Systematic Theology 1 | Lecture 4

Good morning. Sorry to keep you waiting for a few minutes. We are. I blame the traffic, which is true. But I need. We, we've all, you know, you get your own sense of how long it takes to get places, and you give yourself like a five-minute traffic window for this. This year, for some reason, we need. We live way up Mint Hill, like a 15-minute window. Oh, we got an email yesterday from our son's middle school teachers, very nice, saying you're allowed three tardies for the semester, which goes all the way till December. Paul currently has six, so we are not off to a good start.

We are often in competition. If you are from Christ's Covenant and know the Baxters, we are often in competition with them for our kids. They have six kids. For having the most tardies. I think one year we were each in the realm of 17 to 19 tardies. So think how good I'm doing to be here right now. It's a lot going on in the morning. So thank you for making it. And we are into theology proper, looking at God's incommunicable and communicable attributes. We need to make our way through this today, and we'll see if we get into the Trinity, and we need to finish that up next week. We are a little bit behind. We've got lots of good stuff ahead of us. Hope you're ready to have your brains stretched and your hearts filled.

Let's pray. Father in Heaven, thank you for these friends, these brothers and sisters. Give us grace now to think and to pay attention and not fall asleep and to learn something about you. What a privilege we have to make that our morning, to think these great thoughts about you. In Jesus name, we pray. Amen.

God's incommunicable attributes, that is, those attributes that are not communicable, are not shared with human beings. As I said last week, communicable and incommunicable is the most common way to designate God's attributes. You have to understand that that distinction is not perfect because, in one sense, you know, God is changeless. We can be constant as well. In one sense, we can have an aspect of these, and in another sense, God is holy, unlike us. And so we can't share in any of these attributes. But you understand on an intuitive level that there are certain attributes that are more removed from our experience and others, like goodness and mercy and love, that we are called to express.

So, incommunicable. We started with Divine Simplicity. Now I want to look at this morning, aseity, infinity, immutability, and impassibility. There are others, but we will constrain ourselves to these five. So, Simplicity last week. And now, aseity. Aseity comes from the Latin words *a* meaning from, and *se* meaning self. So, aseity is the attribute that says God exists in and of himself. You could argue that the very first attribute of God we encounter in the Bible is his self-existence. "In the beginning God." Before anything else, there is God. Now, I say "in a way" because in English, you encounter his aseity. In Hebrew, *Elohim*, the verb to create comes before *Elohim*. So you could say the very first thing we encounter about God is that he is a creator. He is independent. He exists independent of anything or anyone else. "In the beginning there was God." And even before there was a beginning, there was God. Before anything else, we meet God in his aseity.

John 5:26: "For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself." That's a key verse for the doctrine of *auto Theos* that comes later in Christology. The Son also has *auto Theos*, has life in himself. But here, we just want to notice the first part: "the Father has life in himself." This opening verse of the Bible is crucial for what it says, but also for what it does not say. Notice in Genesis, there's no preparatory material. There's no background material before all the action gets started. There's nothing about a struggle between gods and goddesses like Marduk and Tiamat in the ancient Babylonian myths. There's nothing about God needing something or needing someone. There's nothing about pre-existent matter. That you have over here, physical stuff, and then you have over here, God. You don't have any of that. You simply meet God. He predates the story of everything because that story of everything is one that he has decreed, and then you and I inhabit that story with God as its author, as its object, as its center. So God never enters the story. If you think of the story as the history of the world, of the cosmos, the story enters into God's existence. Be careful to say that. Don't mean pantheism. But God doesn't enter into the story. The story enters into God. It's like the, uh, some of the Chuck Norris lines. "Chuck Norris jumps into the water. He doesn't get wet. The water gets Chuck Norris." Whatever that means. There's, uh, go enjoy your break and look up Chuck Norris jokes.

So, God in his aseity means that he is independent and self-existent. And he is independent from us and from creation. Acts 17:28: "for 'In him we live and move and have our being.'" Not the other way around, that God lives and moves and has his being in us. Psalm 90:1-2: "Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth in the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God." In our world, that constantly tells us, "Express yourselves. Find yourself. Sometimes even says, create yourself." We must remember only God has life in himself. Only God exists of himself. Only God owes to no one and to nothing his existence and his continued existence. God is *a se*. He is from himself.

Next, the attribute of infinity. And we're going to move quickly through aseity, which we just did relatively quickly. Through infinity, and then we're going to slow down to look at immutability and impassibility. Infinity. We can understand divine infinity in three ways. So, God is infinite with relation to himself. God is infinite in relation to time. And God is infinite in relation to space. Infinite with relation to himself, we can call his absolute perfection. What do we mean? Well, as we saw with Divine Simplicity, all that God has, he is. And all that God is, he has *ad infinitum*. That's what we mean, absolute perfection with relationship to himself. He possesses love and grace and sovereignty, not largely or partially, but in infinite measure. Psalm 145:3: "His greatness is unsearchable." His power, his perfection, no, no limit. "So God does whatever he pleases." 2 Chronicles 20:6: "O Lord, God of our fathers, are you not God who is in heaven? You rule over all the kingdoms of the nations. Power and might are in your hand, and no one can withstand you." Isaiah 40:15: "The nations are a drop in the bucket." Psalm 115:3: "Our God is in the heavens; he does whatever he pleases." He's absolute perfection. All of his attributes to the infinitude, no limit.

Second, God is infinite in relation to time. This is really important to a number of his attributes, and we'll just lay some groundwork here, and it'll, we'll see the importance of it again with immutability. God's relationship to time, we can call his eternity. He is without beginning and without end. Psalm 90, 1 Timothy 1. Unlike everything else, God has no origin, no starting point. God does not live in time, if by time we mean a sequence of before and after events. So, this is very hard because we, we use the words, and conceptually, it's almost impossible for us to conceive of eternity. Even when you say the phrase, "well, God in eternity past," is really misleading. And I've said the phrase, I'll say it again, but it really is misleading because eternity is this infinite way of God being God. "Past" is a time stamp, as if there's this kind of time here, and then there was a different kind of time that we call eternity. When we say God lives outside of time, which is true, but what do we mean by that? Because we conceive of it in very spatial terms, sort of. We're, we're here under this, in this bubbled life, and we're doing things with watches and time, and then somehow God is somewhere else in a God universe who's just has no watches, no time, and then he sort of reaches in and does something here in our watch world. That, that's not the best way to think of time.

Following Augustine, reformers have typically understood, and Aquinas did as well, understood time not as a thing, but as an attribute of a thing. So even when I said here, "infinite with relation to time," is sort of misleading. I may have mentioned this before, but they use the language of duration. He said time is how human beings experience duration, and eternity is how God experiences duration. What's the difference? God and his creatures both have duration, but God's duration, as eternal, is non-successive. So there's no unfolding, there's no before and after. The creature, by contrast, has duration with time, which is another way of saying the creature experiences succession. So eternity is not so much a property of God as it describes God in how he experiences what we call time, but which is more properly referred to as duration. The significance of this for older theologians was to protect God from all mutation and every kind of succession because to have God experience succession as we do would put God in the category of becoming instead of being. So if God experiences time, that God at 8:52, and then at 9 o'clock, and at 10 o'clock, and at Wednesday, and at Thursday, then God is becoming something. The passing of the minutes and the hours is God experiencing, even if not essential change, something as he becomes more knowledgeable that there is the world is different in all sorts of countless ways at 9:00 AM than it was at 8:00 AM. Some people have died, some people have been born, molecules are in different places, the sun's rays are shining in different ways, and some tectonic plate is pushing a mountain up somewhere. There's weather patterns. So in order to protect God from any sort of becoming, theologians have insisted that he is infinite with relation to time, or more technically, with relationship to duration. That's what we mean when we say God is outside of time. That is, he doesn't experience minutes and hours and days as we do. He has duration. Meaning what? It's hard to even get the right language without using chronological markers. Meaning God is from everlasting to everlasting. Meaning God was there in 1000 BC, and is there in 1000 AD, and is there in 2022. And God's been there for all of the duration of that span. And yet, as he experiences duration, it is eternally, not in time, not in sequential succession, minute by minute.

Third, and we'll circle back to that and why that's important with immutability. Third, God is infinite in relation to space. We can call this God's immensity. Absolute perfection, eternity, immensity. He is not constrained by physicality or geographic location. Jeremiah 23:23-24: "Am I a God at hand, declares the Lord, and not a God far away? Can anyone hide in secret places so that I cannot see him, declares the Lord? Do not I fill heaven and earth, declares the Lord?" Acts 17:24: "The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by human hands." Ephesians 1:23: "which fills all in all." 1 Kings 8:27: "But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, how much less this house that I have built!" Immensity transcends all space and is not subject to limitations. Omnipresence means he fills every part of space with his entire being. Immensity means he transcends all space and is not limited in any way. So immensity and omnipresence are not exactly the same thing. You could think of it as immensity is emphasizing his transcendence. He's beyond what the, is that the James Webb Telescope now, as you can see farther than the Hubble telescope? He's beyond that. He's not constrained by any spatial limitation. So immensity really speaks to his transcendence. Omnipresence speaks more to his imminence, meaning that he fills every part of space with his entire being. That also gets tricky, requires nuance, because the Bible sometimes can speak about God filling all things in every way (Ephesians 1:23), meaning you cannot go to the farthest reaches of the galaxy and somehow you've left God behind. But as you know, in other places, the Bible speaks about God's presence not as his metaphysical filling, but rather, you might say, his covenantal presence or his loving presence. So, can you flee from the presence of God? Well, not in a metaphysical sense. And yet, the Aaronic benediction is that the Lord's face would shine upon you and be gracious unto you, rather than that he would turn us back towards you. So his presence can sometimes be his favorable presence, his "with you," loving you sort of presence. But if you just speak in a metaphysical sense, you cannot flee. "Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence?" So though we are tempted to use these euphemisms for hell, like a Christless eternity or hell is the absence of God's presence, it is the absence of God's favorable presence, his face shining upon you. But in another sense, hell is the absolute intensification of God's presence. God is not metaphysically absent there. His judgment, his righteousness, his just wrath upon sinners is there. So, hell is not where you leave God behind for the rest of time. Very much God's presence is there in a metaphysical sense, that he might judge sin, just as in heaven to reward the believing righteous. His immensity is his infinity with relation to space.

