None Greater (part 9)

Bethlehem Bible Church

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Corey, for the last couple of weeks, has been looking at immutability, and I kind of appreciated that right from the get -go he really didn't beat around the bush and pretty much said this is a two -week chapter.

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As it turns out, it's more like a three -week chapter as we look at impassibility, which is very, very closely related.

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However, I am bound and determined to make sure that we are going to get through this chapter in one week, so,

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Charlie, I'm going to have to hold you down a little bit. No, I'm just kidding. All right.

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You know, one of the things Corey said was that there's a reason why Barrett put these chapters in the order that he did, and this is very much a case of that.

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In fact, some of my points I didn't bother making because Corey made them last week, so that was kind of helpful as well, but I think

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I did that to you early on. I think I made some points before you. So we're talking about this thing of impassibility.

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Did everybody get a worksheet? I tried to put them in all the doors. All right, great. Immutability, God doesn't change, right?

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And I think it was good to spend two weeks on that because it's easy to understand, okay,

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God never changes, but then when you kind of get into the weeds, you start asking questions like Josh Bertrand did.

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How does God never change if God the Son is incarnate and all of the stuff that comes along with that?

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What about things that we see in Scripture like God repenting or God regretting, right? How do we reckon with those things, right?

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And I hope that you were here for at least some of that because we're going to lean on it a lot.

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So I'll get right into the worksheet, and I'll just kind of ask this question even before I define it.

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What is impassibility? Does anybody know what is impassibility? It's like a half hand.

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It does have something to do with feelings. Okay, okay, good, good.

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We're dancing around like the maypole is the answer and we're just dancing around. No. So who has the book, by the way?

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Who actually has the non -greater book? Pro tip, there's a glossary in the back. So you can actually just look it up if you really want to.

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And here's what it says. It says, God does not experience emotional change in any way.

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God does not experience emotional change in any way.

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So again, like Corey mentioned last week, Barrett kind of titles all of these chapters with questions.

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And the question for chapter seven, which is what we're going to look at is, does

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God have emotions? Does God have emotions?

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All right. Well, that glossary says God does not experience emotional change in any way.

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Our question is, does God have emotions? And so here we go. We're going to try to figure this out.

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The key word here in this definition is the word change.

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God does not experience change, right? That's immutability. We just spent two weeks looking at that.

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So right off the top, we can see, okay, impassibility is kind of like part of immutability.

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God does not experience emotional change. It's like a refinement, right? So that's helpful.

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All right. In my life right now, there's a lot of Greece.

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What do I mean by that? Specifically like ancient Greek mythology. If you know,

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Anitra and I, in our hobbies, we have this website where we review board games. Literally last week, we got in a board game that is all about Greek mythology.

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So it looks very cool. We'll have to talk about that later. All about Greek mythology. So we've got that.

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Of course, Anitra and Asher are doing this homeschool thing this year. Because we play a lot of board games, when

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Asher is learning things that we can relate a board game to, it's kind of a convenient excuse to be like, all right, well, let's take this board game and play it.

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Sometimes it leads to narrative threads that will help with teaching and things like that. It's called game schooling. You should look it up. It's good stuff.

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I mean, it's terrible. I come upstairs. I'm working. He's supposed to be having school, and they're playing a board game.

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And I'm like, you know, really? But it happens. I'm playing a video game that has to deal with Greek mythology.

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Greek stuff is all over the place in my house. The Percy Jackson books are being read by my big kids.

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I can't get away from it, it feels like. And then we come to this chapter on impassibility.

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This chapter kind of opens with a look at Greek mythology. Right? What do we see with the

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Greek gods? How are they characterized? Yeah, they're like superhumans.

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They've got some, like, supernatural powers. And they're these, like, paragons of humanity in all the good and bad ways, right?

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But they're capricious. They're, like, savage. I mean, it's literally all of the worst attributes and all of the best attributes of people are embodied in these

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Greek gods, right? No matter what you think you've seen or heard, if you study the

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Greek myths, some of the stuff that you will read about some of the weird stuff that those gods supposedly did, it's weird.

