How should we understand what God is? Part 2

How should we understand what God is?

Part 2: We can have a relationship with God

Despite God’s holiness, we are able to encounter him. Although he is completely beyond our understanding in terms of fully comprehending him, we are able to meet God, relate to him, and hold within us just an inkling of his reality. Yet even the merest inkling of God’s infinite reality stretches us way beyond our capacity to grasp the fullness of who he is – but not beyond the capacity to know that we have met him, or to love him, or to know that he loves us. In the most stupendous mystery of all, this God – as he is conceived to be in the majesty of his perfection – loves and cares for us. Both these dimensions of the truth about God are what impresses us so much: both who he is, in his infinite, eternal goodness, and that such a person should care for us. Perhaps only a being like God could care for us in the way he does. God is completely unchallengeable. Nothing can ever diminish his abilities; he will never fail to be himself; and such is the healing purity of his nature that anything that comes into contact with God is healed; he is never tainted. This God wants us to know him and to love him. He makes himself known in many different ways, and calls out to us. He wants us to be whole, and he wants us to know him. In this way he honours his loving intention in creating us. As he did not need us, he created us in order for us to know the joy of being alive, and therefore, he wants us to share our lives with him in order that we can fulfil his intention in making us: that we should be fully alive.