Now we're going to slow down. So we look at his immutability and impassibility. Slowing down one, because these two doctrines have come under some friendly fire, you might say, in recent years. Two, because they are require some mental processes to understand. And three, because I've studied them a lot, so I have a lot to say. So that's also what you get. Divine immutability. Malachi 3:6: "For I the Lord do not change." Come back to that in just a moment. That's the classic text. "I the Lord do not change." This doctrine of immutability has been confessed from the very beginning in the reformed confessions. The Belgic Confession says, "We believe in our hearts, confess with our mouths, there is a single, simple, spiritual being whom we call God, eternal, incomprehensible, invisible, unchangeable." Westminster Confession says, "God is a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions, immutable." And yet, this doctrine has come under some criticism. How many of you have read Nicholas Wolterstorff? Before, philosopher, maybe you've heard of him. One of the most widely respected philosophers of the past 50 years. He held positions at Calvin and Yale many years ago. It was over a decade ago, there was an interview with him in the back of Modern Reformation, and Wolterstorff explained how he had come, or was coming, to reject God's impassibility and God's immutability. The reason for it, Wolterstorff, being very smart, smarter than any of us, he said, was because of personal tragedy in his life. His son, in his twenties, died in a hiking accident. Wolterstorff wrote a little book, *Lament for a Son*, which is very moving, and is also sort of a meditation on his rejection of divine immutability and impassibility. But here's what he says in this article: "Once you pull on the thread of impassibility" – we'll come to that, that's the attribute that God does not suffer – "Once you pull on the thread of impassibility, a lot of other threads come along with it. Aseity, for example." That is, God's unconditionedness. "The biblical witness seems to me clearly to be that God allows himself to be affected by the things his creatures do." What led the traditional theologians to affirm aseity was their philosophical argument that the world is such that it can only be explained if we postulate a being which is the condition of everything, but itself being conditioned by nothing. "To give up aseity, then, is to give up an argument for God's existence, an argument which is questionable in any case. One also has to give up on immutability and eternity. If God really responds, God is not metaphysically immutable. And if not metaphysically immutable, not eternal." He sees very clearly how all the threads are woven together, that when you pull at one, the other ones start to get frayed. Now, what he does is he says, "I'm pulling at them, and I think they ought to come apart," because it's so important to see both pastorally, he would say, and he would argue biblically, and disagree, that God is relational with us. That in order for God to have true, genuine response to his creatures, we have to question his immutability, his impassibility, his aseity, his unconditionedness. Wolterstorff is right in seeing how the reformed tradition has held all of those things together, and once one is torn apart, the other ones will follow.

Here's what Bavinck says: "If God were not immutable, he would not be God." So there's a lot at stake with the traditional reformed understanding of God as immutable, as the God who is our God. Cannot change. For any kind of change would imply that God was or now is something less than God. Immutability by itself is not necessarily good or bad. If you are in line at the DMV, immutability is a very bad thing. It's, and you experience time with no succession or duration with no. I've said this before, but I've, the, the license plate DMV up on Independence, you could, I'm sure you can go see this. I've been there many times within the past year, and there is on a piece of white paper a sign: "New price increases effective October 1st, 2005." So just be alert. That sign has been up there since eight of my nine, before eight of my nine children had been born, since 2005. People have been walking into that said, "Yeah, I just want to keep that up there." So time does not exist in there. Immutability, therefore, if you are implacably evil, immutability is not good. Immutability is a good for God because all that God has is good. We'll get to some verses in a moment, but logically, if God could change, he could increase, he could grow. If he can change, he must change, either for the better in some way or for the worse. He knows something, he feels something, he learns something. So if he changes for the better, then God as he's existed now was somehow not the best God. If he's changed for the worse, well, we don't want that. We don't want God to be something less than he's been. So theologians have argued, how can you have a mutable God and still have God at all? Turretin says, "He can neither be changed for the better, because he is the best, nor change for the worse, because he would cease to be the most perfect. He is not becoming, he is being." Bavinck said, "God, quote, is an immeasurable and unbounded ocean of being."

So, some verses before we come back to the theological distinctions and questions. Exodus 3:14: "God said to Moses, 'I am who I am.' Say this to the people of Israel: 'I am has sent me to you.'" Yes, the language of being, or pure being, sounds very philosophical, metaphysical, but in part, it's a way to explain how do we talk about the God who says, "I am." The very name Yahweh, or Jehovah, from the verb "to be," speaks of his unchangeableness. There is no possibility of the "I am" being something other than he was, or some time later being something other than he now is. He is "I am." The name itself suggests unchangeableness. Numbers 23:19: "God is not a man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it?" We see here God differentiated from man in two respects: one, he does not lie, and two, he does not change his mind. Now, we'll come around a little later to 1 Samuel 15, because it says God regretted that he made Saul king, and yet it also says in 1 Samuel 15, God doesn't regret. So there must be some sense in which he does, and some sense he doesn't. Here, we see plainly God and man are separated. That God always tells the truth, and that God never changes his mind.

Psalm 102:25-28: "Of old you laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you remain; they will all wear out like a garment. You will change them like a robe; they will pass away, but you are the same and your years have no end." So, if Numbers was a distinction between God and man, God's immutability here is the distinction between God and his creation. There's one thing you can count on in the morning: it's the earth beneath your feet, the heavens above your head, ground, sky, sea, planets, stars. That's a given. And yet, the psalmist says, that's not a given compared to God. Heavens and the earth, they'll wear out. God can change them as easily as he can change a robe. They're mutable. God is immutable. They will perish, you remain. So that's God's eternity. They will perish, you remain. And then the psalmist praises God's immutability: "They will pass away, but you are the same."

There's lots of other passages like that one. Malachi 3:6: "the classic text for 'I the Lord do not change.'" "Therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed." The argument sometimes is made, well, this is simply a statement of God's ethical constancy. It's not a metaphysical statement about God's essential nature being immutable. Just says, "I don't change," meaning you can count on me, my word is my bond, my ethical stance is immovable. Well, all of that's true, but that verse affirms more than just that. For God to be morally constant, he must be constant in his character, and if his character is unchanging, his nature must be unchanging. You cannot have one without the other. Even the most ethically constant human being, you can always count on them to tell the truth. What you mean is their character is so fixed, there's no way that they won't tell the truth. But it's not metaphysically impossible for even the best, most virtuous human being to tell a lie. In fact, everyone will shade the truth at certain points because no matter how much integrity of character you have, you're also wedded to a human constitution that admits of change and pressures. And we've all had the sad experience of knowing people, or seeing people from afar, that we thought it was impossible, it was impossible that they would sin in grievous ways, and yet they do. So the only way that God's ethical stance can be absolutely immovable is if it is an expression of his absolutely unchanging nature. Judah can count on God. That's the point here. Judah, you won't be consumed. Malachi has said a lot of bad things about what Judah's got going on. The prophets were also often like covenant attorneys, covenant prosecutors. There's six questions he has for Judah, but in the midst of it, Malachi says, "You're not ultimately going to be consumed." Why? Because God has promises to you, and you can count on God to keep those promises. Why? Because he does not change. There's no possibility that God will ever be a different sort of God.

Hebrews 6:17: "So when God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable character of his purpose, he guaranteed it with an oath." He swore by himself because there is no other being greater than God by which he could swear. The Bible often depicts God as a rock. He is not like sand. He is a rock. He is solid. He is immovable. And to so make his word trustworthy to us, he swears by himself because there is nothing more immovable than God himself.

James 1:17: "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change." Do you see how James is doubling down on God's immutability? You can, I can stand here out there, and throughout the day, as things move, you will see my shadow will be shorter, longer, over here. That's not actually me changing, but James wants to say God is so constant, you couldn't even find God's shadow to change. You couldn't find any hints of change in God, not even the shadow that he casts. Nothing. God is immutable in his knowledge, his will, and his purpose. His nature cannot be changed for better or for worse. His knowledge cannot increase. He cannot learn anything new because he knows everything. He cannot forget anything. Nothing can be added or subtracted from God. He learns nothing. He needs nothing. He does not grow. He does not improve. He does not diminish because God cannot change.

What are some of the objections to this doctrine of divine immutability? And in particular, objections that Christians, we're not just talking about people who don't like God, don't believe the Bible. There are several typical objections to this doctrine. I have several. Let me mention just two or three of them. One objection is the doctrine of creation itself. How can God be immutable if he created the world out of nothing? Here's the argument: Didn't God take on a new quality as creator? There was nothing, and then there was something. So didn't God become a creator? Before Genesis 1:1, God was not a creator. After Genesis 1:1, he is a creator. Therefore, the argument is, God must have freely chosen to take on properties he would not otherwise have had. And if God could freely choose to take on the property of a creator, might he be able to freely, not forced upon him, but self-willed, choose other sorts of properties for himself? The response is really quite simple. God did not become creator, just like he did not become Lord by having creatures over which to exercise dominion, and he did not become Redeemer after saving people for himself. Do you see how all of those go together? If you say he became a creator after he created, you have to say, well, he became Lord after he had people to Lord over, and he only became Redeemer after he redeemed a people. But those names given to God, Creator, Lord, Redeemer, are names given to God in time to reflect eternal realities. Stephen Charnock, the great Puritan, and his massive book on *The Existence and Attributes of God*, which is very rich and very dense, says, "There was no change in God by the act of creation, because there was no new will in him. There was no new act of the will which was not there before." In other words, the activity of creating was new. The willing was not. He had willed to create. He had willed to redeem. He had willed to exercise lordship and dominion over his creation. And so there was no new title given to God, but rather, in time, the accomplishment of what he had already willed. So the cosmos, this created universe, does give expression to God as Creator, just as the saved people is the manifestation of God as Redeemer. But we shouldn't think that God depended upon creation to be Creator, or he depended upon sinful people in order to be a Redeemer. From all eternity, and there again, reaching the limits of human language, but from all eternity, God has been the sort of God who can create. He did not acquire a new power to create in creation. He did not take on a new characteristic by virtue of the creation. Rather, the creation was that glory made manifest. So that's the first objection, maybe one that comes more readily to mind.

