“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”

Some of you might recognize this sentence from typing tests in school. It’s an example of a “pangram,” a sentence which contains every letter of the alphabet at least once.

At 35 letters, this is not the shortest pangram, however. This next one comes in at a slim 28 letters:

"Waltz, bad nymph, for quick jigs vex."

We can trim it even shorter than that if we allow abbreviations. The following sentence is a perfect pangram, using each of the 26 letters of the English alphabet only once:

"Mr. Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx.”

That got me thinking… If we wanted to construct a sentence expressing all of God’s attributes, how short could we make it? Is it possible to sum up God?

This is a tall order, because God is so multi-faceted.

We’d have to start off with His role as Creator of the universe and all life on earth, including you and me.

We’d have to include His unfathomable love, His mercy, truth, justice, holiness, faithfulness, wisdom, righteousness, goodness and grace.

We couldn’t leave out His omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. And let’s not forget his unchanging, eternal nature.

Whew! Looks like our sentence is getting pretty long. We might have to trim it a bit.

I wonder if we can encapsulate all God is in one word?

Turns out, we can:

Jesus.

All the attributes of the Father were on display in Him: He is a perfect reflection of God. Jesus was the stage upon which all of God’s qualities were expressed.

“He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power.” (Hebrews 1:3 NASB)

Other translations say that the Son shows us exactly what God is like: He expresses the very character of God.

In Christ we find the same eternal nature of God and the same creative force.

“He existed before anything else, and he holds all creation together.”
(Colossians 1:17)

In Jesus we see the same mercy, love, holiness, wisdom, righteousness, grace, and indeed all the attributes that define the Father. They are two sides of the same coin, as it were. Jesus said so Himself:

“Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and yet you still don’t know who I am? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father! So why are you asking me to show him to you?” (John 14:9)

If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus. Get to know Him by reading the Bible.

You’ll find that He’s the spitting image of His Father!

“For when you see me, you are seeing the one who sent me.”

john 12:45

© 2024 Lori J. Cartmell. All rights reserved.