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It's weird. Like, really weird stuff. Gods raping and pillaging and murdering and raging through the heavens.

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I mean, could you imagine if you were just a Greek peon, you know, part of the proletariat or whatever, and you're going about your day, and you're like, oh, you know what?

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I'm going to, I don't know, I have to go to school today. I'm going to pray to Zeus. Okay? Cool. Pray to Zeus, do my thing.

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Hopefully, like, Hera didn't come home in a bad mood, so Zeus is grumping around, and he's actually going to, you know, help me out with my prayers.

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Like, that's what it would be like if our god was like the Greek gods. We would be praying and hoping that it was the right time to pray.

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We would be hoping that our god would, you know, it was not a bad day.

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You know, we shot 300 par, pretty okay up in the heavens, right? But that's not how our god is.

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Yahweh stands completely opposite of this picture of the gods that we see in Greek mythology.

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The god of the Bible never changes. He is immutable. He is unchangeable. In fact, it's not that he just decides that he will never change, right?

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When we talk about this attribute, both with impassibility and also with immutability, this is not a commitment from an eternal god that he will never change.

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Right? He's not like, listen, you can rest on my promises, and I promise I'm never going to change, so I'm never going to change.

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God can not change. It is not possible for him to do so.

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His immutability is an intrinsic part of his nature. Okay?

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Barrett notes that, bless you, never is there any action by God that is out of line with his unchanging nature.

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Okay, so he never changes because he cannot change, and everything that he does is wholly consistent with who he is.

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Right? God is eternally unchanging, eternally consistent.

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He is never at odds with himself. The persons of the Trinity are never at odds with each other. Last week,

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Corey quoted Simenon, I don't know, I'm just going with the last name here, who said, talking about immutability, when we misunderstand this attribute, we can think of God as if he were an infallible computer, completely devoid of any feeling and emotion as we understand them, a being that foresees all things and decrees all things, but is not affected by anything in any way whatsoever.

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Is that true? The word that's used in concert there, in Corey's notes, is apatheia, right?

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What does that sound like? Apathetic. Is God apathetic? No, he's not apathetic.

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All right, and we looked at a lot of scripture that reinforces, somebody want to read some scripture? Isaiah 43, verses 2 to 7.

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Isaiah 43, verses 2 to 7. Anybody? Does that sound like an apathetic

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God? No, I don't think so. He says in verse 4, I love you, right?

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And he said, look, I give men in return for you, I pay for you, right? And obviously we see at the incarnation and the crucifixion, what

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God has accomplished there. So no, God is definitely not an apathetic God, but how do we then take that and square that with this idea of impassibility, which is the idea of God never changing?

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How do we put those two together into something that makes sense? All right, so we have this definition of impassibility.

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This is question one on our worksheet. God does not experience emotional change in any way. But what does it really mean?

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How do we work with that in a way that is germane to our daily life and we can kind of understand it, right?

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I mean, Barrett calls this possibly one of the most,

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I don't remember what he said, controversial, not controversial, but like contradictory things for the

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Christian to think through and to understand this idea of impassibility. Impassibility is a via negativa, right?

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A description of God through negation. So let's define what passable means. And from there, we'll kind of work into what impassible means.

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I'm pulling these bullet points directly out of the chapter, you know, lest I'd be accused of plagiarism.

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And as we look at this, what I want you to remember, and we're going to plumb this a little bit more, the word passable does deal with emotion, but it's the same root word, not of emotion, but of what?

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A passion. And as we see this, we're going to really see, oh, okay, we're starting to understand what this means.

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So when we say, oh, God does not experience emotional change, it has something to do with feelings and stuff like that, that's all good. But let's keep passion in our mind, because passion is important here.

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So question two, if God were passable, he would what? When we think about emotion and passion, what are some things that maybe could describe this?

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I mean, this is kind of a hard question, but you know, work with me here. Or you could cheat in the book. I won't even be mad. Highs and lows.

