God is great and awesome. The God who created us is the same God who saves us. What we think about God, and what we know about God is important. Just as we ask questions of a person when we are first getting to know them, in order to understand more about who they are and what makes them tick, so we should seek to know who God is.
We ask questions of people like, “How old are you? Where did you grow up? Where do you live now? What is your favorite thing to do?”, etc. In so doing we find out about the inner workings of a person, which allows us to appreciate them for who they are and it allows us to know about them in order to have a relationship with them. It allows us to communicate with them and to share our lives with them.
Since we know that God is a personal God, not some deistic fancy, or some clock maker who winds up the world and lets it go, but a God who created the world in order to interact with it to demonstrate His power and glory, to show His mercy and grace, and manifest His justice and wrath, etc. And since He is a God who speaks into the world through His Son, and spoke into our hearts to regenerate us, in order to call us His friends and children. We know that we are to have a relationship with Him just as we would have with people in this world. After all, everything in this world is designed to point us to God, so these relationships here are also shadows or types to show us how we are to interact and relate to God. Thus, it is very important that we find out about God, His character, nature, attributes, etc.
One of the best ways to do this is to look into the Bible and find out what God has revealed about Himself. We should use these to find out what questions about Himself He has already answered. The great news is that many godly men before us have already done this, and as they did this, they noticed something about the things that God revealed about Himself. They noticed that these things came in two different types. The first type are those attributes of God that people can’t and don’t have. The second type are those attributes of God that are in people in a limited way.
The first type of attributes have been called incommunicable attributes. The word signifies attributes of God that can’t be communicated to people, or better said, attributes that make God who He is. These attributes are the following: independence (God is self-existent and has always existed), changelessness (God does not improve in any way, or grow in any way, He is perfectly alive and joyful in Himself), infinite (God is unlimited, He transcends all space, yet is present at every point), simple (God is one God, He is not composed of different parts).
These incommunicable attributes are those attributes that if man possessed He would be God. And since these attributes imply that the one possessing them is higher than all else, they can only be possessed by One being, and that is God Himself.
The second type of attributes have been called communicable attributes. The word signifies attributes of God that are communicated to people, at least in some finite way. These attribute are the following: spirituality (God is a disembodied Spirit, and we are embodied spirits), omniscience (God has all knowledge, and perfect knowledge, but yet we do have some knowledge in a real way), wisdom (God uses knowledge perfectly to meet the right ends, we have wisdom as well), veracity (God is true in His will and in His mind, we share in truth as well, but limited).
These communicable attributes are only in man partially, but are in God perfectly and without end. These attributes show that man is to be like God, and is like God, and serve the purpose of glorifying God, as we look at these attributes in ourselves, we should praise God for having these in an infinite way.
These distinctions between the incommunicable and communicable attributes of God are very important, because they drive us to know God better and worship Him more. In His incommunicable attributes, we can worship Him as the One who is far above us and can rely on Him as the rock of our existence. And in His communicable attributes, we can look at ourselves and be thankful for allowing us to partake of these attributes of His character, and can learn to praise Him as we see these good things manifested in ourselves and others. And since we know more about who He is, we can communicate with Him in prayer in a real way, and communicate Him to others in a very real way.
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