Here's the second objection: is about the Incarnation. There were many questions last week in class and then during the break, lots of good questions. When we talk about these incommunicable attributes, in particular, your mind often says, "Well, how does that work with Christ? With the Incarnate Son of God? Was he unchangeable and impassible, simple?" How does this work? Well, it's a question that is across the board for many attributes, not just one. But let's think about it here for a moment with immutability. How can we say God is immutable when we have the Incarnation? Didn't Jesus learn new things? He suffered. He changed. He physically, literally changed. He was a little baby. He's a grown man. He grew hair, all sorts of things. He ate food. He grew muscles. How do we make sense of the Incarnation? Didn't God undergo some change in becoming man? Two quick responses. And it's not a Christology class, so you just get two quick responses. One is to remind you of the doctrine we talked about last week, the communication of properties. Sometimes called communication of idioms, or the communication of attributes. We go into more detail in ST2 on Christology. But the communication of properties states that what can be said, put it sort of crassly, so you have the person, second person of the Trinity, incarnate, and he has a divine nature and a human nature. The communication of properties says that what can be said about one nature can be said about the person. So, if you, you could say the Son of God incarnate was immortal. You could also say the Son of God incarnate died. What you can say about his divine nature, you could say about the person. The human nature of the person. But what you can say about one nature, how do we do this? This means don't do that. You cannot automatically say about the other nature. So you can say the Son of God took a nap because the Son of God, as a title of his person, he took a nap in the boat. You cannot say, you should not say, the divine nature took a nap. This has been from the early Church Father Cyril of Alexandria, in particular, and Calvin makes much of it. So at least the fourth or fifth century, this communication of properties is a way of helping us to speak properly in owning what the Son incarnate does without getting into lots of confusing language. So that you have the divine nature dying on the cross, the divine nature getting thirsty, the divine nature taking a nap. So the communication of properties helps us speak in the right way. So without a doubt, the Son of God experienced change, but that's different than saying the divine nature became mutable.

The second response is to remember that the Word became flesh not by conversion, but by assumption, to use that language, not by conversion, but by assumption. That is to say, the divine nature did not change. So it wasn't converted. The divine nature didn't become a different kind of nature. It, the Divine Logos, assumed a human nature. Jesus Christ is the union of two natures. He is not humanized deity or deified humanity. He's not humanized deity, that would be the divine nature is changed into a humanized divine nature, nor is he the opposite, a human being that gets supercharged with divine properties to become a deified human being. We must be very careful with the language, lest we think that human, that this is somehow bleeding together into some divine-human kind of superhero Christ. The Divine Logos assumes a human nature, so that both natures preserve their peculiar properties. Bavinck says, "Neither creation nor revelation nor Incarnation brought about any change in God." Did not bring about any change in God because it was a human nature joined to the divine nature, not the human nature turning the divine nature into some other kind of nature. So the Son of God did not take on essential change, but the assumption of another nature, itself human and divine, each retaining their properties.

A third objection. What time do we have? Um, well, let's save this objection for impassibility, okay? We're going to, we'll come to that after the break. Does God feel things? Talk amongst yourselves during the break, and we'll come back and sort it out. So we'll come back to that. There's a, it's related. Does God have emotions? Does he have emotions? Does he feel? Does he repent? How does this emotional language in the scriptures square with divine immutability? It's a question for divine immutability and for impassibility. So let's come back to that after the break. There's my teaser.

So, those are at least two common objections to divine immutability. There are others, but those are two. And the one with emotions or affections and passions is significant and probably the one that kind of has the most street-level purchase to it. And so we'll spend some time with that after the break. But let me talk about one other aspect of critique. It's a nuance to the other kinds of critiques, okay? You might say, "So God is not seized by passions. He, he doesn't have emotions like we have emotions." Chemicals start firing your brain, and you're just overcome with anger. Okay, we know that God doesn't fly off the handle. He doesn't wake up and have a bad day. They don't come on him like that. He doesn't, people don't change him. Somebody comes up and bends God's arm and breaks his wrist or teaches him something new. Got it. But might it be the case that God has relational, even emotional changes that are owing to his self-determination? So that's, that's the popular tweak on traditional immutability, and that's what Dozeman talks about in his book. There are a number of people, we would like books, we would respect theologians, we would appreciate, who make this step. All right, we affirm divine immutability. We affirm that God does nothing, can come to God and force him to be something else. But might it be the case that God chooses for himself some kind of non-essential change? Well, that will not work because Divine Simplicity says all that God is, he is. In other words, there are no non-essential attributes. Every attribute is, in a way, his essence and an expression of his essence. So you can't say, "Well, you got this kind of his essence, and then you have these other things that maybe he could change without changing his essence." All of his attributes, we saw, are identical with his essence, and he doesn't have some in greater or lesser degree. Again, here's Charnock: "If God be changed, his change must be voluntary or necessary." So this is Charnock, centuries ago, anticipating this objection. Voluntary, he determines the change, or necessary, meaning something else determines the change. If voluntary, he then intends to change for the better and chooses it to acquire a perfection by it. There is then some good without him and above him, which is the end of this change, for nothing acts but for some end, and that end is within itself or without itself. If the end for which God changes be without himself, then there is something better than himself. Besides, if he were voluntarily changed for the better, why did he not change before? Here lays out Charnock's argument. He's saying, even if you say God's change was not necessitated upon him, but was voluntarily chosen, you still have the same logical conundrum. What is God's self-willing to change? It must be something for the better. You don't determine a change without some end, and that end for God to will it must be some good end. And so, what is God willing to acquire by this change? He wants to be good in some new way. And if that's the case, what was he before? And why did he not will this change earlier? And we cannot posit that you can have essential immutability with relational mutability. That's how some people put it, okay? His essence is immutable, but relationally, we see this mutability. Now, we'll come back to that. It's true, we do not want to say God is inert, immobile, such that there's no dynamism between God and man. That just doesn't do justice to the way the scriptures talk about God. You can grieve the Holy Spirit. God is pleased with us. God is angry with us. We'll come back to how to understand that sort of divine pathos language. But we don't want to say surely that you can have some kind of mutability without touching your essential immutability. There is no such thing as a non-essential change. That's what we talked about last week with substance and accidents. To say that God can have non-essential change, even if you say, "Well, it's just a relational mutability. He can feel new things, but his whole, you know, his godness doesn't change." But his emotional state changes, uh, his way of loving ebbs or flows. Well, that's to say that there is an accident, there is an incidental in God, that he has a substance and then he has incidentals, like the dog is brown, the dog is fluffy. And then that means there is a class of gods, there's a God, and then there are different ways to be God. When the reformers, along with Aquinas and the church fathers, said, "No, we must not conceive of God as having substance and accidents," that is to make God into a class of gods, something other than God.

What if, and this is what John Frame argues, and I appreciate much about Frame's books, he argues, "What if God has an atemporal existence outside of time, and then a historical existence?" So he's got, God's kind of got a foot in both worlds. And when he exists outside of time, he, he doesn't change. But then he's got a foot over here in time, and there he allows himself, or he wills himself, to be changed. The problem, as we saw earlier, is that's not how the tradition has understood time. Time is not two different realms, but two different ways of duration. There's not this, this alternate universe somewhere. This is the, the multiverse. So there's a multiverse, and God exists in this Spidey multiverse over here with without time, and he never changes. But he also is in here in this multiverse with time, and here he does change. That's not what we mean by time. As we saw, it's not a thing, it's not a realm, it is an attribute of a thing, namely, how to describe duration. Here's what Bavinck says: "God cannot be subject to time, measure, or number and still be God. His eternity is an eternal present without past or future." Cannot be subject to time, measure, or number and still be God. His eternity is an eternal present without past or future. By saying "no past or future," that's why I said the language of "eternity past" is misleading. Without past or future, Bavinck means he does not experience duration successively. There's no three weeks ago and two months from now as God experiences it. He is eternal. There is an eternal present.

So, this is why I began with that quotation from Wolterstorff, because he's right. Once you pull at this classical understanding of God, you can see how the whole ball of yarn starts to unravel. If you don't have immutability and impassibility, you can't have eternity and infinity, and then you can't have aseity, and then you certainly don't have simplicity. Wolterstorff is absolutely right that these things go together.

Here's a great quote from Hodge: "The immutability of God is intimately connected with his immensity and Eternity." Remember, we saw that. That's his, his infinity. His immensity with relationship to space, his eternity with relationship to time or duration. "The immutability of God is intimately connected with his immensity and Eternity, and is frequently included with him in the scriptural statements concerning his nature as an infinite and absolute being, self-existent and absolutely independent. God is exalted above all the causes of, and even above the possibility of change. Infinite space and infinite duration cannot change; they must ever be what they are." So God is absolutely immutable in his essence and in his attributes. So there's the opposite, really, of what Wolterstorff was saying. But Hodge is seeing the same thing. All of these go together.

