Format for Topical Research:

1. Pray for the Spirit’s leading. 
2. Pick a Topic.  In this case, I chose the topic of examining what the Bible tells me about God’s personality. I know that I have just scratched the surface of this topic.
3. Collect and organize verses.  I found sixteen passages that I studied to understand what happened to bring sin into existence. You might choose more or less. Do not worry if you chose different verses than I did.
4. Read the verses and ask questions about the verses.  My questions were designed to help me understand the verses in more detail. You will probably have different questions than me.
5. Write your answers. I wrote my answers separately for this post, but for myself, I just write the answers right after the questions.
6. Summarize your ideas. 
7. Repeat Steps 4-6.
8. Final Paraphrase. 
9. Pray for deeper understanding even after you finish studying.

MY EXAMPLE STUDY FOR WHO IS GOD

TOPIC: To Know God

INTRODUCTION:  The Bible says that if we want to have eternal life, there is only one way—to know God, especially as we see Him in Jesus.  “When Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (1 John 17:1-3).  According to these verses, eternal life is not about earning a place with good works and being a good person.  It is not about what you do at all.  It is about who you know.  It is about having an intimate relationship with the God of heaven.  Some Christians think they know God, but the God they portray looks more like one of the pagan idols worshipped in Babylon than like the God described in the Bible.  They talk about a God whose favor must be earned and whose anger needs appeasement.  They acknowledge the love and mercy of Jesus, but somehow, they make the Father into a capricious monster whose will it is that people are tortured or raped.  Something horrible happens, and their answer is, “It’s God’s will.”  There are a lot of false pictures of God out there and all too often those false pictures infiltrate our thinking, and we begin to accept them.  I want to know God as much as possible.  Thus, a topical Bible study about God’s character and personality is important for me.  I started out my study by examining the first time a false picture of God was painted.

VERSE 1:  Genesis 3:1-5

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?”  And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’”  But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die.  For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

QUESTION:  In what ways did Satan misrepresent God? 

ANSWER:  God lied to you.  You can’t trust Him.  God is afraid that you will become like Him.  He is holding something good back from you.  God is cheating you out of what you deserve.  You cannot trust Him, so you need to look after yourself.

SUMMARY:  Satan is still telling those lies.  I have to constantly fight to keep faith in God’s care for me.  Too often, I feel like I have to take care of myself because I cannot trust God to look after my best interests.  That is the devil and my human nature whispering in my ear, and I have to continually remind myself that these are the same lies that caused Adam and Eve to fall.

VERSE 2:  Matthew 24:24

For false christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect.                                                 

QUESTIONS:

1. How can the very elect keep from being deceived? 
2. How can we know God? 
3. Who is God? 

ANSWERS:

1. The only way to avoid being deceived is to know God.
2. God has revealed Himself in His word.
3. The most complete revelation of God was Jesus on the cross, but the Bible has much more to tell me about my Father and the Holy Spirit, who are not human.

SUMMARY:  In Matthew, Jesus said that people would imitate him and claim to speak for him with such skill that it would be difficult not to be deceived.  All too often we overlook the words that tell us how God thinks and what He feels.

BACKGROUND QUESTION:  What are some of the negative ideas about God that people have?

ANSWER:  Often people picture God as an angry, controlling, capricious, unforgiving, stern judge.  Many people portray God as having a lot of patience but also having a bad temper that explodes causing destruction everywhere. 

I wanted to look at one of those times of destruction to see how God was really feeling when He brought judgment on His people.  In the days of Isaiah, the Assyrians came and devastated all of Israel and much of Judah.  They carried off the people of Israel into permanent exile leaving only the kingdom of Judah with the two tribes of Judah and Benjamin left of the original twelve that had settled the area.  Then later, the Babylonians came and conquered Jerusalem.  Eventually, they would destroy the city completely, including the temple, and carry off most of the Jews into exile.  The prophets had been predicting that God’s wrath and judgment would come on His idolatrous people and finally it did.  The question is what was God thinking?  Was God feeling overwhelming anger as He carried out His judgment?  Jeremiah lets us see into God’s heart as the last stages of the judgment were about to take place.

