God's Personality

Have you ever thought of God as having a personality? I don’t think I’ve really thought of it but it makes sense. Since we are made in the image of God and since He gave us each our own individual personality, doesn’t it make sense that He also has His own personality? Now, that’s just profound, isn’t it? Not really but God’s personality is a curious topic.

When talking about God, we spend a lot of time on God’s character or His attributes, the things that make Him the One and Only God. This is good and should definitely be something we try to understand. Our finite minds can only comprehend a finite amount of Who God is but the better we understand Who God is the more we can appreciate the God we serve.

What is God’s personality? Can we see God’s personality presented in Scripture? How does God’s character and attributes affect his personality? Would different aspects of his personality be evident based on the circumstances that are present? 

The entire Bible can give us a good look at His personality but we can get an even better look at his personality by looking at the Gospels. My purpose is not to explore if Jesus is more Choleric than Phlegmatic or more Sanguine than Melancholy because God is perfect and we would probably decide that He’s an equal mix of all of them but it would be interesting to go through the stories of the Bible, especially the Gospels, and take a personality test of God and see the results. 

Can you imagine the day after Jesus went with a whip running the money changers out of the Temple? Imagine one of the people that saw this telling his friend the next day about what happened. He starts telling his friend about Jesus making the whip, throwing the tables around, using the whip to run the thieves out of the temple, and anything else he saw that day. I can just imagine his friend saying, “That’s not Jesus. You must be mistaken. I was on the hill when he fed all of us on the mountain, and just yesterday I saw him with children on his lap and telling them stories about heaven. That’s not Jesus’ personality. Are you sure that was Jesus you saw who did that?”

I know that some struggle with the perceived differences between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament. I know there are a lot of explanations for this but could we be seeing God’s personality? We know, according to Scripture, that our God does not change. He’s “the same, yesterday, today, and forever.” It could be that different aspects of his personality are seen through the different circumstances of His people? God’s personality would be consistent with His character but we get to see His personality come out through the interactions with His people as told through stories told in the Bible.

God’s Personality, it’s an interesting thought.