God
Whoever breathed the breath has to be a certain kind of thing, or the breath came from nowhere, and nowhere does not breathe.
The boy was six and the lights were off. Who made God? Nobody made God. Then where did he come from? He was always there. That doesn't make sense. The man sat on the edge of the bed in the dark and found that he agreed with the boy and had nothing better. Then, because the boy was waiting, he said the truest thing he had ever said without knowing it was true. It's the only thing that does. Because if somebody made him, that somebody is really God, and you'd ask me about him instead. Somewhere it has to stop. The boy said okay and was asleep in a minute. The man sat there a while. Thirty-eight years in church, and his son had made him think it through in the dark in four questions.
A man arrives here having climbed: the floor, the well, the breath. Every room was walking upward and pointing at the same door, and one thing should be said before it opens. He walked up to this room. That is the order of discovery, not the order of reality. Reality runs the other way. Everything he has walked through hangs from what lives here, and he climbed the building floor by floor to stand in the room the whole building hangs from.
Who is this God? Not the vague sense of something higher, not a personal interpretation, not the deity a culture carved to the shape of what it could tolerate. The specific, named God who has said who he is. This is a room for an honest reckoning with who the God of the Bible claims to be, so that a man building on this foundation is building on what is there, and it begins in the one place a man would least expect the summit to begin.
God
"Thus says the LORD, the King of Israel and his Redeemer, the LORD of hosts: 'I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god.'" — Isaiah 44:6
Read who is talking and what he rules out. Not the greatest god, which would leave room for the others. First and last, with nothing on either side of him, and then the flat sentence, besides me there is no god, said by the one speaker in the universe who could check. The boy in the dark arrived at the same place by a different road: somewhere it has to stop, and whatever it stops at is God. This room is where a man meets the one it stops at. It begins where the signature of evil and the love of God occupy the same ground, builds the shape of the throne from what God would have to be, and then lets him say who he is: one, three, unlimited, just and merciful at once, sovereign over the leash, and the one whose image the man reading this carries.
The Lamb at the Bottom of the Well
At the bottom of the well a man learned evil's signature: it finds the most innocent thing it can and does the worst that can be done. He was told the road would not go down there again, and it will not. But before he meets God in his attributes he has to see the one place where that signature and the love of God occupy the same ground.
The worst possible thing, done to the most innocent one who ever lived. That is a description of the darkness at its deepest. It is also, word for word, a description of the cross. Jesus of Nazareth was the only innocent man in history, "although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth" — Isaiah 53:9, and at the cross everything from the bottom of the well converged on him: betrayal by a friend, a rigged trial, torture as spectacle, mockery while he died, and beneath it something heavier, the weight of what evil is, laid on the one who had none of it. Peter said both halves in one sentence, to the men who had done it. "This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men." — Acts 2:23. Lawless hands and a definite plan, on the same ground, in the same hour.
Here is the difference between the cross and every atrocity in the well. He chose it. The innocents at the bottom had no say. The innocent one on the hill had every say, said that no one took his life from him, and laid it down anyway. "For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly." — Romans 5:6. Which means something that has to be said plainly to any man reading this from a low place. The well has a bottom. The rescue was worked at the bottom, by one who went there on purpose, and there is no depth it cannot reach, because it was never reaching down from above. That is not sentiment. It is the first thing to know about God: before he is anything a man can define, he is a rescuer who has already acted, and the reason was not obligation.
What It Would Take
Now step back and ask the boy's question properly, because it is the question every man should ask before he takes anyone's word about God. For anything to rightly be called God, what would it have to be?
Not made. If something made God, that something outranks him, and the maker, not the made, would be God. The boy saw it in the dark. Whatever is truly God has to be self-existent: uncaused, unmade, depending on nothing outside himself to be.
Not changing. A god who improves was imperfect yesterday. A god who declines is dying. Either way he is being measured against a standard above himself, and the standard would be God. "They will perish, but you will remain; they will all wear out like a garment… but you are the same, and your years have no end." — Psalm 102:25-27. And he does not change his mind the way a man does, because he never gets new information. "The Glory of Israel will not lie or have regret, for he is not a man, that he should have regret." — 1 Samuel 15:29.
Not limited. If there is a fact he does not know, the fact escapes him. If there is a power he cannot exercise, the power exceeds him. If there is a place he is absent from, the place sits outside his rule. Whatever is truly God must know everything, be able to do anything consistent with what he is, and be present with no outside.
Not plural. Two ultimate beings is a contradiction. Whatever decided between them would be the actual ultimate, and a god who can be overruled is not God. He is the strongest thing currently in play.
Run it honestly and it produces a short hard list: self-existent, eternal, unchanging, singular, unlimited in knowledge and power and presence. Reason can build the shape of the throne. What reason cannot do is say who sits on it. For that he would have to speak, and "I am the first and I am the last" is him speaking.
One
The first claim of Scripture about God is not complicated. There is one. Not the best god among many, not the god of this tribe or that tradition. "I am the LORD, and there is no other, besides me there is no God." — Isaiah 45:5. Israel's oldest creed says it in six words. This is not the claim that all paths climb the same mountain. It is the claim that there is one God, that he has said who he is with specificity, and that every other account is measured against that, and it matters for a man building on truth because a God who is one means truth is one. There is a source, it is singular, and what contradicts it is not different. It is wrong.