VERSE 3:  Jeremiah 4:19-22 

My anguish, my anguish! I writhe in pain! Oh the walls of my heart! My heart is beating wildly; I cannot keep silent, for I hear the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war.  Crash follows hard on crash; the whole land is laid waste. Suddenly my tents are laid waste, my curtains in a moment.  How long must I see the standard and hear the sound of the trumpet?  “For my people are foolish; they know me not; they are stupid children; they have no understanding. They are ‘wise’—in doing evil! But how to do good they know not.”

QUESTIONS:

1. How do we know that this is God speaking and not Jeremiah? 
2. What does God say that He feels?
3. What is the cause for God’s anguish? 
4. What kind of people is God suffering with?

ANSWERS:

1. Verse 22 says, “They know me not” indicating that they do not know God.
2. Verse 19 says that God feels anguish and is writhing in pain.  His heart is beating wildly.
3. Verses 19-21 says that the cause of God’s anguish is the war and the resulting destruction, yet God is the one bringing this judgment on His people.  As they suffer, He suffers with them.
4. Verse 22 says that they are foolish, and they don’t know Him.  It calls them stupid children who have no understanding.  They are wise in doing evil, but they don’t know how to do good.

SUMMARY:  As the people practice more and more evil to each other, God says that He writhes in pain.  His heart beats wildly. and He is full of intense anguish.  I do not know if God has a physical heart.  I have no idea what God has.  This is a metaphor.  God is putting His feelings into words we humans can understand, and most likely the heart part is figurative.  The point is that when God’s people hurt each other, God hurts also.  He feels pain as we do evil.  He feels pain when we give pain and when we receive pain.  He feels pain when He is forced to bring judgment on us.  How could it be otherwise if He loves us?  And this grief was for people who were evil.  This reminds me of another verse that speaks of God’s attitude toward people who are wise at doing evil.

VERSE 4:  Romans 5:6-11

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.  For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.  Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.  For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.  More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

QUESTIONS:

1. Who did Jesus die for? 
2. Why? 
3. Is this only speaking of Jesus loving us? 
4. What does it mean here when we consider that the Father is trying to save us from His own wrath? 
5. What do you think wrath means in verse 9?  Is it God getting angry and blowing His top?

ANSWERS:

1. The ungodly
2. God loves us even when we are sinners/enemies.
3. These verses show that both the Father and the Son love us.
4. God is merciful.
5. No, it is judgment, but it is not out-of-control anger.

SUMMARY:  We need to rethink our ideas about the wrath of God.  When we read about God’s wrath and judgment in the Bible, it is not someone flailing around in out-of-control rage.  I have studied what wrath means in the Bible before and when I looked at the context, I found that over and over again, God’s punishment consisted of Him stopping His protection and letting this sinful world take its natural course.  However, God always takes responsibility for the destruction when He stops protecting people. 

VERSE 5:  Luke 19: 41-44

And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.  For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.”

QUESTIONS:

1. What was happening in the verses before this, i.e., what is the context? 
2. What did Jesus do when the city of Jerusalem came into view? 
3. Why did Jesus weep? 
4. Why were the people and the city going to be destroyed? 
5. What did Jesus say that they should know? 

ANSWERS:

1. The triumphal entry into Jerusalem.  They started at the Mount of Olives, and they were going towards Jerusalem.
2. Verse 41 says that He wept.
3. Verses 43-44 say that Jerusalem would be destroyed.  Jesus could see the siege that would happen in A.D. 70 where the Romans would tear down the temple and city, and the people would be decimated. Jesus said that not one stone of the temple would be left upon the other.
4. Verse 42 & 44 say that they did not KNOW the time of their visitation—that  God had come to them.  There is that word KNOW again.
5. Verse 42 says that Jesus wanted them to know the things that make for peace, but it was hidden from their eyes that He was with them.

