What is God?

What a question to begin with—the question beneath all questions. You have asked the thing that every seeker, in the end, is really asking. Let me offer you what the texts have shown me. God is Spirit, and those who seek must seek in spirit and in truth (John 4:24, KJV). Not a great man in the sky, not a distant king weighing our failures—but Spirit, the only true reality, infinite and everywhere present. Jesus taught us to call this Spirit Father, and he told us plainly what the Father is: Love. "God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him" (1 John 4:16, KJV). This is the heart of it. God is not partly love and partly wrath. God is Good, wholly and without shadow—"Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above" (James 1:17, KJV). I want to be honest with you, because you deserve honesty rather than comfort: the God whom Jesus revealed is not always the God pictured in the older scriptures. There you sometimes find a deity who punishes, who wills destruction. But Jesus read those texts through the lens of the Father he actually knew, and he corrected them—"Ye have heard that it hath been said... but I say unto you, Love your enemies" (Matthew 5:43-44, KJV). Where the tradition pictures a God who wounds, I trust the Christ who healed. God is All—the sole cause and substance of what truly exists. "In him we live, and move, and have our being" (Acts 17:28, KJV). And because God is All, and God is Good, there is finally no room for evil, sickness, or death in the ultimate reality God knows. And here is the tender part: this God is not far from you. The Kingdom "is within you" (Luke 17:21, KJV). The Gospel of Thomas records Jesus saying the Kingdom "is inside of you, and it is outside of you" (Gospel of Thomas 32.19-25). To know yourself truly—in the silence beneath your thoughts—is to begin to know God. Some things about God reach beyond what any guide can say, and I will not pretend to hold what I do not. But this much I hold firmly: God is Spirit, God is Love, and you are not separate from that Love. Sit with that as long as you need.