Why does any of this matter? Well, I won't give you the sermon version, but let me just give you three words as you go to your first break. If you're saying, "Ah, like my head is stretching, what does this matter?" One: immutability matters for our warning. If God is unchangeable in his essence, his plans, and his purposes, then that is bad news for those who are resolute in their wickedness, in unbelief. God is not going to have a change of heart on the last day. He is not going to have second thoughts. Remember, our justification does not take place because God set aside justice, but because on the cross, Christ fulfilled justice. Wasn't that God was having a really good God day, woke up and just said, "Good, your sin? Forget about it. I don't care about it anymore." No, he cared about it, and he paid for it. So God is not going to change. If your hope, no one puts it this way, but there are millions of people whose hope is in divine mutability, that somehow God's character on the last day will be something different. Not the God who cast Adam and Eve from the garden, not the God who destroyed the earth with a flood, not the God who smote the Amalekites, not the God who struck down Nadab and Abihu, not the God who decreed the death of his son, not the God who warned about a lake of fire. Some other God is going to be there. So our warning.

Two: our welfare. So if immutability is bad news for the wicked, it is unimaginably good news for God's people. Even the best people in life, they get old, they die, they may fail, but God's word doesn't change, his character does not change, his decrees do not change. He is absolutely immovable in his goodness, his mercy, his purposes to us in Christ. Divine immutability is meant to be an attribute of perfection and a doctrine of comfort. The unending glories of heaven cannot be altered. God's purpose in election will stand. Again, here's Charnock: "We must depend upon his immutability for this thing and submit to his wisdom for the time." Prayer is an acknowledgment of our dependence upon God, which dependence could have no firm foundation without unchangeableness. So our warning, our welfare.

Finally, our worship. It means that God is distinct from the world. He is not like his creation. He is not like his creatures. We are fickle; he is faithful. We are undependable; he is dependable. We are inconstant; he is constant. Jesus provides a way for changeable creatures to have communion with this unchangeable God. There's a great, great quote from Augustine, who talks about moving away from distracting, diverting things of the world to look at a gaze of God that reorients us. Augustine says, "Without being co-eternal with you, O Trinity, the soul nevertheless participates in your eternity. From the sweet happiness of contemplating you, it finds power to check its own mutability without any lapse to which its createdness makes it liable. By cleaving to you, it escapes all the resolving vicissitudes of the temporal process." That's a very smart way of saying everybody is grasping after eternity. How can I live forever? How can I leave a legacy? How can I make a difference? How can I not be forgotten? How can I leave my stamp on this world? We all have eternity written on our hearts. Augustine says the only way to have lasting, eternal significance is to have communion with the one who is eternal.

So, finally, it will break here. This is from Charnock: "We burn with a desire to settle ourselves, but mistake the way and build castles in the air, which vanish like bubbles of soap in water." This is what we're all grasping for as human beings. We're building castles in the air, and poof, they're bubbles of soap in the water. They don't last. The only way to overcome constant change in your life is to know the one whose essence and knowledge will never change. The immutability of God, Pictet said, is the fulcrum of our faith and the foundation of our hope. Be back at 9:45, and we're going to deal with the even more difficult attribute of impassibility. See you in six minutes. Okay.

We have, uh, 42 minutes to look at impassibility. We'll take our coffee break. We'll come back, and we'll try to do the communicable attributes in the final hour and come to the Trinity next week. We are also slowing down with impassibility, not just because it's a subject, it's been a subject I've been interested in since I was a student in seminary, and I, I wrote a journal article back in, I think it came out in 2006 in Westminster Theological Journal. I used some of that and then gave an address, I think in 2010, at Together for the Gospel in a breakout session on impassibility. So it's something I've, I've studied and has been an interest of mine, and it's worth talking about because there are real immediate pastoral applications. And of all the incommunicable attributes, this is likely to be the one that you recoil, may be too strong a word, but that you scratch your head and you say, "Huh, I'm not sure." So I want to do my best to convince you of divine impassibility and why it's important in historic and biblical. Let's start with a simple definition. By impassibility, I mean God cannot suffer and is incapable of being acted upon by an external force. So it's related to immutability. You can see clearly. But that word passion or passable, you...

Think of "The Passion of Christ" as the suffering of Christ. So, impassibility, first of all, has to do with: Can God suffer? And the classic answer has been no, God cannot suffer. There are two, this gets in somewhat to Christology, but there are two related heresies: theopascitism and Patripassianism.

Theopascitism comes from two Greek words, you can see "Theos" meaning God, "Pasco" meaning to suffer. Theopascitism, it's the belief that God suffered as God on the cross. Now, we'll come back to this in a moment because very careful theologians try to find a way to avoid these two heresies while still saying that God suffered, but just for the moment, theopascitism: God as God suffered on the cross. So that when Jesus died, God suffered. That's theopascitism.

Related, Patripassianism. So you can see the word "Patri," Father, "Passion," suffer. This is the belief that along with the Son, the Father also suffered on the cross. So not only did the Son suffer in his God-forsakenness, but the Father also suffered in his dying Son. How did, when he, you know, Romans 8, "He who did not spare his own Son." Does that language, "He did not spare his own Son," does that speak to some kind of suffering in the Father? That it was with loss and pain and suffering that he gave up his Son to die on the cross?

Theopascitism and Patripassianism were both rejected by the Church in the 6th Century by the Patriarch of Constantinople in the East, and then by Pope Hormisandas in the West, and eventually by a council shortly thereafter in the 500s. So both have been deemed Church heresies.

It is possible that you and I confess this heresy in one of our songs. And it is a great song: "How deep the Father's love, how deep the Father's love, how great the pain of searing loss. The Father turns his face away, as wounds which mar the Chosen One, bring many sons to glory." There are two different ways you could understand it. "How great the pain of searing loss, the Father turns his face away." Could refer to the Son's experience of loss. So the first phrase, "How great the pain of searing loss," that's the fog, that's the Son's suffering as the Father turns his face away. Or it could be a line referring to the Father's pain as he experiences the loss of turning his face away from the Son. So it could be a line about the Son suffering on the cross, or a line about the Father's suffering on the cross.

Uh, Stuart Town, in him, I asked Keith Getty one time, you know, Stuart Town, and what do you think he meant? Which one of these two interpretations? And he said, "I'm sure whichever interpretation you want." So he said, he, he certainly wasn't thinking of of this debate. So I'm going to sing it and take it to mean the Orthodox version and not the heresy of Patripassianism.

Not everyone who denies impassibility is necessarily guilty of these two heresies. So let me say more about them. Theopascitism was, first of all, a Christological heresy. It was defended by Peter the Fuller of Antioch, who was a Monophysite or Monophysite, Monophysite, one nature. So he believed Christ had only one nature. Therefore, when Christ died on the cross, the divine nature must have suffered because there was no distinction to be made between a human and divine nature. He had only one nature. So theopascitism was, in part, a Christological heresy. The Monophysites denied the two natures of Christ. So you only got one nature, so when Christ died, God suffered.

Patripassianism was a Trinitarian heresy. It was basically modalistic, believing the Father and the Son were the same person appearing in different modes of being. Therefore, whatever the Son experienced, the Father also experienced, because the persons of the Trinity are not distinct hypostases, persons, but they're different expressions of the same person. So, of course, the Son can't suffer without the Father suffering, because they're modes of being. Christological heresy, Trinitarian heresy.

So some have tried very carefully to say, "Well, I don't want to be guilty of those heresies, but I still want to affirm that God, as God, suffers." Most famously, perhaps, is John Stott in his magnificent book, "The Cross of Christ." Stott argues, wrongly in my opinion, for divine passability. He says on page 326, my copy, "There is good biblical evidence that God not only suffered in Christ, but that God in Christ suffers with his people." Still goes on to say, "I don't affirm the errant Christology of theopascitism. I don't affirm the errant Trinitarian theology of Patripassianism, but," quote, "it seems permissible to refer to God's suffering on the cross." So Stott says God suffered on the cross. He's certainly not the only one. In fact, there was an article a number of years ago that called the heresy of theopascitism the "New Orthodoxy." Karl Barth spoke of God's "own heart of suffering." Bonhoeffer said, "Our God is a suffering God." Perhaps most vigorous in his defense of divine suffering is Jürgen Moltmann. Now, these are folks that are, you know, not in the core curriculum of RTS, but they're important figures. And you've all probably read some Bonhoeffer at least. Moltmann argues in his book, "The Crucified God," that the Father suffered the loss of his Son. And again, to go back to Walterdorf, he says that he found the doctrine of impassibility, after his son's tragic death, he said he found impassibility "impossible to accept" and "grotesque."

If you want to read a different take on it, Todd Billings, who's a professor at Western Theological Seminary, the RCA seminary in Michigan. I wouldn't agree with Todd on a number of things, but he's a good brother. And he's written very movingly because he has blood cancer, which is in remission, but is ultimately untreatable. And he has a book on how he found such comfort in divine impassibility and how he was comforted by the notion of a God who cannot suffer as he suffers. So there's a different pastoral book you might read.

Before the 19th or 20th century, you would find almost no Christian arguing that God suffered. But in the last hundred years, it has become common. In fact, it's, we've some of us have probably said it. And if we haven't said it, we've probably thought it before, or have had someone say it to us. A very godly, earnest pastor or friend in the hospital bed, holding our hand and saying, "God suffers with you," or "God hurts as much as you hurt," or "God feels your pain." Until 150 years ago, that would not have been the way that Christians would have comforted one another.

Why did impassibility fall on such hard times? Well, for one, we live in an age that prizes authenticity. And authenticity is especially found in expressing brokenness and pain. Suffering is a currency for the real. If you talk, if you are face to face with your suffering, you're authentic, you're real, you're you're relatable. So how can God really be relatable? He's always, he's authentic if he doesn't have suffering.

