What is God actually like?

Most people who ask this question are checking an inherited picture. The picture might have come from a parent, a religious upbringing, a high-school encounter with religion, an internet argument, a few specific lines of the Bible read out of context, or a movie. Whatever the source, the question underneath is: is what I think God is like actually what God is like?

It is a good question. It deserves a careful answer. You do not have to be religious to follow what comes next.

A few terms first

For readers without the background:

• Jesus of Nazareth was a Jewish religious teacher who lived in first-century Palestine. The Christian claim is that he was also God in human form.
• The gospels are four short biographies of his life — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John — written by his followers within decades of his death.
• The New Testament is the second part of the Christian Bible, containing the gospels plus letters by early Christian leaders.
• The Old Testament is the first and longer part of the Christian Bible, written between roughly 1500 BC and 400 BC — it is also the Jewish scriptures.
• The Father / the Son / the Holy Spirit: Christianity describes God as existing in three persons who are one God — a doctrine called the Trinity. When Christian texts refer to "the Father," they mean God. When they refer to "the Son," they mean Jesus. The Holy Spirit is God's presence active in the world and in people. These are not three Gods; they are three persons of one God, on the Christian view.
• The resurrection: the Christian claim that Jesus, after his execution around 30 AD, was seen alive again three days later by multiple named witnesses.

A short, honest answer

Christianity gives an unusually specific answer to "what is God like?" The Christian claim is not "God is too transcendent to describe" or "we cannot really know." The claim is the opposite: God has made himself known, in one specific person, in one stretch of history. According to one of the four early biographies of Jesus' life, Jesus said: "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father." If you want to know what God is like, the Christian answer is: look at Jesus. Everything else fits inside that.

The Christian shortcut

The claim that Jesus is the clearest available picture of God runs throughout the earliest Christian writing. A few examples make it explicit.

The opening of the gospel of John (one of the four short biographies of Jesus' life) makes the claim about Jesus' identity directly: "No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known."

A short New Testament letter called Hebrews uses unusually direct language about Jesus: "The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being."

Paul (an early Christian leader who wrote about a third of the New Testament) makes the same move in his letter to Christians in Colossae: "The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation."

And Jesus himself, in another scene from the gospel of John: "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father."

The Christian doctrine is that Jesus is not just a picture of God; he is the picture. He is what God looks like in human form. If something about your idea of God conflicts with how Jesus actually behaves in the gospels, the Christian move is to revise your idea of God, not to ignore Jesus.

This sounds simple, but it solves an enormous amount of confusion. People rejecting "God" are often rejecting a picture Jesus would have rejected. People accepting "God" are sometimes accepting a picture that has very little to do with Jesus. Centering on Jesus rather than on inherited generalities about God is the first move.

What Jesus actually shows us

So, what is Jesus like in the gospels? A careful list, drawn from what he actually does and says:

He goes toward broken people, not away from them. The category Jesus is most often found with is sinners — people his religious culture considered unclean, immoral, off-limits. He eats dinner with them. He befriends them. He defends them publicly. The complaint of the Jewish religious authorities was not that he was rigid; it was that he was too lenient with the wrong kind of people.

He is unimpressed by religious performance. The harshest extended speech in the gospels (in Matthew 23) is aimed at the Jewish religious leaders of his day, not at the prostitutes, tax collectors, and outsiders he kept meeting. His complaint is the same complaint the ancient Hebrew prophets made centuries earlier: performance without heart, rules without mercy, status without service.

He is gentle with the suffering. He weeps at a friend's grave. He stops a mob from stoning a woman caught in adultery. He receives children when his disciples try to shoo them away. The pattern is consistent: with the suffering, he is tender. With those who would exploit them, he is fierce.

He is direct about his own identity. Not anxious, not defensive, not falsely modest. He says he is God, claims authority to forgive sins, and lets people worship him. His own friends were Jewish monotheists who would have known exactly what those claims meant. He did not soften them.

He is unafraid of hard questions. He is challenged on taxes, marriage, the resurrection, the Jewish Law, his own authority. He engages every question. He does not duck or threaten. He often answers questions with better questions. He never punishes honest inquiry.

He absorbs harm rather than returning it. At the moment of his greatest power — his trial and execution — he refuses to use it. He could have called down angels (according to one of the gospel accounts). He does not. He absorbs the violence done to him and forgives the people doing it.

This is what the Christian claim about God looks like in the flesh. Whatever else God is, the Christian doctrine is that he is the kind of person who behaves this way when he becomes one of us.

The Old Testament summary that matches

If this sounds like a New Testament-only invention — like Christianity smuggled in a kinder God on top of an angrier original — the surprise is that the Old Testament itself describes God in exactly these terms.

A specific passage from the Old Testament book of Exodus contains God describing himself to a Hebrew leader named Moses:

The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished.

Read the proportions carefully. Compassionate. Gracious. Slow to anger. Abounding in love. Maintaining love to thousands. Forgiving wickedness. And — at the end — does not leave the guilty unpunished. The mercy is much louder than the judgment. God says it himself.

This same self-description gets quoted by later Old Testament writers, again and again — in books like Numbers, Nehemiah, Psalms, Joel, and Jonah. It is the Old Testament's own preferred summary of God's character. The God who comes to be embodied in Jesus, a thousand years later, is the same God — and his character is consistent across both halves of the Christian Bible.

What about God's anger and judgment

Both are real in the Bible. Neither is the dominant note in God's character. They are the response of love to harm — the protest of a good God against what is wrong with the world. A God who looked at trafficking, abuse, genocide, slavery, exploitation, and shrugged would not be a loving God. He would be a callous one.

The Christian claim is that God's anger is real and proportionate, and that it is not his default state. "Slow to anger, abounding in love" — slow, not absent. The reason most people who study the Bible carefully come away with a picture of God that is fundamentally good is that the texture of the whole — narrative, poetry, prophecy, gospel, letter — keeps emphasizing love and mercy, with judgment as a secondary, painful, necessary note.

What about the parts of the Bible that look harsh

Some passages — particularly in the Old Testament — look harsh by modern reading standards. They have separate page-length treatments (see Why is the God of the Old Testament so violent?). The short version: most of these can be read responsibly inside the larger story without flattening God's character into something inconsistent with Jesus, but they require care, context, and willingness to learn how a particular kind of ancient literature works.

What is not responsible is to take one isolated passage, treat it as the definitive statement of God's character, and use it to override the hundred-plus passages that say the opposite. Christians have done that and so have skeptics. Both are doing the same thing badly.

What this changes

If the inherited picture of God you have been arguing with — or holding onto — is not actually the Christian God, that is worth knowing. A lot of religious doubt is doubt about a god the Christian tradition itself would also reject. A lot of religious acceptance is acceptance of a god who would not survive contact with the actual New Testament.

The most direct way to encounter the actual Christian claim about God is to read one of the gospels straight through. Mark is short, about ninety minutes. John is intimate. See what kind of person you find on the page, and ask what kind of universe could produce him.

What about right now

If you have been carrying a picture of God that is not actually the Christian one — too harsh, too distant, too small, too vague — you do not have to figure it out alone. Our chat is free, private, and in your language if you want to talk through what the actual claim is.

Where this comes from in the Bible

• John 14:9 — "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father."
• Hebrews 1:3 — "the exact representation of his being"
• Colossians 1:15 — "the image of the invisible God"
• John 1:18 — Jesus has "made him known"
• Exodus 34:6–7 — God's own self-description
• 1 John 4:8 — "God is love"