We can only know what God is like because he has told us—and he has told us a great deal. When God proclaimed his own name to Moses, he described himself: “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness… forgiving iniquity… but who will by no means clear the guilty” (Exodus 34:6-7). That single self-portrait already holds together the things we tend to pull apart: mercy and justice, love and holiness.
Theologians group God’s attributes in helpful ways. Some belong to God alone: he is eternal (without beginning or end), almighty (omnipotent), all-knowing (omniscient), everywhere present (omnipresent), unchanging (“I the LORD do not change,” Malachi 3:6), and self-existent (depending on nothing). These can overwhelm us—and they should, a little; a God we could fully manage would not be God. Other attributes God shares with us in a creaturely way, because we bear his image: he is holy, just, good, faithful, wise, loving, and merciful.
Two attributes deserve special weight because Scripture presses them. God is holy—utterly pure, set apart, morally perfect; the angels cover their faces and cry “Holy, holy, holy” (Isaiah 6:3). And God is love—not merely loving, but love in his very being (1 John 4:8). Hold these together and you have the God of the Bible: so holy that sin cannot be waved away, and so loving that he came to bear it himself.
Here is the crucial thing: God’s attributes are not a checklist of separate parts, and they never contradict each other. He is not sometimes loving and sometimes just, as if in tension. He is all of these, always, perfectly, at once—and where his holiness and his love seemed impossible to reconcile, he reconciled them at the cross. If you want to see what God is like in a single place, look there.
Scripture cited: Exodus 34:6-7 · 1 John 4:8 · Isaiah 6:3 · Malachi 3:6
Confessions cited: Augsburg Confession I · Small Catechism, The Creed (First Article)