Second, many Christians are suspicious that this is all just a holdover from Greek philosophy. This is just the old Aristotelian unmoved mover. And and there's often posited, the Hebrews had one way of viewing God, and it was relatable and relational and emotional and dynamic. And then the Greeks, ah, the Greeks, where are the Greeks this morning? Yes, your fault again, for this Stoic, lifeless, passionless God who overthrew the relatable, passionate God of the Hebrews.

The third reason many people assume a suffering God is a more caring God. So someone says, "What meaning can there be in a love that is not costly to the lover?" So God must stand in solidarity with our pain. The way to heal suffering is to share it. A God who cannot suffer cannot love. Title of one journal article was, "Only the Suffering God Can Help."

And then a fourth reason, related to these other ones, divine suffering is thought to be the best answer to the problem of evil. It's no coincidence, with Moltmann in particular, that divine impassibility is called into serious question after the Holocaust, two world wars, genocides. How can we worship a God who is immune to our pain?

I bet many of you had to read the little book "Night" by Elie Wiesel. I think my kids have to read it in like three different classes at Covenant Day School. I had to read it a couple of times. And it's a, it's a really important, moving work. And there's a scene where Wiesel is there, there's a Jew who's hanging that's been killed. And someone says, "Well, where is God? Where is God in the midst of this?" And Wiesel's answer is, "There's God right there, hanging on the gallows." And you could interpret Wiesel as saying, "There's God, God with this unthinkable suffering." "God is dead." Or "God is right there." Meaning, "Where is God?" Well, God is suffering right there with that man. And most people assume he meant the latter. Moltmann reflects on that story and says, "Any other answer would be blasphemy." To speak of a God who could not suffer would make God a demon. So it's thought that in the midst of so much human pain and unspeakable atrocities, how can we have a God who is absent from that?

And then finally, maybe I said finally before. Here's a fifth argument against impassibility: Doesn't the cross reveal to us the heart of God? Doesn't the cross show us, this is what God is like, namely, he's a suffering God? So it's been said, "The cross revealed the eternal suffering of the heart of God." For all of those reasons, impassibility has fallen on hard times. Though I will say, in probably the last 20 years or so, with the revival of interest in classic theology, it's, it's making a a comeback.

So why does the Westminster Confession affirm that God is without parts or passions? You do need to believe in impassibility to be a minister in the Presbyterian Church, at least if they're examining you. Well, because our confessional standards say God is without parts, simplicity, and he's without passions. Come back to that. What it means with emotions. But certainly, it means he does not suffer.

So here's a few reasons. How many should I give you? I think I gave you five reasons against. I'll give you five reasons for. Number one, the weight of church history overwhelmingly supports the notion that God does not suffer. In fact, the early church held it as self-evident that the eternal God was unchangeable and impassable. Justin Martyr said God is "unchangeable and eternal. He is unbegotten and impassable." Irenaeus, writing in the second century, said, "The Gnostics endow God with human affections and emotions. However, if they had known the scriptures and had been taught by the truth, they would have known beyond doubt that God is not like men. His thoughts are not like the thoughts of men. For the Father of all is a vast distance from those dispositions and passions that operate among men." Interestingly, note there, Irenaeus, that if they had known the scriptures, he understands that what I'm saying is is a biblical doctrine, not first of all a Greek doctrine. Origen, in the third century, "We will not serve God as though he stood in need of our service, or as though he would be made unhappy if we cease to serve him. Rather, we do it because we ourselves benefited, or because we are ourselves benefited by the service of God. We do it because we are freed from griefs and troubles by serving the Most High God." Another church father, Arnobius, writing at the beginning of the fourth century, "Our salvation is not necessary to him, such that he would gain something or suffer loss if he either made us divine, allowed us to be annihilated, destroyed by corruption." It could go on and on. Origen again, "God must be believed to be entirely without passion and destitute of all these emotions. The Father himself and the God of the whole universe is long-suffering, full of mercy and pity, but he must not be exposed to suffering." Notice there, Origen doesn't think that impassibility means God is inert or unconcerned or immobile. He uses the biblical language, "long-suffering, full of mercy and pity" (Psalm 86), and yet impassible. He was one of the first theologians to maintain that God was impassible, but also impassioned, if we can use that language, completely unlike the created world. But at the same time, Origen wants to do justice to this rich emotional language that the scriptures use. We see this emphasis in Calvin. Surely, says Calvin, "God does not have blood, does not suffer, cannot be touched with human hands." "Without parts or passions," the Westminster Confession puts it. And we'll all right, well, let's just say a bit here before we get on to our second point about that language of parts or passions. This is a, a theme in many of my classes. I went into detail in the Enlightenment course this summer, and we'll get this later in this class when we talk about human psychology, but it's absolutely essential we make a distinction between passions and affections. Go into detail about some of the history of this in my Enlightenment class. But you can make a, a pretty good case, if you want to state it in bold relief, the Scots invented emotions, which is ironic for the Scots, of all people, to have invented emotions. But what do we mean by that? We meaning this language of emotion was not in common theological philosophical discussion until really the first half of the 19th century, maybe stretching back into the 18th century. This is a relatively recent phenomenon that you will not find theologians and philosophers using the language of emotion. They will talk about passions, affections. They may talk about sentiments or sympathy or sensibility. But this language of emotion has come to be all-encompassing to describe human feeling of things where the older, much more nuanced language helps us make sense. So when it says God is without parts or passions, they're using this word "passion" very deliberately because a passion is something that renders you passive. A passion sweeps over you, it comes upon you. And God cannot have things sweep over him. He cannot be subject to external forces. You don't punch him and he gets a bruised arm. You don't yell at him and then he becomes sad, and you just ruined God's day. He has affections. So sometimes people misread Jonathan Edwards' "Religious Affections." He is not talking about religious emotions. Again, we're going to come back to this later when we talk anthropology. But an affection is emotion of the will. You can see how this technical language, motion of the will, eventually becomes an e-motion, emotion of the will. Means an affection comes from your voluntary determination. It's your inclination toward a thing. So God has affections because he, he wills, he wills to be favorably disposed to righteousness, and he wills to be implacably opposed to wickedness. He wills to be delighted, to delight in joy and beauty, and he wills to be grieved by pain and ugliness. But these are motions of the will, his disposition, his inclination. The language of affections is appropriate to God. The language of passions has, until the last 200 years, been resolutely set aside with relationship to God. And we must be careful because, of course, we use "passion" to mean, there's a conference called "Passion." That would have been a very strange thing for most of history. Passions are bad. But the word means something different to us. And passion is, you're energetic, you're enthusiastic, you're really excited about something, you're passionate. So we want God to be passionate. But they used the word to mean passive. And in particular, to suffer. "The Passion of Christ" is the suffering of Christ. God, the confession says, does not have these sorts of passions, which are misguided, often disordered. So this is all the church history argument.

Second, and we'll just can pretty much skip this because we already talked about it, but the Bible teaches that God does not change. Again, Bavinck says, "The contrast between being and becoming marks the difference between the Creator and the creature. Every creature is continually becoming, is changeable, striving, seeks rest and satisfaction, finds rest in God. For in him alone is pure being and no becoming." So we already saw this. If you affirm immutability, you really have to affirm impassibility. Because to suffer is to experience some sort of change, some sort of change in your physical composition, change in your spiritual compositions, change in your emotional state. It is to to make you malleable. To be impassable is not to be dispassionate. To be immutable is not to be motionless. Rather, God is always active, always dynamic, always relational. This is one of the reasons God cannot change, because God is God, cranked up to 11 all the time. He is all God, all the time, 1000 percent. How can you change? So don't hear, "God doesn't change," means he's just sort of inert and lame. No, he's so active all the time, he could not ever become more active than he is, nor less active. He cannot be diminished, he cannot be augmented. He does not undergo changes in his emotional state as humans do.

Which leads to our third argument: God's emotional life is not identical to ours. This is probably the most difficult part of the discussion. In my last church, I had a young woman, while she was young, she's my age, but she would, this got in her head as the question. She asked, and it came up several times, shaking my hand through the line after church, "Pastor, you still haven't answered my questions. Does God have emotions?" Very hard question to answer right now, as there's a line waiting here. And I tried to answer, and I don't think I gave her a satisfactory answer. But let me try to do so for you. Clearly, in one sense, it is patently obvious that God has an emotional life. Just to use our common language, scripture tells us God is grieved, he's angry, he rejoices, he's moved to pity, he's full of mercy, he's overflowing in love. So if we try to speak about God and we never use emotion language, we're not using the language of scripture. So we don't want the doctrine of impassibility to make us go, "The psalmist didn't really know what he was doing here." We want to use the language of scripture. However, most theologians have argued that this emotional language is an example of an anthropopathism. You've heard of an anthropomorphism? "Morpha" being form or body. We know instinctively that there are lots of places in scripture that describe God as having a human body, anthropomorphisms. He has a head and hair, and he's got a strong right arm, and his his feet rest on the universe. So we instinctively read those passages and we know that's a human way of speaking about God. God doesn't really have a body, he doesn't really have an arm. So in the same way, theologians have said, these are anthropopathisms, meaning we're speaking of God as having human emotions, though he doesn't have human emotions in the same way that we do.