The Name He Gave
When Moses asked who he should say had sent him, God did not give a label. He gave a statement of nature, two words in Hebrew, I AM, and told Moses to carry them to Pharaoh. The personal name of God, the four letters English Bibles print as LORD in small capitals, means the one who is: self-existent, underived, the same before the universe as after it. The list reason built in the last section is the list God declared about himself from a burning bush, three thousand years before the philosophers formalized the argument, and he declared it to a shepherd who had asked a practical question.
He has other names, and none of them is a label either. Each was given on a day somebody found out it was true, usually at the point where they had nothing left. The catalog has a room of its own off this page, and the names will mean more once a man knows the One they belong to.
Three
The most contested thing Scripture says about this one God is that he is one being in three persons. Not three gods. Not one person in three costumes. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, equal in deity, distinct in person, and the clearest place to see all three at once is a riverbank. "And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him; and behold, a voice from heaven said, 'This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.'" — Matthew 3:16-17. The Son in the water. The Spirit coming down. The Father's voice. One scene, three, and no one present was confused about how many Gods there were.
The Father. The one no man has seen in his full nature and lived; the source, whom Jesus addressed as Father and taught his men to address the same way. The Son. God come in flesh, fully God and fully man, born of a woman at a datable time in a findable place, the only man who ever lived without sin, who came not to teach a better way to live but to do what no man could do for himself. He is the Lamb this room opened with. "No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known." — John 1:18. The Holy Spirit. Not a force, not a feeling, a person, the one Jesus promised would teach and remind — John 14:26, who dwells in the man who belongs to Christ, convicts, advocates, empowers, and makes him increasingly clear-eyed about what is actually wrong in his own life, which is why maturity in faith is not comfortable.
The three are not an arithmetic problem. They are a relationship inside the nature of God himself, which is why God can be love without needing something outside himself to love. He has been loving, in person, forever. Paul's blessing on a church names all three in a breath. "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all." — 2 Corinthians 13:14.
What He Is
Reason said God would have to be unlimited in knowledge, power, and presence. Revelation confirms each one and shows what it means for the man standing in this room.
He knows everything. "Great is our Lord, and abundant in power; his understanding is beyond measure." — Psalm 147:5. Every motive behind every act, every consequence before the choice. A man can act in secret. He cannot act outside what God already knows, and neither can the men at the bottom of the well; the networks that run in darkness are not dark to him. That is sobering, and it is the one liberating fact a man has once he has seen the dark.
He can do anything. "Ah, Lord GOD! It is you who have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and by your outstretched arm! Nothing is too hard for you." — Jeremiah 32:17. Jeremiah prayed that with the siege works going up outside the wall, having just been told to buy a field. God is not the most powerful being. He is the being power is defined against. His power is never the question. Only his will is.
He is everywhere. "Am I a God at hand, declares the LORD, and not a God far away? Can a man hide himself in secret places so that I cannot see him? declares the LORD. Do I not fill heaven and earth?" — Jeremiah 23:23-24. There is no place to conduct a private life without witness, and the bottom of the well is not outside his presence. For the man walking rightly, that is the comfort. For the man who is not, it is the one fact he cannot outlast.
He loves. Not sentimentally. The love that gives what the beloved actually needs at cost to itself, and went to a hill while the beloved was still hostile. Every human love is a reflection of this one.
How He Moves
Attributes say what God is. Character says how he moves toward what he made.
He is just, and he cannot be bought. "For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who is not partial and takes no bribe." — Deuteronomy 10:17. He does not bend the standard for the ones he prefers or relax it for the ones he loves. He is the God of justice and of mercy, both at full strength at once, and the two do not take turns. Justice without mercy is cruelty. Mercy without justice is complicity. That God runs both without contradiction is what makes the hill necessary, and what makes it enough. "Your righteousness is like the mountains of God; your judgments are like the great deep." — Psalm 36:6. Love to the sky, in the same psalm, and judgments to the sea floor.
He is near the broken. The God who holds the universe draws close to the man whose world has come apart. He is not watching from a safe elevation. The man who reaches the lowest point of his life is not abandoned there. He is found there, which the well already showed.
Whose Hand Is on the Leash
God is sovereign. He holds absolute dominion over everything and directs it freely, as he pleases. This is not the doctrine that makes God arbitrary. It is the doctrine that makes reality cohere. "All the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing, and he does according to his will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay his hand or say to him, 'What have you done?'" — Daniel 4:35. A king said that after seven years on his hands and knees. Without a sovereign, nothing is finally governed, the strongest temporary force decides outcomes, history is noise, suffering means nothing, and the wicked get away with it forever.
