God Is A Being

The LORD by wisdom

founded the earth;

by understanding He

established the heavens;

By His knowledge 

the depths 

were broken up,

and clouds

drop down the dew.

Proverbs 3:19-20

     The beginning to understand the Sovereignty of God we must admit that God is a Being. Not a being as man is, for God is not man. God has no dimensions, He is infinite. We cannot give Him a body in the sense to anthropomorphize Him so that we can picture Him in any way. but to say that He is a Being is to say that He is real, substantive, and is existent. In other words He is substance or essence. God is not just some force or power as taught by some. This idea of God did not just happen, we get this idea from our consciousness. Are we not conscious of feelings, volitions in their varying acts? Within is a law that constrains us to believe that there is something which is matter and mind, a manifestation. It is found to be impossible to think of action without acts, or of motion without there be something that moves. To say that nothing exists and that the mind is only a series of acts or states, a force, is to assume that nothing or nonentity can produce effects.

     It is then true that God in His nature is substance or essence, that which is eternal, infinite, unchangeable, the common agent for all divine acts. Try as we may, we can go no farther for we have no definite idea of substance, or of matter, mind, as to be distinct from attributes. The two are inseparable. To know one is to know the other. An example would be that to know that something is hard is only to say that we know hardness. This is the same for the knowledge of the essence of God, as we do for the substance of soul. When we say that is a God, we are not just admitting of something in the mind of some idea of infinite Spirit; rather we assert that He is entirely independent of our idea of Him, that such a Being exists.

     The infinite God is of divine essence, eternal, unchangeable, exists, and this essence existed before the founding of the world, it exists distinct from the world. We do not make God to be as us, material, that is Materialism that denies any spiritual substance, or some ideal, that is Idealism, that denies reality, and denies all real objective existence, and affirms that the subjective alone is real. Further, this idea of God is not Pantheistic, that which makes all that exists a form of God, this makes only God to be real existence, making God everything. No! God is separate, infinite, unchangeable, and the creator of all that exists, the One who existed before all things came to be. To say that we cannot understand God, His existence is not to say that God does not exist, or is real, only that we who are finite cannot possibly know all there is to know of God. All we know of Him is that which is revealed to us and that revelation is found in His Word. Next we shall define God and His attributes.

In the beginning

     God created

the heavens and 

    the earth.

              Genesis 1:1

When God Calls; say "Here am I"

Richard L. Crumb