God's Communicable and Incommunicable Attributes
Short answer: The communicable attributes of God are the perfections he shares with his people in measure, such as mercy, grace, patience, kindness, and truthfulness. The incommunicable attributes are the perfections that belong to God alone and can never be transferred to creatures, such as his self-existence, infinity, immutability, omniscience, omnipresence, and absolute sovereignty. Exodus 34:6-7 is a crucial text because God himself names his own character there: he proclaims himself merciful, gracious, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness and truth, while also declaring that he does not clear the guilty. In that single self-revelation we see both kinds of attributes at once, the ones we are called to imitate and the ones that mark him off as God alone.
God Proclaims His Own Name at Sinai
The setting of Exodus 34 matters. Israel has just broken the covenant with the golden calf. Moses has interceded, smashed the tablets, and asked to see God's glory. God answers by placing Moses in the cleft of the rock and causing his goodness to pass before him. What God says next is not a description someone else invented about him. It is his own proclamation of his own name. Exodus 34:6 says, "Yahweh! Yahweh, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness and truth." The repetition of the divine name is not accidental. The God who speaks is the God who is, the covenant God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and he defines himself by his character before he gives any further commands.
This self-revelation is one of the most quoted texts in the rest of the Old Testament. The prophets return to it again and again when they call Israel back. Nehemiah prays it. Joel appeals to it. Jonah complains about it when God spares Nineveh. Psalm 145:8-9 echoes it closely: "Yahweh is gracious, merciful, slow to anger, and of great loving kindness." When God describes himself, he does not lead with raw power. He leads with mercy. That ordering tells us something about how God wants to be known, and it tells us which of his perfections he intends his people to reflect in their own lives.
But the passage does not stop at comfort. Exodus 34:7 continues with the words that God keeps loving kindness for thousands, forgives iniquity, transgression, and sin, and yet "will by no means clear the guilty," visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and on the children's children. That last line disturbs modern readers, and it should not be smoothed away. God is not only compassionate; he is also just and holy. He is not a vague force of benevolence. He is a personal God who holds moral order together. Any account of his attributes that only quotes the first half of the verse is not an account of the God of the Bible.
So from the start we have two kinds of language about God in a single breath. He is merciful, and mercy is something we can show. He is also the one who does not clear the guilty, and that is a prerogative no creature can claim. The passage naturally pushes us toward the classic distinction between the communicable and incommunicable attributes of God. Theologians did not invent that distinction to be clever. They observed that Scripture speaks of God both as one whom we are commanded to imitate and as one whom no creature can ever become. Exodus 34 holds both together, and that is exactly why it is such a useful place to begin.
What Communicable Attributes Actually Are
Communicable attributes are the perfections of God that he shares with his image-bearers in a real but finite measure. They are sometimes called his moral attributes. When Scripture says God is merciful, and then commands his people to be merciful, it is treating mercy as something that can be communicated from God to us. The same is true of grace, patience, kindness, faithfulness, truthfulness, love, and holiness. These are not divine properties that we somehow take over and possess by right. They are gifts reproduced in us by God's Spirit, and they are always creaturely reflections rather than the original.
Exodus 34:6 gives us a short catalogue of these: merciful, gracious, slow to anger, abundant in loving kindness, and abundant in truth. Notice how each one names a way God relates to people who do not deserve it. Mercy is compassion shown to the miserable. Grace is favor shown to the undeserving. Slowness to anger is patience under provocation. Loving kindness is covenant loyalty that keeps loving when the other party fails. Truth is reliability, the God who means what he says. Every one of these is something a human being can genuinely grow in, not merely admire from a distance.
That is why the New Testament can tell believers to forgive as God forgave them, to be kind as God is kind, and to love as he loved. When Jesus says his Father makes his sun rise on the evil and the good, he draws a direct line to our behavior. God's mercy is not just a fact to be praised; it is a pattern to be copied. Paul can command the church to forgive one another as God in Christ forgave them, and that command only makes sense if God's mercy is somehow reproducible in human lives. The communicable attributes are the ground of Christian ethics.