SUMMARY: Jesus was looking forward in time to a situation where the people of Israel would be under judgment for rejecting Him.  Jesus wept over the destruction of Jerusalem even as he was entering it triumphantly on a donkey with the Jews singing Hosannas all around.  Jesus did not want Jerusalem to be destroyed.  He longed to save them.

VERSE 6:  John 11:33-36

When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled.  And he said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.”  Jesus wept.  So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!”  But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man also have kept this man from dying?”

QUESTIONS:

1. What has been happening before this, i.e., what is the context? 
2. What were the people and Mary and Martha doing? 
3. Why did Jesus cry?
4. What do we know about God from these verses?

ANSWERS:

1. Mary and Martha had sent for Jesus because Lazarus was sick.  Jesus purposely delayed.  Lazarus died.  Jesus finally arrives, and Martha comes out to see Him.  They talk about resurrection.  She goes and gets Mary.  When Mary comes out to Jesus, others follow her.
2. They were crying.
3. Jesus did not weep for Lazarus.  Lazarus was about to be raised from the dead, and Jesus knew it.  Jesus was crying out of sympathy for the pain that he saw in the living people standing at the tomb.
4. God cries.  Jesus cried here and in prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane.

VERSE 7:  Hebrews 5:7

In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence.

QUESTION:  Was Jesus quiet when He cried? 

ANSWER:  He was loud.  This was not silent gentle crying.  This was loud wailing.

VERSE 8: Jeremiah 9:1-2 

Oh that my head were waters, and my eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!  Oh that I had in the desert a travelers’ lodging place, that I might leave my people and go away from them! For they are all adulterers, a company of treacherous men.  They bend their tongue like a bow; falsehood and not truth has grown strong in the land; for they proceed from evil to evil, and they do not know me, declares the LORD. 

QUESTIONS:

1. Why is God crying?
2. How long does He want to cry?
3. In verse 2, what does God want to do with His people? 
4. Why? 

ANSWERS:

1. God is crying for the slain/the dead of Jerusalem.
2. He wants to cry day and night.
3. God wants to leave His people.
4. They are adulterers and treacherous/liars.  They do not know Him.  There is that word KNOW again.  These verses show a relationship between knowing God and not being evil.

SUMMARY:  God cried before the first destruction of Jerusalem just as Jesus would cry over the later destruction of Jerusalem.  How sad that God’s love for us humans has made Him wish sometimes that He could run away from knowing our evil and seeing us hurt each other?  We see horrors on the news and try to hide from them and sometimes we blame God for them when we should be sympathetic because those horrors affect Him more than they have ever affected us.  We can ignore other people’s hurt.  God can’t.  Yet He bears with us because some of us can be saved, and He will endure any pain He has to experience in order to save us.  He endured the pain of the cross for us, but the pain did not start there.  God has been enduring pain on our account ever since Eve first bit into the forbidden fruit.  The first time that I read through Jeremiah, it helped me to clearly see God’s pain when evil happens and He cannot stop it, or even worse when He is forced to stop it by letting judgment come in.  That theme is throughout Jeremiah.

GENERAL SUMMARY:  God cried for Jerusalem the first time that it was going to be destroyed and said that the people were evil and did not know Him.  Jesus cried for Jerusalem the second time that it was going to be destroyed and listed how they killed the prophets and that they did not know their own Peacemaker.  Jesus wept out of sympathy for the grief of the people at Lazarus’ tomb, even though He knew that their grief would turn to joy soon.  Why?  Because God is moved by our sadness and hates that He has to let us stay in that situation.  (He waited four days.  In a way, He was responsible for their grief.)  This is life eternal.  That we know God.  God feels pain when we hurt others and when we are hurt.

