God is…
When the Westminster Assembly came to this question they did not know how to answer it, but called on one of their ministers to pray for guidance. Young George Gillespie addressed God and described Him in the words of this answer. The brethren decided that the opening words of his prayer were the answer to this prayer.
Q4: What is God?
A: God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.
It is here that we see how important the Bible is. Yes we can learn many things about God from nature; after all it has His ‘fingerprints’ as it were all over it. But we would never get a correct understanding of who God is – especially because of the impact of sin upon our understanding. We must come to the Bible and get right ideas about God, and what we have here is a fine summary of the truth of God as He has revealed Himself in the Bible.
The opening phrase is the words Jesus spoke to the Samaritan woman in John 4. God is a Spirit, and not a body with different parts.
Yet He is distinct from other spirits as indicated by the various attributes or characteristics.
God is infinite, without any limit of space; He is eternal, without beginning or ending or limit of time; He is unchangeable, dependable, subject to none of the uncertainties and inconsistencies which belong to us. He is constant, faithful to His own character.
These distinctions of God apply to His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth. God is the only true BEING, that is He exists of Himself and everyone else gets his being from God. In God’s being there are the same virtues that we admire in people, only in God they are in perfect or full measure without any limit. And God always acts according to every one of His virtues.
If God is unchangeable, how can the Bible speak of Him as if He changed (eg Gen 6:6)? The answer is that when the Bible speaks like this about God, it always tells us first that it is man who has really changed. Man has changed in attitude or relationship to God, and with that change in man comes a change in how God deals with man. But the change is not really in God, it is in man. God’s holiness and hatred of sin has not changed, but because man has turned from obeying God to sin, man now knows God in terms of holy anger instead of His holy love. God hasn’t changed at all.