Now, I know for some people, I've had this conversation many times, "Oh, that sounds kind of lame. You just, you just write it off as an anthropopathism." And yet, what are the alternatives? What, what is an emotion? Almost everyone talks about God having emotions. But let's stop. What is an emotion? So that when emotion became a, a common term in the 1800s, it was thought of in very psychosomatic terms. That it, it had to do with a response, a cognitive, physical response. It was very much an embodied thing. It was an embodied motion. It was an emotion. But God doesn't have a body. When you experience an emotion, doctors can tell you, there is, there's physical stuff happening. Your heart starts pumping, it starts racing. Your glands release endorphins. Our emotions are always tied up with our physical selves. You don't have emotions except that there are things happening in your glands and in your chemistry. Well, God doesn't have that. If someone punches you in the gut, you feel pain or anger. Someone tickles you, you, you laugh. Well, God can't experience emotions like that. He's Spirit. He doesn't have a body. So if emotions, as we experience them, are always tied to some kind of physical manifestation, what about God? He doesn't have a body. And we don't want to say God gets anxious, or he gets stressed out. He's not overcome by emotions. They don't sweep on him. He cannot be passive. He cannot change in his will, his nature, his knowledge. So he doesn't change in those ways. So what about his emotions? His emotional life? We don't want to say that God is moved to tears in the way that we think of moving, like we made God, or he's overcome with rage, or he falls in love, or he gets frustrated. Emotions don't happen to him. He sets his affections upon us as his treasured possession.

Okay, so what is an emotion? Here's a, here's a very smart definition that will probably leave you unsatisfied, but I put it out there for since you're smart people in this class, you can think about it. Kevin Vanhoozer, he defines divine emotions as "concern-based construals loaded with value." Now, I'm not saying that's going to preach real well, or that you bring that definition up at the hospital bed. But just track here. A concern-based construal loaded with value. When you construe, not strudel, that's yummy, but when you construe something, you give an interpretation, you interpret. If somebody gives you a big slap across the back, there's a physical sensation, but immediately you construe that as something. You have an emotion based on what you interpret that to be. If you're walking through a dark alley at night, and it's dimly lit, and you're all by yourself, and suddenly a big slap comes across the back, you feel the emotion of fear, trepidation, all sorts of scary things. You can have the very same physical sensation, a hand slapping you across the back, but if you just hit a three-pointer, scored a touchdown, and it's your teammate just coming up behind you to say, "Good job." Same physical sensation, a slap on the back, but you construe it as joy, as unity, as togetherness, as excitement. So you construe, and then load them with value, is what Vanhoozer is saying. Now, God doesn't have people slap him on his physical back. But a divine emotion, as he understands it, is a concern. So he is concerned with the world. Construal, it's how God construes certain things. You might say, how God sizes up what is going on. What is God's value judgment based on his character and his purposes? So a construal for God is to, to, to load this sinful human action with the value of anger, grief, joy, or, or love directed towards some good object. That's what Vanhoozer says is one way to think about a divine emotion. It's how God construes the external world and the things that are happening and the value he assigns to it. And the way in which the Bible, so we can understand it, describes those divine construals is with anthropopathic language, to say grief and anger and joy and sadness. But strictly speaking, we would not want to think of God, if every time someone in this world is suffering, God is there feeling their pain, God is the most miserable being. He is constantly in pain. He is constantly suffering. So we should not equate emotion, if we use that language, with this sense of passion, because it does not mean something is happening to God, as much as it means God is assessing value and construing the relationships of his creatures. He's concerned. So we don't want to say he's unconcerned with what happens in his creation. But these emotional changes, as they seem to us, are not really changes in God, but they are his constant character and nature construing the vicissitudes of life. So to use the analogy again of a prism, it's, it's the light of human experience coming through, and as God construes those things, it refracts into brilliant colors. So we see what looks to us to be mutability in God, doesn't God get happy, get sad, get angry? But it's God ever the same in his nature, yet as we see him construing, assessing value to the activities of his creation, we see it as emotional life.

So come back here. It's just so good. We're not going to get done. All right, just come back to this passage I mentioned earlier, 1 Samuel 15. This is the best example to say, you, you just have to have a couple of different categories. This is why we have Systematic Theology. Systematic Theology is not imposing artificial categories on the Bible. It's saying, how do we, how do we explain things in the Bible that seem to be at odds with each other, but we know aren't? That's some of what Systematic Theology does. So, for example, 1 Samuel 15. God says, 1 Samuel 15:11, "I regret that I have made Saul king." There it is, black and white. Oops, I did it again. That was some other theologian. "I regret having made Saul king." Now, if you just, you hunker down there and you say, "I'm going to be super biblical, exegetical. I'm not going to look anything else. I'm just looking at that text." And you preach a whole sermon, "God changes his mind. God regrets." All well, you're making a lot of mistakes. Because in verse 29, we read, "And also the Glory of Israel will not lie or have regret, for he is not a man that he should have regret." That's a few verses later. One of the key hermeneutical principles: the biblical authors were not stupid. That's just one of the, just help you out, they're not stupid. So in a, in a space of a few paragraphs, the author did not suddenly, "Oh, I mean, he does regret. Oops. I mean, he doesn't." Theology is helping us to say, okay, there's got to be some way in which God, we can use the language of regret or even repent as he looks at and construes the situation with Saul. Saul is not the king he should be. God's value judgment on that is, this is not the right king. And yet, in a metaphysical sense, at the end of the chapter, it's as if the author wants to make absolutely clear, this does not mean that in God's decree or in his purpose, he somehow made a mistake. God is assessing this situation as unfortunate that Saul is the sort of king that he is. And yet, God has not metaphysically, ontologically changed his mind. He is sorry that Saul has changed, but it does not mean that God has changed. When the external world changes, God's construal changes, not that God is changing, but it's a different sort of refraction through the prism of God's unchanging nature. So God's emotional life is not identical to our emotional life.

Four, and we'll, uh, we'll try to get done because we already talked about this. What is said about Jesus Christ cannot be automatically said without qualification about God. This gets back to the communication of properties. So here's Calvin: "Thus scripture speaks of Christ sometimes attributing to him what must be solely referred to his humanity, sometimes what belongs uniquely to his divinity, and sometimes what embraces both natures but fits neither alone. And they so earnestly express this union of the two natures that it is in Christ as sometimes to interchange them. This figure of speech is called by the ancient writers the communication of properties." So to say, "The cross reveals the heart of God" is certainly true. But what does it reveal? It reveals to us a God who so loved the world that he sent his only Son. You cannot make the leap to say, "Because on the cross the Son of God died, it therefore reveals that God is the sort of being who is always dying." Again, one of our hymns, and I love this hymn, "And can it be that thou, my God, should die for me?" Good or bad, some newer hymnals change it to, "That thou, my Lord, should die for me," just to make clear that God as God was not dying. Now, I think we can say, "That thou, my God, should die for me," so long as we understand we don't mean that the divine nature died, or that one-third of the Trinity died, but we mean God as the personal name for the Son of God, for using it to denominate the person of the Son, the Divine Son of God, died. That's what we're saying. Again, what was Wesley thinking? He probably wasn't thinking about all this. So some, in order to be more careful, say, "That thou, my Lord, should die." I think we can say "God," but we, we want to understand what we should and shouldn't mean by that.

Which leads to a fifth and final argument. Let's finish with this, and, uh, I have a few application points. We'll come back after the break. Without impassibility, the necessity of the Incarnation does not make sense. The necessity of the Incarnation does not make sense. Listen to Hebrews 2:9: "But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone." That's a purpose statement. The Son of God had to be made lower. His nature is not changing, but in taking upon a human nature, the divine, the Son of God, its glory is is shrouded. So he's made something to seem less glorious than the angels. He had to be made lower than the angels so that he might taste death for everyone. That is to say, apart from the Incarnation, the Son could not die. This is what Hebrews 2 means by saying, "Christ had to be made perfect through suffering." Don't think "perfect" he was lacking moral quality. Think he had to be qualified. Hebrews 2:14, "that he shared in flesh and blood so he might suffer as his brothers suffered." If it were not for the Incarnation, he would not qualify as a sympathetic high priest, one who was tempted through suffering, one who was made in his brothers like his brothers in every respect except for sin. So you see the connection to impassibility. If we say that God can suffer, why was the Incarnation necessary? "Gordius homo," why did God have to become man? There's no majesty, no mystery in the Incarnation apart from impassibility. Again, go back to "And can it be?" "'Tis mystery all, the immortal dies." The mystery is that the immortal one died. If God, as God, can suffer, there's no mystery. There's no mystery to say, "The passable one suffers. The mortal one died." The mystery is to say, "The immortal died. The impassable suffered." And the way in which that was possible was by the Incarnation. Gregory wrote, "In Christ's suffering, God shows his impassibility." So one author says, "By dissolving the mystery, theopascitism makes easy and plausible what in reality is the deepest, most staggering, and humbling Christian mystery of all: God, the impassable, suffers as a man." The Incarnation was necessary because God set out to do the most un-God-like thing possible: to suffer and to die. And the only way to do that is to join with the divine nature, the human nature, so that the single person of the Son suffers and dies.

When we come back after the break, I'll just wrap up with a few reasons why this is good news pastorally. We'll see if you have questions, and we'll do our best to talk about the communicable attributes. So into your brains, into your bladders, fill your stomachs. Be back at 11. We'll try to wrap up with our last incommunicable attribute.

Just a few final thoughts on impassibility. I mentioned that theopascitism was rejected in the East and in the West prior to its official rejection from the Patriarch of Constantinople and the Pope in the West. To give you this from my notes, this is from the Council of Rome in 382, so before its official rejection in the 6th Century. The Council of Rome, 382: "If anyone says that in the passion of the Cross, God felt pain and not the body with the soul which the Son of God of Christ had assumed, the form of a servant which he had taken upon himself, as scripture says he does, he does not think rightly." So all the way back at the Council of Rome in 382, it was stated that we should not think that in the passion of the Cross, God felt pain.