VERSE 9:  Mark 14:26

And when they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.

QUESTIONS:

1. What was the situation where this happened? 
2. Who was singing? 
3. What were they singing? 

ANSWERS:

1. The Last Supper
2. Jesus and the disciples
3. From the Psalms

SUMMARY:  But someone might think that Jesus was singing only because it was expected, not because Jesus just naturally sang if this were the only verse about God singing.

VERSE 10: Zephaniah 3:14-17 

Sing aloud, O daughter of Zion; shout, O Israel! Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter of Jerusalem!  The LORD has taken away the judgments against you; he has cleared away your enemies. The King of Israel, the LORD, is in your midst; you shall never again fear evil.  On that day it shall be said to Jerusalem: “Fear not, O Zion; let not your hands grow weak.  The LORD your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.

QUESTIONS:

1. Why are the people/Israel supposed to sing? 
2. Who is in the King of Israel and where is He? 
3. In verse 17, what does God do? 

ANSWERS:

1. Verse 15 says that their judgments have been taken away, and God has acted to take away the enemies.
2. The King of Israel is Yahweh.  He is in the middle of His people, and He will never leave.  LORD in all capital letters denotes that the name Yahweh was used in the original Hebrew.
3. God rejoices with gladness.  He quiets His people with his love.  He exults over His people with loud singing

SUMMARY:  Just as God feels anguish when His people hurt each other and reject Him, He feels joy when His people turn to Him and choose to love each other.  He comforts us with His love, but what really interests me here, is that God wants to sing loudly in His happiness that we have chosen Him.  God wants to sing when He is happy.

VERSE 11:  Psalm 32:6-7

Therefore let everyone who is godly offer prayer to you at a time when you may be found; surely in the rush of great waters, they shall not reach him.  You are a hiding place for me; you preserve me from trouble; you surround me with shouts of deliverance. Selah

QUESTIONS:

1. What kind of people are these?
2. What does it mean to be Godly?
3. How can we depend on God when we know Him? 
4. What does God do when He delivers His people? 

ANSWERS:

1. These are Godly people.
2. To be Godly is to know God.
3. He is our hiding place.  God preserves us from trouble.  He surrounds us with deliverance.
4. God shouts as He delivers people.  In other words, God can be quite loud and exuberant.

SUMMARY: God rejoices over us and wants to sing loudly for joy because we want Him.  God cares for His people and is so excited that He shouts when He can deliver them from evil.

VERSE 12:  Isaiah 40:10-11

Behold, the Lord GOD comes with might, and his arm rules for him; behold, his reward is with him, and his recompense before him.  He will tend his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms; he will carry them in his bosom, and gently lead those that are with young.

QUESTIONS:

1. What is God bringing with Him? 
2. When this happens, how does He want to treat us? 

ANSWERS:

1. God is bringing His reward/recompense with Him
2. God will treat us gently.  God wants to touch us and carry us and be close to us.  Isaiah pictures Him as carrying us in the same way that a young lamb that cannot walk steadily is carried by its shepherd.

SUMMARY:  This pictures God as being very gentle, which is the opposite of the unmoved, stern picture that many people have of God.  The God of the scriptures understands that we are weak and treats us with compassion.

VERSE 13: Isaiah 46:3-4

“Listen to me, O house of Jacob, all the remnant of the house of Israel, who have been borne by me from before your birth, carried from the womb; even to your old age I am he, and to gray hairs I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear; I will carry and will save.

QUESTIONS:

1. How long does God say that He carries His people? 
2. What is God’s promise to His people? 

ANSWERS:

1. From before birth to old age
2. He will carry them and save them.

SUMMARY:  Isaiah pictures God as carrying us from the time before we are born to holding up our weak frail bodies in old age.  This is a picture of a God who is constantly looking out for us to see what we need and to meet those needs.  He is constantly attentive to people and determined to support them in any way that they let Him.  God is a nurturer.

