Communicable Attributes

A group leader I know once told me she had stopped talking about God's holiness in her Tuesday-night study. Too abstract, she said. People glazed over. So she leaned into love instead, the warm, relational God who meets us where we are. Within a year the group had drifted into something therapeutic: a place to feel supported, not a place to be transformed. She had not meant to cut holiness out. She had assumed love and holiness were separable, that you could hold one without the other. Scripture will not let you make that move.

What makes these attributes different

Theologians distinguish between two kinds of divine attributes. Incommunicable attributes belong to God alone: his aseity, omniscience, timeless self-existence. No creature will ever share these. Communicable attributes are different. These are qualities God possesses in infinite measure and yet genuinely imparts to his creatures. They are the family resemblance between Father and children. God does not just model them for us to admire. He commands us to embody them. Peter makes this scandalously direct: "As he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, 'You shall be holy, for I am holy'" (1 Pet 1:15-16). The ground of the command is God's own character. The imitation is relational before it is ethical.

Holiness is not primarily a prohibition

Most people, if pressed, would define holiness as separation from sin. That definition is not wrong, but it starts in the wrong place. Holiness in Scripture means first the positive reality of God's radiant perfection, his absolute otherness. When Isaiah saw the Lord in the temple, the seraphim did not cry "separate, separate, separate" but "Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory" (Isa 6:3). The triple repetition, unique in Hebrew poetry, signals a categorical superlative. This is holiness without remainder, without mixture.

Isaiah's immediate response was not a manageable sense of moral failure. It was sheer undoing: "Woe is me! For I am lost" (Isa 6:5). An encounter with holiness does not produce guilt management. It produces the collapse of self-sufficiency. That is the posture from which God's commission becomes possible. The coal touches Isaiah's lips, the iniquity is taken away, and then, only then, the question comes: "Whom shall I send?" Holiness received enables holiness in motion.

Love that has teeth

No attribute of God is more celebrated or more misunderstood than his love. John's first letter gives us the most concentrated formulation Scripture offers: "God is love" (1 Jn 4:8). Not that God has love as one feature among many, but that love is part of what makes God God. Every act of God is shaped by love. Then John anchors the definition in history: "In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins" (1 Jn 4:10). The word "propitiation" is load-bearing. Love does not float above God's wrath. It goes into the middle of it and absorbs it.

Many presentations of divine love treat wrath as its opposite. John 3:16 lands in a chapter that ends: "whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him" (Jn 3:36). Same passage, same chapter. God's wrath is not the opposite of his love. It is the other edge of it. A father who watches his child consumed by addiction and feels nothing is not loving. Wrath is love with a target on what destroys the beloved. Then John turns this back on us: "Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another" (1 Jn 4:11). The logic is not "God loved you, so feel warm." It is: the love you have received creates a debt you discharge by loving outward.

Justice as covenant loyalty

Micah 6:8 is one of the most quoted verses in Scripture and one of the least examined. "He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God." Notice the preface: "He has told you." The requirement is not new. It has been declared. Justice is not a progressive social invention we read back into the text. It is something God has been saying all along.

Isaiah 61:8 locates the source: "For I the LORD love justice; I hate robbery and wrong." This is not sentiment. It is an active orientation that hates its opposite. In the covenant framework, justice means the faithful exercise of rights and responsibilities within relationship. The king who defends the widow does justice because he acts according to covenant norms. The merchant who cheats the poor tears the relational fabric God wove into community. For us, justice is not a political position added on top of faith. It is what a community that knows a just God naturally produces.

Faithfulness as daily mercy

Lamentations is not comfortable reading. Jerusalem has fallen. The temple is in ruins. The poet does not pretend otherwise: "Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow" (Lam 1:12). The grief is specific. Then, in chapter three, something shifts: "But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness" (Lam 3:21-23).

The Hebrew word translated "steadfast love" is hesed, covenant loyalty. It is not a feeling. It is a settled commitment. God's faithfulness does not depend on favorable conditions. The poet did not arrive at this conclusion by reasoning from his circumstances. He called it to mind. Faithfulness in us is not the emotion of confidence. It is the decision to remember what we know to be true about God when nothing around us confirms it.

The ethics that follow

These attributes are not a reading list. They are a portrait of a God who made us in his image and therefore capable of looking like him. Holiness means we take the interior life seriously, because God is not satisfied with external performance. Love means we move toward difficult people, because God moved toward us when we were hostile. Justice means we notice who is missing from our tables and why. Faithfulness means we keep the commitments we made on good days when we are in the bad ones.

None of these flow from moral effort alone. They are the fruit of sustained encounter with the God who possesses them fully. Paul prays that the Ephesians would be "filled with all the fullness of God" (Eph 3:19) before describing how they should treat one another. That sequence is causal. The ethics come out of the encounter.

Before your group opens any of these texts this Tuesday, put this question on the table: which of these attributes do you find easiest to talk about in God, and hardest to practice yourself, and sit with the gap between those two answers.