How Can We Sum Up God?

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

“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.

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