At the same time, we must be careful. The Bible never says these attributes are identical in God and in us. Our mercy is always derivative. It exists because God made us in his image and then renewed that image in Christ. God's mercy is original; ours is reflected. When we say he is merciful, we mean he is the source and standard of mercy, and we mean that any mercy in us is a small, real, but dependent participation in his character. The communicable attributes are shared in kind but never in degree; God is infinitely more merciful than the most merciful saint, and he is merciful in a way no creature can be.
Why Some Perfections Cannot Be Shared
Incommunicable attributes are the perfections that belong to God because he is God and to creatures not at all. Self-existence is the clearest example. God simply is; he did not come from anything and does not depend on anything. Everything else exists because he made it and keeps it existing from moment to moment. Immutability is another. Numbers 23:19 says, "God is not a man, that he should lie, nor a son of man, that he should repent. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not make it good?" God does not develop, improve, or change his mind the way a person does.
Infinity belongs here too. God is not bounded by space or time. John 4:24 says, "God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth." As spirit, he does not have a body and is not localized the way bodies are. Omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence all flow from this. He knows everything, he can do everything consistent with his character, and he is present everywhere. 1 Timothy 6:15-16 describes him as the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, whom no one has seen or can see. Those are not titles we can ever earn or share.
Isaiah 55:8-9 is the classic statement of what separates God from us: "'For my thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not my ways,' says Yahweh." This is not only about the difference between good and evil people. It is about the difference between a Creator and his creatures. Even when we think rightly about God, our thoughts remain finite. Even when we obey him perfectly, our obedience remains creaturely. There is a qualitative difference between the way God is wise, powerful, and present, and the way any creature can be anything at all.
This is a crucial correction to a common mistake in popular teaching. It has become fashionable to say that God's attributes are just human virtues writ large, that being like God simply means being nicer, more patient, more generous. That is half true and half dangerous. We are commanded to be holy as he is holy, and we are never commanded to be omniscient or omnipotent. Confusing the two leads either to despair, because we think we must become infinite, or to arrogance, because we think we already are. The incommunicable attributes keep us on our knees; the communicable ones call us to walk in his ways.
Both Kinds Appear in Exodus 34:6-7 Together
What makes Exodus 34:6-7 so rich is that both categories stand side by side. The first verse names the perfections God shares with us: mercy, grace, patience, steadfast love, faithfulness. The second verse names a prerogative he keeps to himself: he forgives iniquity but will not clear the guilty. A human judge may pardon, but only a divine judge can perfectly hold justice and mercy together without dissolving one into the other. And the language about visiting iniquity on the following generations points to God's oversight of history across time in a way no creature possesses.
This combination is what makes the passage so pastorally powerful. If God were only incommunicably great, we would be crushed. If he were only communicably kind in a way indistinguishable from human niceness, we would have no gospel to trust. The God who reveals himself here is the one who is high above us and yet stoops to us. He is transcendent in his sovereignty and immanent in his mercy. When we confess our sin, we are confessing to a God who is actually capable of forgiving it, because his authority to forgive is his own.
Notice also how the attributes in verse 6 are not abstract ideas. They are descriptions of how God acts toward a particular people at a particular moment in history. He has just spared a rebellious nation. He is not being merciful in the abstract; he is being merciful to Israel. The communicable attributes are always relational. They describe God's covenant faithfulness in real situations. Likewise, the incommunicable attribute of sovereign justice is not a philosophical principle; it is God's commitment to judge sin, and it is about to be displayed in the history of Israel.
When we read the passage this way, we stop treating God's attributes as items on a list to be memorized and start seeing them as the shape of his character. The list in Exodus 34 is more like a portrait than an inventory. It tells us who we are dealing with. And it tells us that the same God who invites us to imitate his mercy is the God who alone can judge the world. Both are true, and we cannot discard one for comfort or the other for strictness.
