What the Bible Says About God
The short answer
When people search for bible verses about God, they often expect a list of abstract attributes: God is holy, God is love, God is eternal. Those statements are true, but the Bible rarely talks that way. Scripture introduces God through what he does. The opening page shows a God who speaks a world into being and delights in it—commanding the earth to "put forth grass" and bring out living creatures. From the very first chapter, God's character is bound up with soil, seed, water, and bodies.
That pattern continues all the way to the Gospels, where God comes near not as an idea but in flesh. John writes that "the Word became flesh" and lived among us. If you want to know what God is like, the Bible says, watch him make a world, feed a people, and finally take on a human body to love that world up close. God's concerns are not other-worldly; they land on real neighbors with real needs.
Isaiah 11 shows the same God at work in a different way. Isaiah promises a coming king from the line of Jesse, and everything about this king depends on God's Spirit: "the spirit of wisdom and understanding," of counsel, might, knowledge, and "the fear of Yahweh." The point is that justice, wise power, and a renewed creation are not human achievements. They flow from God's own Spirit resting on someone. The chapter ends with a vision where the wolf lives with the lamb and the earth is "full of the knowledge of Yahweh."
Read together, these verses do more than define God. They reveal a God whose love is generative and material, whose Spirit makes true justice possible, and whose purpose runs from the first garden to a healed creation.
What scholars say
In these excerpts, Walter Brueggemann answers the question of what kind of God the Bible actually portrays: a God preoccupied with the material world from creation to incarnation, whose care makes the neighbor's bodily well-being a primary task—and whose Spirit, not human autonomy, equips Isaiah's coming king with the wisdom and righteousness that make a new creation possible.
“WB: What I did was to offer an introductory chapter about the incessant materiality of faith in the Bible, from creation to incarnation. The Bible begins with God’s generative love for the world, the real plant-producing, life-sustaining earth. And then Jesus came in the flesh to love the world. The real world cared for by God and the flesh of Jesus attest that God cares about material reality, with all of its economic palpability. But the church too often has preferred things “spiritual” and “other-worldly,” as though the material world were dispensable. The Bible is an insistence that the material world is God’s big preoccupation. The inescapable outcome of that claim is that the bodily well-being of the neighbor is a primary task of our life in God’s world.”
“That king for whom Israel waits will act in this way precisely because of the ruach of YHWH, without which the king would be an ordinary self-seeker. But the ruach blows the king beyond self to be a generative force for a new world. The ruach from YHWH is marked by wisdom, understanding, counsel, might, knowledge, and fear of YHWH. This will be no ordinary king, but one who knows better about the deployment of power. This king will be festally dressed in "righteousness and faithfulness." This king, furthermore, is not autonomous. Instead, everything depends on YHWH's ruach . Verses 6–9 proceed to offer a vision of the new creation in which the earth is full of the knowledge of the Lord.”
What it means for you
If God cares this much about the material world, then faith cannot be an escape from ordinary life. Your body, your work, your neighborhood, and your neighbor's well-being all matter to God. Verses about God's character become invitations: because God feeds, heals, and sustains, we are drawn into caring for the bodily needs of the people around us.
Isaiah 11 adds a note of humility. The good we long for—fairness, wise leadership, peace—does not come from self-confidence but from dependence on God's Spirit. Praying for wisdom, counsel, and reverence before God is not weakness; according to Scripture, it is where real strength for justice begins.
In context
These themes span the whole biblical story. Genesis 1 opens with God's creative love for the earth, and John's Gospel answers it with the incarnation—God entering the world in the flesh. Isaiah 11 sits within Isaiah's movement from judgment to hope: after chapter 10 pictures proud powers cut down like a forest, chapter 11 promises a shoot growing from Jesse's stump. Verses 1–5 describe the Spirit-endowed king who judges the poor with righteousness, and verses 6–9 widen the lens to a peaceable, renewed creation.