A man has already met sovereignty in action, though it was not named when he saw it. At the bottom of the well he learned that the mystery of iniquity is at work and is being held back, that for all its appetite evil never reaches the totality it thirsts for, and that the restraint is not luck. This is the room where the restraint gets its name. The leash on the dark is held by a hand, and the hand is this one. "The LORD has established his throne in the heavens, and his kingdom rules over all." — Psalm 103:19. Over all includes the dark. Sovereignty does not cancel a man's agency; it encompasses it. His choices and their consequences are real, and God is not surprised, defeated, or thwarted by them. "The king's heart is a stream of water in the hand of the LORD; he turns it wherever he will." — Proverbs 21:1. Even the man who thinks he is running things is a stream in a hand. A god who can be overruled is only the strongest thing currently in play, and the LORD is not in play. He is the ground everything in play is standing on.
What Carries His Image
A man is not an advanced animal. He is not a process that developed self-awareness through sufficient complexity. Scripture's first word about him is that he was made in the image of God, and the psalmist, having looked at the stars and asked what man is, answered his own question. "Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet." — Psalm 8:5-6. Crowned, and given dominion. A man carries, inside the box the last room described, the imprint of the being this page has been describing.
This is also the last piece of the well's explanation. A man saw down there that evil's hatred lands on human beings with a ferocity no survival logic accounts for, and lands hardest on the most defenseless. Now he knows why. The enemy cannot touch God, so it defaces his image, and nothing carries that image more openly than the innocent. The war he has been reading about since the bottom of the well is, at the root, a war over what he is.
The dignity this confers is not earned and cannot be revoked by what has been done to him. It is what he is, and it is the ground of every accountability this foundation will hold him to, because a man who carries the image of God is not free to be less than what the image means. He is also a maker, by delegation, and the man who shapes raw into useful and leaves his corner of the world better than he found it is doing a small version of what he was made from.
One Room Off This One
A chamber opens off this summit, and it is not a fourth room in the hall. It holds the names.
Names of God walks them slowly, and the thing to know before stepping in is that almost none of them was handed down as theology. They were given at moments: to a slave woman dying of thirst, to an old man with a knife on a mountain, to a farmer threshing in a hole to hide the grain from raiders. Each name is a doctrine compressed into a word, and each was a rescue before it was a doctrine, and the chamber reads them that way, from the names of power to the names cried out in the wilderness to the names of the King, and then the name above every name, where all of them converge in a person. The chamber lets out through this room's own door. A man who steps in leaves the hall from there, carrying the names, by the same exit as everyone else.
How Men Shrink the Summit
The man with a higher power. He believes in something with no name, no character, and no claim on him, which is why he chose it. He has climbed to the summit and furnished it with a feeling.
The man who kept the mercy and lost the justice. His God is kind and cannot be disappointed, and the hill makes no sense to him, because nothing needed to be paid. He has made God manageable, and a manageable god is the one the chamber's holiest name forbids.
The man who kept the justice and lost the mercy. He is certain God is holy and certain God is against him, and he is half right, and the half he has is killing him. Nobody told him the one who is near the broken went to the bottom on purpose.
The man who never thought it through. Thirty-eight years in a pew and his son had to ask him in the dark. He is not a hypocrite. He has been standing in the room the building hangs from and has never looked up.
Three Questions at the Summit
TRUTH: Is the God a man actually believes in the one who said I am the first and I am the last, or a smaller one assembled from what the man could tolerate? The test is simple. Does his God ever disagree with him. A god who always agrees is a mirror with a beard.
LOVE: If God is near the broken on purpose and went to the bottom himself, what does a man owe the broken man next to him? Not an argument. The same nearness. A man who keeps a safe elevation from the men at the bottom has met a different god than the one on the hill.
LAW: If he is sovereign over the leash, he is sovereign over the man holding this page, who agreed to it the moment he agreed that God would have to be unlimited to be God at all. He should notice that he agreed. The third column of this foundation reads that agreement back to him in full.
Unapproachable Light
All of this a man can do. Run the boy's question to the end. Learn the list reason builds and the name God gave. Hold justice and mercy in one hand because God does. Find the leash's owner and his own image in the same room. He should. The next hall has nothing to show him until he knows whose hand he is looking for.
And he should notice what Paul says about the summit itself, because it is not a place a man climbs to. "Who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see." — 1 Timothy 6:16. Unapproachable. No one has seen or can see. A man who has read this far has been climbing toward a room that, by its own description, cannot be reached from below, and the only reason he is standing in it is the sentence a few sections back: the one at the Father's side came down and made him known. The summit was not climbed. It was visited. A man should let that sit. It is the shape of everything he will be told later, and this room will not say more.
Where the Summit Leads
This is where the hall ends, and a man should look back down it once. The floor, the well, the breath, and the summit: what God would have to be in order to be God at all, and who he says he is. One, three, unlimited, just and merciful at full strength together, near the broken, sovereign over the leash, and the one whose image a man carries. The hall was never a doctrine to master. It was an introduction to a person, and the person is the one the whole building hangs from.
A man who has met the maker does not leave the summit and stop meeting him. "O LORD, how manifold are your works! In wisdom have you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures." — Psalm 104:24. Made in wisdom, and the wisdom shows. A man who knows a carpenter's hand can walk into a stranger's house and name the carpenter from the joinery, and a man who has met this God is about to start finding his handwriting on things that never heard his name. That is the next hall, and it is not a smaller one.