The Danger of Flattening God Into a Bigger Version of Us
One of the most common errors in modern spirituality is to treat God as essentially a very good human being, only bigger. On that view, his love is like our love roughly magnified, his knowledge is a lot like our knowledge, and his presence is something like our presence. Exodus 34:7 breaks that picture. The God who will not clear the guilty is not simply a more patient version of a human judge. He is the moral governor of the universe, whose justice is not one virtue among many but the foundation on which mercy can even be offered. His ways are not our ways in kind, not only in degree.
This error shows up in how people talk about God's forgiveness as if it were automatic. If we assume God is just a nice person who forgives everybody, then the cross becomes an embarrassment rather than a rescue. Why would a kind God need to bear sin in his own Son? But when we see the incommunicable attribute of perfect justice alongside the communicable attribute of mercy, the cross makes sense. God does not clear the guilty by pretending sin does not matter. He clears the guilty through a substitute who bears the penalty, so that he is just and the one who justifies.
This error also shows up in the opposite direction, when people speak of God's knowledge or power as if they were just enlarged human capacities. That can slip into fatalism or into the fear that God is capricious. But the God of Exodus 34 is not a capricious giant. Because he is unchanging, his mercy shown at Sinai is still his mercy today. Because he is infinite, no situation is beyond his reach. The incommunicable attributes are not a threat to the gospel; they are the guarantee of it. A God who could change his mind like a man could change his covenant, and we would have no hope.
The healthy way to hold these things together is to let each category do its work. The communicable attributes tell us what to pursue and give us confidence that God is not asking us to do something he does not care about. The incommunicable attributes tell us whom we are trusting and keep us from the illusion that we could ever be the center. When we get this right, we neither idolize ourselves by making God in our image, nor despair by pretending we must become God to be loved by him.
Growing in Mercy Without Pretending to Be God
The practical payoff of this distinction is that it tells us what to aim at and what to leave alone. We are not called to become omniscient. We are not called to become omnipresent or self-existent. We are called to be merciful, as our Father is merciful, to be slow to anger, to speak truth, to keep faith with people over time. Those characteristics are on the communicable side of the list, and God commands them precisely because he is willing to produce them in us by his Spirit. The incommunicable attributes, by contrast, are given to us to trust, not to imitate.
That distinction is deeply freeing. It means you do not have to know everything in order to be faithful. You do not have to control outcomes in order to be godly. You do not have to be everywhere for everyone. The very things that exhaust modern people are often the things that belong uniquely to God. When we try to occupy his place, we burn out. When we accept that he is God and we are not, we can do the small, creaturely works of mercy that are actually ours to do: forgiving one person, keeping a promise, telling the truth, being patient with the same person again this week.
At the same time, growing in the communicable attributes is not optional. Because God is merciful, we must be merciful. Because he is truthful, we must tell the truth. Because he is faithful, our promises must mean something. The fact that these attributes are shared does not make them optional; it makes them evidence of genuine life in Christ. If we claim to know God and show none of his character, something is wrong. The communicable attributes are like family traits. They are how the children of God are recognized.
And when we fail, which we will, we do not turn to the incommunicable attributes for a way out. We do not say that God will understand because he is just a bigger version of us. We turn to his mercy, which he has made available through Christ, and we confess our sins, trusting that he is faithful and just to forgive us. The same God who said he would not clear the guilty has provided a way in which he can clear the guilty without compromising his justice. That is the mystery of the gospel, and it grows directly out of this text.
How the New Testament Uses These Categories
The New Testament does not abandon the Old Testament language about God's attributes; it fills it out. When Paul describes God as the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, he is working with the incommunicable attributes. When he commands churches to be kind, tenderhearted, forgiving, he is working with the communicable ones. The same pattern appears in Jesus' teaching. The command to be perfect as the heavenly Father is perfect sits alongside the reminder that God alone knows the end from the beginning.
