God is love. If God were a single solitary Person alone for eternity, then before He made anything, there was no one for Him to love.

But God has never been alone. The Father has loved the Son “before the foundation of the world” (John 17:24).

Love was happening inside God before there was ever a world to love. So when the Bible says God is love, it is telling you the truth about His eternal nature, not just how He behaves toward us. Out of that fullness, He made you, and He invites you in.

Is Jesus God?

Yes. This is not a later idea the church invented. The Bible presents Jesus as fully God and fully man. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1).

When doubting Thomas finally saw the risen Christ, he fell down and said, “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28), and Jesus did not correct him but blessed his belief. We wait for “the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13). If you want to know who God is, you cannot go around Jesus. He is God with us.

The Cross: Where God’s Holiness and His Love Meet

Put two truths side by side and you feel the tension. God is perfectly holy, so He cannot wave away sin as if it were nothing.

God is also full of love and does not want to lose us. How can both be fully satisfied at once? The answer is a hill outside Jerusalem.

At the cross, God took the penalty His own justice required and carried it Himself in the Person of His Son. “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). His holiness was not ignored; it was honored, because sin was truly paid for. His love was not held back; it was poured out to the last drop.

So God can be “just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus” (Romans 3:26). He did not soften His standard to let you in. He met His own standard so He could bring you home. That is who God is: holy enough to require it, loving enough to become it. Read also: Does God Love Me Even Though I Keep Sinning.

Is the God of the Old Testament the Same as the God of the New?

Many people carry, without ever quite saying it out loud, the idea of two different Gods: a fierce God of the Old Testament and a kind God of the New. It is one of the most common worries about who God is, and it comes apart the moment you actually read.

The Old Testament overflows with tenderness. It is there that God calls Himself “merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness” (Exodus 34:6), and there that David sings, “The LORD is my shepherd” (Psalm 23:1). And the New Testament does not drop God’s holiness. It is Jesus who spoke most about judgment, and the New Testament that says plainly, “our God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:29).

It is the same God throughout, holy and loving on every page, because He does not change. Think of the father in Jesus’ own story, who ran to embrace his returning son while the son was still a long way off (Luke 15:20). A consuming fire and a running Father are not two Gods. They are the one God, and He always has been both.

What God Does: Creator, Sustainer, Redeemer, Judge, and Father

You come to know a person by what they do, and God’s actions reveal His heart. He is the Creator who spoke everything into being (Genesis 1:1). He is the Sustainer who holds it together right now, for “by him all things consist” (Colossians 1:17), which means the world does not run on its own for a second apart from Him.

He is the Redeemer who bought us back at the price of His Son’s blood (Ephesians 1:7). He is the Judge who “hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness” (Acts 17:31), so no evil gets the last word. And to His own children He is Father, close enough to be called “Abba” (Romans 8:15). Everything He does is of one piece with everything He is.

If God Is Good, Why Does He Allow Suffering?

This is the question that competitors to your faith press hardest, and the one an honest article cannot skip. If God is this good and this powerful, why is there so much pain?

The Bible does not hand us a tidy formula that explains every sorrow, and we should be careful not to pretend it does. What it does give is far better than a formula. It gives us God’s own posture toward the hurting.

“The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart” (Psalm 34:18). He is not distant from your pain. Scripture also shows that God can work good out of what was meant for evil.

Joseph, sold by his own brothers, later told them, “ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good” (Genesis 50:20). And “we know that all things work together for good to them that love God” (Romans 8:28).

Most of all, God did not stay above suffering looking down. He entered it. The cross is God Himself bearing the worst the world could do. Whatever you are carrying, you are not carrying it alone, and you are not carrying it in front of a God who does not understand.

How You Can Actually Know God

All of this stays just information until it becomes personal, and God never meant for you to only know about Him. He made you to know Him. So how do you begin?

You start with Jesus, because He is the way in. “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). Coming to God means turning from going your own way, trusting what Christ did on the cross, and receiving Him.

From there, you get to know God the way you get to know anyone, by spending time with Him. You listen to Him in His Word, reading the Bible not to finish a chapter but to hear the One who wrote it. You talk to Him in prayer, honestly, in your own words.

And you do not do any of this on your own strength, because God gives His Holy Spirit to live in every believer and make Him real to you. He is nearer than you think. “Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you” (James 4:8).

The living God is not playing hard to get. He has already made the first move; you only have to answer it. Read also: Walking With God: How to Walk With God.

What Knowing Who God Is Changes in You

When God stops being a fuzzy idea and becomes the living God you actually know, it changes how you live. Fear loses its grip, because the One running your life is good and cannot be caught off guard.

Guilt loses its power to crush you, because the holy God has already dealt with your sin at the cross. And you find yourself doing the one thing knowledge of God is meant to produce, which is worship. Knowing all about God without bowing to Him is not really knowing Him at all.

The Fear of the Lord

“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10). This is not the cringing terror of someone bracing for a blow. It is the deep reverence of someone who has seen how great and holy God is and cannot help but bow. It sits right alongside intimacy, not against it.

The same Person you call Father is the God the angels cover their faces before. Holding both, awe and nearness together, is what it means to truly know Him. Read also: Have You Met My God.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where Did God Come From, and Who Created God?

No one created God, and He did not come from anywhere. He is eternal and self-existent, without beginning or end: “from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God” (Psalm 90:2). Everything that begins to exist needs a cause. God never began. He just is, which is the whole point of the name “I AM.”

What Does God Look Like?

In His own nature God is Spirit and is not a physical being (John 4:24), so He does not have a body the way we picture one. The Bible does not describe His appearance. What it does is show us His character, and it shows it most clearly in Jesus, who is “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). If you want to see what God is like, look at Christ.

Is God a Person or a Force?

God is personal, not an impersonal force. He speaks, thinks, feels, loves, and acts, and He calls people by name. The God of the Bible is not “the universe” or an energy but a living Person who sees you and can be known.

What Is God’s Name?

God reveals many names, each showing something true about Him. The central one He gave to Moses is “I AM THAT I AM” (Exodus 3:14), the source of the covenant name the LORD (Yahweh). He is also Elohim the Creator, Adonai the Lord, and to His children, Father.

Related Articles to Read Next

• What Is the Holy Trinity
• Difference Between God and Jesus Christ
• Reflection on God’s Unconditional Love
• What Does Grace Mean in the Bible
• Why Do We Need the Holy Spirit
• Walking With God: How to Walk With God
• 10 Reasons to Have Faith in God
• Have You Met My God
• Is Jesus and God the Same Person?
• Is Jesus God in Human Form?
• The Attributes of God
• How to Explain the Trinity: how to put it into words for anyone.
• Is Jesus God or the Son of God?: why the title Son never means lesser.

So, who is God? He is the one true and living God, without beginning, holy in everything He is and full of love in everything He does. He is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the Maker who holds the stars and knows your name. He is not far off and He is not hiding. He has spoken in His Word, He has shown His face in Jesus, and He stands ready to be known by anyone who will come. You do not have to settle for knowing about Him. Come and know Him.