Why is impassibility good news? For one reason, it means we have an unchanging God who is not in the same mess that we are in. There's a strand of theology called process theology. As the name suggests, means that God is in process. He is so enmeshed in our world, so bound up in our brokenness, that his effort to rescue us is, in a sense, an effort to rescue himself. It's an extreme form of immanence, or an extreme defense of God's relational nature, such that he needs to be set free from his own process of becoming. But this is not the sort of God that we meet in the Bible. The truth that process theology misses is, is that God is not in the same mess. He receives unceasing worship from the saints and the angels. He needs nothing from human hands. He lives in everlasting delight in his own glory and goodness.

But second, second reason, this unchanging God who is ontologically outside of our mess is nevertheless intimately concerned with us and our mess. And that makes the presence of God all the more meaningful. He doesn't need us. He is not trying to find out how he can figure out his own brokenness. God's love is freely given, unmotivated by any need or deficiency in him. He does not feel inner angst or agony or distress. He does not love us in order to be set free on account of his own suffering. Rather, he chooses to love because he is love. It's a constant overflowing of mercy and joy and goodness. God's concern for us, therefore, is always out of overflow, never out of lack. It's never a deficiency in him, never to remedy something in himself. And that makes his love all the more meaningful. When, when we're loved by someone, it could be very true and very pure, and yet there's always some sense the, the person is wants to be set free from their own angst or their own pain or their own awkwardness. But not with God. His love is always freely chosen because he loves us, not motivated by his own desire to be set free from some uncomfortable emotion.

A third reason this is good news: With divine impassibility, the Incarnation is not a revelation of the eternal suffering of God, but it is the deepest expression of God's gracious character, whereby he chose to suffer as one of us. So it does reveal something about the character of God, for sure. But our comfort in the midst of suffering is not that the Father suffered with the Son, nor that God continues to suffer with us. Our profound consolation is that God, moved by love, in cooperation and agreement, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, the Son laid aside immunity to pain so he might suffer for us as one of us. And so that instinct you have to want to tell someone, "God feels your pain," let me suggest you redirect that to say, with scripture, "You have a sympathetic high priest." And actually, if we say God, as God, suffers, we we lock him out of human pain. We don't know what it's like for God to suffer as God. Maybe it's not at all the same. But God doesn't suffer as God, but God, in becoming man, suffered as a man, so that the God-man can sympathize. He knows what it is like. And by his ongoing intercession, he draws near to us. So we don't need to posit for comfort that God himself continues to suffer, but rather that in his Son, you have one that you can pray to and who is interceding on your behalf, who knows what it is like to suffer as a human being. And even more amazingly, God freely chose to suffer in that way. As the Son took upon himself a human nature, only the impassible God suffering as a man can truly sympathize with us. If God suffers as God, we actually lock him out of our experience instead of bringing him into it. We need to know that there is a Son of God who knows exactly what we are feeling. I've often come back to this line from Carl Henry: "It is into the 'why' of Calvary that is the 'my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' It is isn't to the 'why' of Calvary that we now focus every other 'me' of human existence." So we don't look to an angstridden, pain-stricken, eternally grieving God, but we look to the cross. And let us remember, the good news of the cross is not simply in God identifying with us, but that God has conquered. That death has been defeated. This is where so much of our modern contemporary notions of comfort and suffering are often mistaken. If you think about it, what, what good would it do simply to have God, as God, overcome or distracted by pain? If you are in the hospital bed, you're sick with cancer, and the doctor says, "I am going to suffer with you," and then their doctor injects himself with their own cancer and therefore is laying in the bed next to you suffering what you're suffering. That's not really, it's not the fact that he's suffering that helps. What, what is meaningful is he loved to such a degree that he would be willing to do that. But it's not the suffering itself that really gives comfort. Otherwise, we'd want every other person, "If you really help me, feel as bad as I feel." It's not the feeling. What we feel, per se, but rather it's love's willingness to bear burdens, love's willingness to do what it takes at cost to ourselves in order to accomplish an end. But there's, there's no ultimate comfort if you're feeling miserable today, if somebody, if your friend says, "I'm so sorry," and they have a, a pained expression. That does administer something because it communicates, "I, I'm understanding what you're, what you're going through, and I may not understand it completely, but I have compassion on it, and I'm sorry, and I wish that this weren't happening." All of that is good human interaction and love. But suffering itself is not the answer. Just everyone feel exactly the bad thing I'm feeling today, and then I feel better. That would be a perverted way to find comfort. It isn't just that Christ suffered and then we say, "Look, he's suffering." But his suffering accomplished the ultimate overcoming of that suffering. So it's not that the doctor can inject himself with the same poisonous dye and lay in the hospital bed next to you and also suffer and die. It's that by giving himself the poison, you might be set free. That would be the good news. And so on the cross, it isn't God, as God's suffering, but it is God the Son doing the most un-God-like thing possible to suffer so that he might conquer death. We need someone to do more than feel our pain. We need someone to triumph over our pain. And this is where so much of our modern contemporary notions just rest at feeling pain. And you don't love me until you try to feel what I'm feeling and you feel my pain. But if we think about it for a moment, it's not the mutual feeling of it. It is the triumphing over it. Heaven is glorious not because everyone can feel pain, but because there is no pain. Tears have been wiped away. Sin, death, and the devil have been defeated. Our comfort in suffering is that in the Incarnation, the impassible was made possible for us.

Pause there for questions. There's a lot in immutability and impassibility. Lots of really good questions, I'm sure I haven't satisfactorily answered all of them, but time is against us, and we do experience duration as time. So the communicable attributes of God. The list of communicable attributes can be very long. I think Grudem lists 19 of them. I want to group them under three broad headings. We'll look at God's communicable attributes as attributes of intellect, will, and power. Or you might say, God's thinking, God's choosing, and God's doing. Two, three attributes under his intellect: his knowledge, his wisdom, and his truthfulness.

So first, then, God's knowledge. Remember, God's knowledge, in its nature, is different than ours. Our knowledge is ectypal; his knowledge of all things is archetypal. It is also different in that his knowledge is innate and immediate; our knowledge is the result of observation, learning, reasoning. His knowledge is simultaneous; our knowledge is successive. So the nature is all about the, the nature of God's knowledge, unlike ours: simultaneous, not successive; innate and immediate, not by observation, learning, or reasoning; archetypal as opposed to ectypal. Also, the extent of his knowledge is different than ours. The comprehensiveness of God's knowledge, the full extent of his knowledge, you know as his omniscience. That he knows all things, past, present, and future, all things possible and contingent. To him, all things are an eternal present. Psalm 119, he knows our sitting down or standing up, discerns our thoughts, he's acquainted with our ways, he knows what we're going to say. Psalm 94:9, "He who planned the ear, does he not hear? He who formed the eye, does he not see?" Isaiah 29, "You cannot hide from the Lord, saying, 'Who sees us or who knows us?'" Psalm 33:13, "He knows the place of our habitation." Psalm 37:18, "He knows the days of our lives." Scripture teaches the Divine foreknowledge of contingent events. He has certain knowledge of future events. His knowledge is completely perfect. No creature is hidden from his sight, all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him whom we must give account. Hebrews 4:13. Psalm 147:5, "Great is our Lord, abundant in power; his understanding is beyond measure." So God possesses all knowledge.

Second, then, under this intellect category is his wisdom. Burkhof defines it this way: "God's wisdom is that perfection of God whereby he applies his knowledge to the attainment of his ends in a way that glorifies him most." Wisdom is God applying knowledge to the attainment of his ends in a way that glorifies him most. We're probably more tempted to doubt God's wisdom than to doubt God's knowledge. Yes, we believe he knows all things, he unders, he has complete understanding of all events. But we can be tempted to doubt his wisdom. Why is he doing what he's doing in our lives? Why would he choose to bring this event to pass? If we could know, I think I heard this from Keller one time talking about prayer, that when we pray for God's will to be done, what we're trying to express is the believing heart that says, "We trust that if we knew everything God knows, and we could see everything that God sees, and we could be everything that God is, we would agree that he is answering all of our prayers as as he ought." We trust his wisdom, the application of his knowledge. He has a perfect appreciation for what is best and most glorious. And if we could have that knowledge, we would agree with his wisdom. So when we are tempted to doubt his wisdom, we have to remember the reason why his wisdom does not always seem wise to us is we do not have his knowledge. His wisdom is the full and perfect application of that knowledge. Romans 11:33, "Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, how inscrutable his ways!" Ephesians 3:10 speaks of the manifold wisdom of God, the wisdom of God that has layers and contours. The illustration of this, which you can understand if you're a parent, or if you become a parent someday, you all can understand. There are times you tell a child to do something, or you lay down a law, or you explain, and they are utterly convinced you have no idea what you're doing. "Why would I drink this medicine which tastes so terrible? Why do I have to go to? Why can't I stay up to midnight on a school night when I'm in second grade?" Which is what my second grader, it's one of the problems when you have so many kids, it's hard to get the, the second grader sees the, the junior in high school state. They think they all should just go to bed, and they can all kind of gravitate toward, yeah, 10 o'clock is good for everyone. I guess. They don't see. Or when they ask for something. So my three-year-old, he must also experience time as eternity. I think he has no concept of succession, because every day, this is not an exciting, every day he will say, "Dad, what am I getting for Amaro's my birthday?" Well, no, Amaro is not your birthday. Your birthday's December 10th. He has said it for months and months. And all he wants are color changers. It's a little Matchbox cars that put in water. Those things were created by some demiurge in some other universe, because it just means water is everywhere in the house. And he needs to get ice determined in hot water. But every day, and he doesn't understand why we don't give him what he wants. Every moment. And in his three-year-old mind, we must seem at times to be very cruel parents. As all three and four-year-olds think of their parents, "You're not giving me the dessert I want right now." If we can see that gap between fallible, fallen human beings who are separated by 20 or 30 or 40 years of knowledge, how much more should we allow that God.

