God

God, in Scripture, is the personal, living being whom Israel and the church address by name, worship as creator and sovereign, and trust as covenant partner.

Linguistically, the Hebrew Scriptures most often use elohim, a grammatically plural form that takes singular verbs when it refers to Israel's God, along with the shorter forms el and eloah; the New Testament uses the Greek theos. Alongside these stand the personal name written YHWH, whose original vocalization is not preserved and which is commonly reconstructed as Yahweh and printed as "the LORD" in many English translations. The text consistently ties the word to relationship rather than to abstraction: "Yahweh your God is with you wherever you go" (Joshua 1:9), and "Don't you be afraid, for I am with you... I am your God" (Isaiah 41:10). God in Scripture speaks, commands, promises, and acts.

The passages that describe God's character present him as both near and sovereign. He renews the strength of those who wait for him (Isaiah 40:31), freely pardons the wicked who return to him (Isaiah 55:7), and knows and appoints a person before birth (Jeremiah 1:5). The New Testament adds that his kingdom and righteousness are to be sought first (Matthew 6:33), that he works all things for good for those who love him and are called according to his purpose (Romans 8:28), and that his grace is sufficient and his power "made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:9). His initiative is repeatedly described as prior to human response — choosing "before the foundation of the world" (Ephesians 1:4), saving and calling "not according to our works" but according to purpose and grace "before times eternal" (2 Timothy 1:9) — while the same texts call for human seeking and turning (Isaiah 55:7; Matthew 6:33), and describe him as the "God of all grace" who restores those who have suffered (1 Peter 5:10).

Christian traditions differ over how to speak of God's internal life. The trinitarian mainstream, defined at Nicaea and Constantinople, confesses one God in three persons — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — reading the New Testament's language about God's saving action "in Christ" (Ephesians 1:4; 2 Timothy 1:9) and the "power of Christ" resting on a believer (2 Corinthians 12:9) as pointing to real distinctions within the one divine being. Non-trinitarian bodies, such as unitarian churches and the Latter-day Saints, reject that formulation and read the same texts as describing a single divine person or distinct divine beings. Judaism and Islam, which share the Hebrew Scriptures' confession of one God, do not accept the Trinity. The Bible's own vocabulary for God is thus common ground; how that vocabulary is fitted into a doctrine of God is where the confessions part ways.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.