Recommended Reading on the Attributes of God

A couple of Sundays ago, I began an eight-week sermon series on what many people refer to as the “attributes” of God; the truths about God that he ascribes to himself in the Bible. The aim of this series is to put a spotlight on those perfections that God reveals about himself in Scripture, so that we might grow in love for him as a local church.

Though we are just two weeks deep into this series, some of the truths about God’s nature that we have focused upon already have challenged us to think about God in ways we haven’t thought about him before. Because of this, some may be tempted to think we are saying new things about God, or things that no one has ever said about him, or things that no one has ever discovered in his Word before. This is simply not the case. In fact, the truths about God that we have focused upon (and will focus upon in the coming weeks) are truths that Christians have been seeing and teaching throughout the long history of the church.

In order to show the historical precedent of the things that we have and will be digging into throughout this series, and to aid those who are interested in learning more about the things we have and will be covering in it, I thought I would provide a short list of resources that the members of our church could dig into for themselves to continue studying these things on their own. May these recourses prove helpful to leading us into a growing knowledge and love for our infinite and incomprehensible God.

Resource #1

The first resource I would recommend is a 26-chapter devotional walk through the attributes of God called God Is: A Devotional Guide to the Attributes of God. The book is written by a Presbyterian pastor named Mark Jones, who has written a number of other helpful books on crucial matters of the Christian faith.

God Is is a solid book and a rich devotional read. Jones thoughtfully leads the reader to focus on a single “attribute” of God in each chapter. Though you can expect to learn a lot from this book, what is more important is that Jones will lead you to know the God you worship more deeply, and to worship the God you know more sincerely.

Resource #2

The second resource I would recommend is a book called None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God by a theologian out at Midwestern Seminary named Matthew Barrett. Barrett does a good job of making some deep truths about God readily accessible to the reader; something that cannot be said of every meaty work of theology. None Greater is an excellent resource that ties many truths about our God together in an understandable way.

Resource #3

Another book I would highly recommend is by a younger theologian named Peter Sammons who teaches out at The Master’s Seminary in California. It’s a book called The Forgotten Attributes of God: God’s Nature and Why it Matters. Sammons has written another accessible book on the doctrine of God, but one where he deals almost exclusively with things you may not have thought through before.

Often, when we think about God’s attributes we run to things like God’s love and grace and justice and faithfulness, what have been referred to as the communicable attributes of God, those qualities of God that he shares with his image bearers. Sammons however, backs us up to consider who God is regardless of his relation to his creatures – who God has forever been, even before the foundation of the world.

In The Forgotten Attributes of God, Sammons looks at those attributes of God that were “staples of basic Christian theism from long ago” but that “haven’t received the same attention” in our day “because they seem less practical” (p. 15). He seeks to reintroduce these attributes of God to us today, and he does so in a fresh and useful way.

All three of these books are well worth your time, even though there are surely others that could be mentioned (feel free to ask me if you’d like additional recommendations!). So, if you’re interested in reading up on these things as we work through this series (or after it is over), pick one and we’ll seek to grow in the knowledge of God together.