Definition 3: God part 2.

Back to God again. And back to the source (or as close as I can get to the source without learning a selection of bronze age middle eastern languages). There are clearly several other versions of the Old Testament in current use, but I don't have the resources to cross check every single one. I'm more than happy to take suggestions of variations and clashes in comments. For current purposes I am simply going to list the usual attributes of God and reference them to the appropriate bits of the King James version of the Old Testament.

Using Bartleby's excellent searchable reference books (one of the finer corners of the Internet) makes the task of finding the biblical definition of God easier. But still not very easy. As you might imagine, or know, the word "God" appears quite a lot in the old testament. The majority of these occurences are statements praising God, or advising God's followers how they ought to behave towards God, or reporting what God said or did, which helps to narrow it down.

In fact, there are relatively few direct statements about what God actually is. I haven't decided yet if that makes this job harder or easier.

The Eternal God

Arguably, one of the most fundamental qualities of God is that God has always existed and is not something that was created or came into being. (oh ... another nice feature of Bartleby is that it provides hyperlinked cross-references ... so if you find one statement in a reference, you can easily find related statements. Nice.)

Isaiah 44:6 "I am the first, and I am the last" and Isaiah 48:12 "I am he; I am the first, I also am the last". (according to Bartleby, this is also repeated in Revelations, but I'm only looking at the Old Testament).

That is fairly unequivocal as a statement: God existed before anything else.

The Creator

This one is easier. God is referred to as a creator in many many places.

Isaiah 40:28 "the everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth"
Isaiah 45:7 "I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things."

(I did look further than Isaiah, honestly. It is quite a good book though.)

And of course there is the whole of Chapter 1 of Genesis.

There are some slightly more equivocal statements which refer to God creating more specific and limited things like 'Israel' or 'righteousness', but overall the Old Testament has an uncontroversial position that God created everything.

An aside: there is a whole wealth of material on the internal consistency of the various creation stories in Genesis. I might delve into those at some point, but the intention at the moment is simply to list God's attributes and provide their biblical justification.

God the Trinity.

Happily, I've said that I am only using the Old Testament definition of God. The Trinity is one very good reason for doing that. It has spurned more brain aching theological debate than probably all other biblical questions combined and caused more splits in the church than anything else. It also narrows the scope to mainstream Christianity, as Judaism, Islam, and many smaller branches of Christianity do not accept that Jesus and God are one and the same. In short, I'm not touching it with a barge pole.