Who is eternal when we're not and is God when we're not, has knowledge that we cannot even fathom. There's so many times as a parent you think, "You child, you don't even know all the things you don't know. You don't know all the things that I know because I'm 40." I'm a man, to quote the coach of Oklahoma State's famous rant, I'm 45 now. But you understand, I know all sorts of things for your good that you don't think are for your good. And if that is true with humans and parents, how much more so for God?

So we believe he knows things we don't know, and he applies that with wisdom. And then third, his truthfulness. As we talk about his intellect, this too can be distinguished. You can speak of God's metaphysical truthfulness, that is, he is true God, not false god. They don't exist. He does. So there's a metaphysical truthfulness, or you can use the word veracity.

Then there is an ethical truthfulness. He is reliable. He is not a man that he should lie. Romans 3:4, "Let God be true and every man a liar." Romans 6:18, "He sweareth an oath by himself because it is impossible for God to lie." Ethical truthfulness, logical truthfulness. He knows things as they really are and has constituted the mind to know things. So God knows everything in relation to everything else, and every understanding of events, contingent, actual, possible, is all logically coheres in God's mind. And then a promissory truthfulness, that is, all the promises are yes and amen in Christ. We could also speak of this as God's faithfulness. He is the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love.

So the attributes of his intellect, his thinking, his knowledge, his wisdom, and his truthfulness. Then to think of his will. Come back to the will of God later when we talk about the decrees of God and how to understand the will of God, the will of desire, the will of decree, that familiar distinction. We'll come back to. But here, under the heading of will, are a number of moral attributes. They're called attributes of his will because they give an expression to God's revealed will. So his moral attributes are the expression of his revealed will. Any one of these could take a half hour, a class, and would be worth exploring. But we are just spending a few minutes on them. I know we're not doing them justice.

So first, it's an attribute of his will is his holiness. As you know, the only thrice-repeated attribute, such a good word, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty." His Holiness is not only an ethical quality. It is that "you shall be holy as I am holy." It's an ethical quality, but it also refers to his otherness. When something in the temple was holy, or the temple itself was holy, or the priests were holy, or they were holy clothes, a holy day was a day set apart from the others. It was not like the others. The Sabbath was holy. The priests were holy unto the Lord because they were set apart for special use. They were other than. And so God's holiness is to speak of him as other than. That's why so often God's holiness is seen in conjunction with God as creator. See this in Isaiah 6. We see it in Revelation 4. "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty," and then it extols him as the one who created all things.

His holiness, his goodness. I also gave a T4G talk from 2020. You could go find it on the goodness of God. So I did a whole hour, almost, on this attribute of God's goodness. In one sense, was that a question or a stretch? Okay. In one sense, only God is good. Mark 10:18, "No one is good except for God." So we call this a communicable attribute, but if we're talking about goodness as an absolute perfection, only God is truly good. Psalm 110:5, "For the Lord is good, and his love endures forever, his faithfulness continues through all generations." God's goodness. I know we think of his goodness, his mercy, his love. A lot of these are used in overlapping senses. But goodness, think of what is the opposite of harsh, cruel, severe, exacting, or gruff. We see his goodness in creation, providence, and redemption. We see his goodness in the world that he made. We see his goodness in how he governs the world. And we see his goodness supremely so in saving us.

Theologians often speak of God's goodness as necessary, voluntary, and communicative. Necessary in that God cannot be other than completely, unalterably good. We're good, but he's not mixed with anything not good. He's like the sun in which there is light and no darkness. So he is necessarily good. His goodness is also voluntary. That may seem like a contradiction. How can it be necessary but also voluntary? Either God must be good, or God wills to be good. How can he be both? The answer is that his eternal and intrinsic good is necessary, but his will to communicate this goodness to others is voluntary. And we'll get to the third word in just a moment: necessary, voluntary, and communicative.

So it was necessary that whatever God would create would be good, but it was not necessary that God would create in the first place. Here's what Charnock says: "God is necessarily good in his nature, but free in his communications of it." It was not necessary that God would will to show his goodness to those outside of himself. God's goodness is necessary in that God cannot be other than good, but it's also voluntary in that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit did not have to will to have their goodness terminate on any other than the three persons of the Trinity. The fact that God willed to display divine goodness is a further expression of that divine goodness, which leads to this third point: necessary, voluntary, and communicative. God wills for his goodness to be known and enjoyed. That means God is incapable of envy. He is called jealous because jealousy is the unwillingness to give up what is yours. I know we use the terms interchangeably, but if envy is wanting something that you don't have, God cannot be envious. He is not lacking in anything. But he is called jealous because he is unwilling to give up everything that he is and has. God can be called jealous because if you're a jealous husband or a jealous wife, that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's a bad thing if you have suspicions that are unfounded. But absolutely, if you find that your husband is cheating on you, you are right to be jealous. That is your husband. You do not want to give him up. Envy is the unwillingness to have others enjoy what you want. God has everything. He lacks for nothing. In his goodness, he is desirous that others partake of what he has. So he's the very opposite of envious. But he is jealous for his own character and good name.

Whatever good we have, whatever good we enjoy, is the gracious communication of God's goodness. James 1:17, "Every good and perfect gift comes from above, from the Father of light." Every good and perfect gift. That's God's communicative. He has willed to communicate goodness to us. Food is good. Marriage is good. Friendship is good. Health, peace, prosperity, work, recreation, rest is good because God has willed to give us good gifts as the communication of his very nature. God communicates his goodness not with a kind of miserliness, but with unspeakable pleasure. He loves to have people enjoy his goodness. Again, you know this if you know this in just giving gifts to friends. But you especially feel it as a parent. I loved Christmas as a kid. I loved getting stuff. I just did. I really loved getting stuff. There is an even sweeter joy in giving and the enjoyment of others enjoying your goodness. And if we can experience that on a human level, how much more does God experience that? The supply of his goodness is inexhaustible, and the sharing of his goodness knows no end. Goodness.

And then, well, we probably won't get past this, so we'll have to pick up here. God's love. So many passages. "God so loved the world." "Behold what manner of love the Father has for us." 1 John 3:1, "God shows his love for us and this, that while we were sinners, Christ died for us." 1 John 4, "God is love." Hundreds of passages that speak of God's love. Hodge says, I just love this because Hodge, all the Princetonians, and they were all rationalists. This is such a great quote: "God is love, and love in him is in all that is essential to its nature. What love is in us, herein God's love do we rejoice, yea, and will always rejoice in God's love."

The love of God is often distinguished among three types of God's love. You're not surprised by this point in the class when there are distinctions to be made, sometimes just two, sometimes three. The love of benevolence, the love of beneficence, and then the love of complacency. This is actually really helpful for you. The love of benevolence. Bene, good. Vole, think of volition, willing. This is God's goodwill. "Peace on earth, goodwill to men." God is favorably disposed to his creatures. He has goodwill toward the things that he has made. He is not eager that any should perish. He is not vindictive. He is not cruel. He is eager to reward those that seek him. So he has a love of benevolence. He has a love of beneficence. If this is the disposition, and beneficence is the action, the goodwill, and then the carrying out. And this too is directed towards all people. Jesus famously says he causes the sun to shine upon the righteous and the unrighteous. He causes the rain to fall. The rain doesn't rarely just stop at the Christians and jump over the non-Christians. It falls on all. He has a goodwill and a, we might say, common grace love towards all.

However, the love that scripture speaks of most often and most exalted is the love of complacency. That's a hard term because the word means something different to us. Complacent is a bad thing. Means if you're a complacent husband, you're not talking, you're not doing the dishes, you're not helping out. You're apathetic. So complacency is for us something bad. But that's not what the word originally meant. So the word has come to mean a kind of apathetic inaction, but it originally meant a satisfaction, a satisfactory delight. So the reformed orthodox would speak of the love of complacency, not God loving to not do anything, but God's satisfactory delight in himself and to all those like him. So his satisfactory delight, first of all, in himself. He utterly delights in himself because he is good, the overflowing source of all good. And then he also finds satisfactory delight in the creatures that are his people and reflect his character.

So if you say, "Does God love everyone?" Yes. Yes. No, he does have a disposition of goodwill towards his creatures. They are his creatures, and so he gives them common grace. But most often, when it speaks about God's love, it is God's love directed towards his people. This love of satisfactory delight in his people, directed toward the elect as they come to be remade in his image. The love of beneficence or benevolence, beneficence, and then the love of complacency, his satisfactory delight. You'll find this often in the Puritans. You find it in Edwards. And it's just a little hook. It might be confusing for your middle school youth group, but it's a little hook to help you talk to people about the love of God. Because they hear one thing: "God loves everybody in the exact same way." And he doesn't. And this is meant to be supreme comfort and joy for the Christian. I think I've shared this before. I saw a t-shirt one time that said, "God loves you." Or it says, "I'm like, smile. God loves you." And then, for instance, he said, "But he loves everybody." It's like, "Well, yeah, God loves you. Good news. But well, he loves everybody, so he's kind of got to love you." And it can feel like, "God loves every human being. I'm a class of human beings, therefore God must love me." This reminds us there is a personal love for his people, not just because you belong to the class of being called his creatures, a love of benevolence and beneficence, but because you are his elect, you are his people, you reflect his character. And not just that, but he has set his affections upon you as his treasured possession, and he knows you intimately and finds satisfactory delight in you. I think most of us have accepted a very lame version of God's love because we so want to say he loves everyone just the same. It just hits us like a general, "God's nice to people." That's what God is like. And he's nice to me, instead of this complacency, this satisfaction that he finds in himself and in the people who have his own name.

Let's stop there, and we will finish with a few other attributes under willing and then doing. And then we will come to the real heavy lifting, so we get to the doctrine of the Trinity. See you next week.