Connected with God’s attribute of being good is God’s attribute of being honest. God has integrity: He is who He says He is. He is not otherwise.
God doesn’t pretend to be otherwise. When He appears, in the scriptures, to be three distinctly different persons, it is because He is three persons: God is a trinity. Non-trinitarians claim He only appears to be three persons—either from our limited perspective, or because He wishes for us to perceive that He is three. But God has stated throughout the scriptures that He is one; He has no interest, or purpose, in our perceiving He’s anything that He’s not. It would be inconsistent of Him to be so upset at hypocrites if He were a hypocrite Himself.
In the same way, when we perceive Him to be human in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, it’s because He is human. He isn’t part human, or semi-human, or a divine spirit operating a human body, or anything other than human. (More than, but certainly not other than.) He is exactly who He appears to be, and who He claims to be.
“He who is the Glory of Israel will not lie, nor will He change His mind, for He is not human that He should change His mind!” the prophet Samuel once pointed out. (1Sa 15.29) Of course, God eventually became human, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. (Jn 1.14) But other scriptures point to God’s consistency: He keeps His promises, (Js 21.45, Ps 89.34) His character and behavior is consistent, (Ml 3.6, Jm 1.17) and He is steadfast and faithful and unfailing. (Ex 34.6-7, Ps 89.2) God is reliable: If He says it, and He’s not being vague—He’s not speaking in apocalypses* or parables,* but in clear language and we’re not misreading Him—we can take it to the bank.
Misreading Him.
Of course, Christians misread Him all the time. There are three main ways in which we do this.
A pop-culture understanding of God. Our larger culture, and even the larger Christian culture, has a lot of wrong beliefs about who God is and what He’s like. The book of Job is a good example of this: While Job insisted on his innocence, Job’s friends reiterated every ancient platitude about God they could think of in order to defend what was ultimately a very flawed worldview. We do that today: We assume we know who God is; that we’re right instead of wrong. We interpret God based on our pre-existing, prejudicial understanding of Him. Not the scriptures.
Pulling Him out of context. To defend our pop-culture God, we dig up scriptures to back these ideas… and if they don’t fit, we’ll stretch them to fit. Hence many Christians take the bible out of context: We take a prophecy from Isaiah or Jeremiah to the people of Jerusalem, reinterpret it and claim that it applies to us too—even though we have no basis for saying so—and quote it all the time to comfort ourselves.
Or we assume, as many Christians have, that the Old Testament doesn’t fit; that the God of the OT is a different person (or the same person rendered entirely different because He exists under a different dispensation*) and is not the same as the Father of Jesus. So we don’t need to read the OT in order to understand the context of the New Testament; Jesus did away with the Law. (Except He didn’t.)
Making obedience optional. Embracing the promises of God, while ignoring the commands of God, and the warnings lest we disobey, is pretty common human behavior. We assume that because we’ve turned to Jesus, and because we’re saved by His grace, life will be nothing but blessings from here on out: Sunshine, rainbows, lollipops, and heaven. We assume that when we sin, we get God’s automatic forgiveness, so there’s nothing more to worry about.
Which is crap. Yes, we get God’s automatic forgiveness, but that has to do with not cutting off our relationship with Him. It has nothing to do with consequences. God will forgive you for a murder, but the victim’s family might not, and the state certainly won’t. That’s an obvious example, but there are other, subtler consequences for self-centered behavior, and they add up, and ultimately cause death.
God warns time and again that if we deviate from His path, there will be consequences. He gives us the path because He wants us to avoid these consequences. Stay in the light. Build your house on the rock. Study all the scriptures, not just our favorites. Follow all the teachings of Jesus, not just the ones we don’t find inconvenient.
The end result of any way by which we misread God is that our thinking about Him is what lacks integrity. Not God. Yet we think He’s the one at fault. I’m not just talking about how we lose faith in Him when the “promises” we expect Him to follow through with, don’t pan out. I’m talking about the daily lack of faith in Him that we demonstrate in our behavior, and in some of the things we teach about Him. When we think of Him as acting one way in the OT and another in Jesus, we innately won’t trust Him because we assume He might pull another personality out of His grab bag. We teach that the Father actually didn’t seek our salvation; that the idea was all Jesus’s, and if the Father had His way we’d all be toast, and that He doesn’t really love us, or has limited salvation to only a select few—that in some ways God stands against Jesus, instead of being Jesus. We act as if the Holy Spirit didn’t exist, or act like the Holy Spirit, until Acts 2. We teach a God who is inherently untrustworthy. And then we expect people to trust Him!—when even we don’t.
God is who He is. Learn who He is.
When Moses first asked God’s name, His answer was ehyéh ashér ehyéh, “I am being what I am being,” or “I am who I am.” (Ex 3.14) From this concept He derived the name Yahweh, the LORD. He is who He is. He gets to define Himself. And He chose to do it through Jesus.
If we’re going to understand God as He is, we need to start from first principles. We need to accept that we really don’t know Him; that the only way we could know Him is through the teachings, interpretations, character, and fruit of following, Christ Jesus. The only lens by which we should be looking at God, in both Old and New Testaments, is Jesus. We need to put aside these myths about dispensations and differing personalities, on differentiating God’s character before and after Jesus’s death, and look at Him through Jesus. We need to integrate our understanding of God through Him. Until we look at Him as a being with integrity, we won’t see it. We’ll just continue to doubt that He has it.