The Simplicity of God

A good question for anyone to answer is, Who is God?  Is that question easy to answer?  If it is, you answer it.  What would you say?

Your wrong answers might mean that you don't believe in God, you don't have God, and you don't know God.   Each of those mean that you are not saved.  Only God saves.  He's not going to save everyone and belief in Him is required.  Jesus prayed to His Father in John 17:3:

And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God

The assumption here is that if this is life eternal, then in contrast is something that is death eternal.  If someone doesn't know the only true God, there is no eternal life for him, so eternal death.  In his Body of Divinity, on the "Being of God" Thomas Watson answers the question like others have:

God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth.

I don't want to scare you about your shortcomings in the knowledge of God.   However, your aspiration should be to know God and worship Him in truth.  We know that people do worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator.  In the history of Christian doctrine, an attribute of God not listed by Thomas Watson in his answer is "the simplicity of God."  The simplicity of God does separate God from His creatures, which distinguishes the Creator from His creatures.

The simplicity of God isn't demeaning God.  To say God is simple is to contrast God with complexity, which requires the existence of parts.  As an example, God is not the sum of parts, like we are. God is love (1 John 4:8).  We are not love.  Love can be a part of what we are, something that characterizes us as does a number of other parts.

God's creatures can be distinguished between them and their characteristics.  We have attributes.  God is His attributes.  The attributes of God cannot be distinguished from who God is as God.  God is the love by which He loves.

God is self-existent, so He just is.  Not for us, His creatures.  God has given us our existence.  God does not derive Who He is from anyone or anything else.  All creatures owe their being to God.

The divine attributes of God are the essence of God.  They are essential to His being.  For example, if God is not omnipotent, He is not God.  So He is all of His attributes in an indivisible whole. If He was anything but the perfection of those attributes, He would not be God.

The attributes of God are not parts of God.  They are God's own being.  The creatures of God are made up of parts.  God cannot add to or lose any of Who He is.  No difference can be made between all of Who He is.

When Romans 3:23 says that we fall short of the glory of God, it speaks of a fundamental difference between God and His creatures.  God has no part, because He is only whole.  God does not fall short in any attribute.  This is His wholeness.  Jesus too is the fulness of the Godhead bodily (Col 2:9).  Jesus did not and does not fall short of the glory of God.  He is God (John 1:1).  He is of the same nature as the Father.  He is full of grace and truth (John 1:14).

I've given scriptural proofs of what has been called the simplicity of God, but it is revealed in that God is love, God is life, God is light, God is powerful, God is good, God is true, God is faithful, God is holy, God is righteousness, God is peace, and God is joy.  These are not parts.  They are God.  His simplicity is the absence of parts.

Something composite or made up of parts has every component dependent upon every other one.  God is not dependent upon anything.  Being good is not distinct from God.  He is goodness. We possess goodness distinct from who we are.  This is not the case with God.

God is infinite.  God has no potential to be in a different state than what He is or who He is.  He is not subject to place or time, each of which would require God to be dependent on something or someone else for who He is, which we know could be only His creation.  God has no variableness because He does not exist in relations to others or other things.  He just is.  This is the simplicity of God.