VERSE 14:  Deuteronomy 1:29-33

Then I said to you, ‘Do not be in dread or afraid of them.  The LORD your God who goes before you will himself fight for you, just as he did for you in Egypt before your eyes, and in the wilderness, where you have seen how the LORD your God carried you, as a man carries his son, all the way that you went until you came to this place.’  Yet in spite of this word you did not believe the LORD your God, who went before you in the way to seek you out a place to pitch your tents, in fire by night and in the cloud by day, to show you by what way you should go.

QUESTIONS:

1. How did God take care of His people? 
2. Where was God with relationship to His people (before, behind, in the middle)?  What is the significance of this? 
3. How does Moses picture God’s relationship with His people? 

ANSWERS:

1. He found them places to sleep and showed them where they should go.
2. He went before them.  He was making the way clear for His people.  He was breaking the trail and dealing with the problems ahead.
3. Moses saw God’s relationship to His people as a father carrying His little son.

SUMMARY:  God wants to nurture us and take care of us.  He wants to carry us when we are weak.  He looks on us as His children who are weak.

VERSE 15:  Jeremiah 31:1-3

“At that time, declares the LORD, I will be the God of all the clans of Israel, and they shall be my people.”  Thus says the LORD: “The people who survived the sword found grace in the wilderness; when Israel sought for rest, the LORD appeared to him from far away. I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.

QUESTION:  What do these verses tell us about God? 

ANSWER:  He is loving and faithful.

VERSE 16: 1 Corinthians 1:4-9

I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that was given you in Christ Jesus, that in every way you were enriched in him in all speech and all knowledge even as the testimony about Christ was confirmed among you—so that you are not lacking in any gift, as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.  God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

QUESTIONS:

1. What does the grace of God tell us about God’s personality? 
2. What does Paul say that Jesus will do for us until the end? 
3. In verse 9, how does Paul describe God?
4. What does it mean that God is faithful?
5. In verse 9, what kind of relationship are we supposed to have with Jesus? 
6. What does it mean to have fellowship with someone?

ANSWERS:

1. The grace of God tells us that God is merciful.  He wants to take judgment away from us.  He wants to give us gifts.
2. He will confirm / sustain us.  I see a similarity in these verses to what I already read in the Old Testament about God carrying us to old age and carrying His people like a lamb.
3. God is faithful.
4. For me, the fact that God is faithful means that He can be trusted to stay with His people and He will continue to love us.  He is in a relationship with us, and He will not leave that relationship.  It means that He will not go back on His promises.
5. We are supposed to be in fellowship with Jesus.
6. When we have fellowship with someone, we interact with them.  We eat, drink, talk, and work with them.  We need to know Jesus.

FINAL SUMMARY:  Once I started looking in the Bible to see who God is, I saw beautiful descriptions of God in both the Old and New Testaments that were simply overlooked before.  I saw a God who laughs, cries, sings, and shouts for joy.  I saw a God who is aware that we are much weaker than He is, so He carries us and is gentle to us in our weakness.  I saw a God who keeps His promises and who goes ahead of me to clear the way.  He will guide me in finding safe places for me to rest and provide food for me in the wilderness.  I saw a God who wants to interact with me personally and who gives me gifts.  I saw a merciful God rather than a temperamental God.  I saw that God is not shy about declaring His love for us.  This is the characteristic of God that is emphatically stated over and over throughout the Bible.  God is love.  Jesus is love.  We see that love on the cross more clearly than anywhere else as Jesus declares Father forgive them, but that is only the loudest cry of love of the many other cries in the Bible.  Here is the mystery that we cannot fathom.  We do not deserve His love, but God loves us.  We have caused Him pain, yet He loves us.  When we do not even love Him back, He still loves us.  When we are dirty and ugly and broken, He still loves us.  When we can understand just the smallest part of that love, we will begin to know God, and to know God is to have eternal life.