1 Timothy 6:15-16 is especially helpful because it presses the incommunicable side hard. God alone has immortality; no one has seen him or can see him. That is a direct challenge to any tendency to domesticate God. But the same Bible that tells us no one can see God also tells us that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and that in Christ we have seen the Father. The incommunicable attributes are not suspended in the incarnation; the incarnation is what makes the invisible God known without making him less God.
Similarly, John 4:24 tells us God is spirit, and therefore those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth. The incommunicable fact that he is spirit shapes the communicable practice of worship. Because he is not confined to a mountain or a temple, we can worship him anywhere, but we must worship him honestly and inwardly, not with mere external ritual. The two categories are not competing; they work together to tell us what kind of God we approach and what kind of worship he deserves.
When we put all of this together, we see the biblical picture. God is both far above us and near to us. He is the one we imitate and the one we trust. Exodus 34:6-7 sets the pattern, and the rest of Scripture works it out. Holding the distinction correctly keeps us from arrogance and keeps us from despair. It also keeps the gospel at the center, because it is precisely as the uniquely sovereign and holy God that he is able to save, and precisely as the merciful and gracious God that he is willing to.
Biblical fidelity check
Exodus 34:6-7 establishes that God himself defines his character, that his mercy and justice belong together, and that some of his perfections are to be reflected in human lives while others belong to him alone. The text does not establish that we can ever become God, that his mercy cancels his justice, or that his incommunicable attributes are irrelevant to daily life. It also does not say that visiting iniquity to later generations means each person is punished for someone else's sin; Scripture elsewhere clearly says each is accountable for his own. The words in Exodus 34:7 are spoken to a God who rules history across generations, not a license for personal fatalism about sin.
A common misreading is to split the passage in half, celebrating the merciful God of verse 6 and dismissing verse 7 as an outdated or harsh note. That misreading is wrong because it makes God's mercy something other than what the text says it is. A mercy that does not take sin seriously is not the mercy described here. The God who does not clear the guilty is the same God who passed before Moses and proclaimed himself merciful. To reject the second half of the verse in order to keep the first is not to honor God's love; it is to invent a different god with the same name.
Other passages that speak to Exodus 34:6-7
Several related studies trace the themes of God's character and how his people respond to him. The self-revelation at Sinai stands behind the New Testament apostolic witness, explored in What Does 1 John 1:1 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application. The honest confession of sin that God's mercy invites is treated in What Does 1 John 1:8 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application. The promise of forgiveness for the confessing sinner is unfolded in 1 John 1:9 Meaning: Confession, Forgiveness, and Cleansing. And the call to love God rather than the world, which flows from knowing his character, is examined in What Does 1 John 2:15 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application.
Frequently asked questions
What are the communicable attributes of God?
The communicable attributes are the perfections God shares with his image-bearers in a real but finite measure, such as mercy, grace, love, holiness, patience, kindness, truthfulness, and faithfulness. They are called communicable because God communicates them to us, and they form the basis of Christian ethics. Exodus 34:6 lists several of them together, describing God as merciful, gracious, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness and truth. We are commanded to imitate these attributes because God himself produces them in his people by his Spirit. They are always reflections, never independent possessions.
What are the incommunicable attributes of God?
The incommunicable attributes are the perfections that belong to God alone and cannot be shared with any creature. They include self-existence, infinity, immutability, omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, and absolute sovereignty. 1 Timothy 6:15-16 presses this by calling God the blessed and only Ruler, who alone has immortality, whom no one has seen or can see. Numbers 23:19 adds that God is not a man that he should lie or repent. We are to trust these attributes, not imitate them, because they describe what only God can be and do.
Why does the distinction between these attributes matter?
The distinction matters because it tells us what to pursue and what to leave to God. If we confuse the two, we either despair because we think we must become infinite, or we become arrogant because we think we already are. Exodus 34:6-7 holds both kinds of attributes together, showing that the God who commands us to be merciful is the same God who alone judges the guilty. Keeping the distinction clear protects the gospel, because our salvation depends on God being both perfectly just and perfectly merciful, which no creature could ever be.