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Okay, so there's going to be some fluctuation in emotion, right? He would be capable of freely changing his inner emotional state due to interactions with others, right?

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So I, listen, I spent some time with Corey yesterday. I mean, we took down a shed.

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It was a very macho time, right? So I left there. I had a headache. We displaced a family of skunks.

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It was hilarious. If you ever want to see Corey jump like a girl, just pick up a board and have some skunks underneath. It's great.

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But I felt very macho, right? So my testosterone, all of my emotions coupled with that were, actually,

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I just went home, took a shower, and took a nap. But, right? So that's exactly what that is. So because of my interactions with other people, my personal emotional state was changed.

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Charlie, do you have something? Sure, guess away.

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He would have to not know the future. That's true because with passibility, you have to react to things, right?

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And so when you know what's going to happen, you're not going to have that kind of unexpected reaction, right?

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Anything else? Janet? He could be swayed.

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Yes. Number what? The numbers don't matter, but he would be capable of being acted upon by external forces, which would bring about emotional change, right?

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When I saw the skunks, I started to laugh. It was funny. And the other one I have here is, just in general,

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God would have changing emotional states that were analogous to feelings. Okay, so emotions and feelings, again, not exactly the same thing, right?

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So capable of being acted upon by external forces, capable of changing his own emotions, having, you know, changing emotional states analogous to human feelings.

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And of course, what Charlie said, it's extra credit, part D. He wouldn't know the future.

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He wouldn't be able to. But of course, we know from our study, in looking at things like the simplicity of God, he can't add anything to himself.

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He can't take away from himself the immutability of God. He can't change. And here we're studying the impassibility of God.

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None of these things are true, right? None of these things can affect God in this way. Y. Nandy writes that God is impassible in that he does not undergo successive and fluctuating emotional states, nor can the created order alter him in such a way so as to cause him to suffer any modification or loss, right?

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God is simple. There is nothing to lose. He is one part, right? Remember when we talked about that and the bosons and the whateverons and all that other stuff?

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There's nothing to lose. Question three on our worksheet from commentator

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Helm, one of the commentators that Barrett relies on a bit. He says that that which is immutable and impassible is by nature complete, right?

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That which is immutable and impassible is by nature, not by like outside nature, but like in, you know, the essence of who he is by nature complete.

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So as we've seen here and explored a little bit, impassibility very clearly is part of immutability.

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Barrett says that impassibility is the natural, logical, and necessary corollary to immutability, right?

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If one, therefore the other. So when we talk about the simplicity of God, we talk about the analogy of the stained glass window.

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Does anybody remember this stained glass window? Anyone? All right, I'm getting some nods. That's good. I got a number one from the little guy in the back.

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I like that. So the idea with the stained glass window was that in much the same way light, one unit, part, whatever, of light, white light hits the stained glass window and the stained glass diffuses the light and we see the different colors on the other side.

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And this is kind of a picture, again, all of these analogies are imperfect, but a kind of a picture of God's attributes all being on display at once, but expressed to us differently.

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So in the context of impassibility, we have Dolezal writing, who is more academic than Barrett, but his stuff is very thought -provoking and very interesting.

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And he does not wire. He writes, I'll have to fire my editor, that God is, quote, so dynamic, so active that no change can make him more active.

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God is act, pure and simple. We can simplify this as many scholars have to describe

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God as pure, pure act. So considering this definition, we have number four in our worksheet, pure act.

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What is pure act? What does it mean? This actually calls back to something that Charlie said a long time ago.

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So if you've been paying attention, what is pure act?

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Anybody want to guess? All right, all right, that's okay.

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We'll talk about this. This is fun. This is kind of cool. So the thing that Charlie said a long time ago is that as we talk about moving through time, you can't be still.

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There's always an exertion. There's movement. There has to be something. In order for something to progress through time, there's this idea of motion, of movement.

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Does this sound familiar? Okay, good. As long as it sounds familiar to Charlie, I'm good, because he's the one who said it. So I just want to make sure

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I'm not misremembering here. And so when we talk about pure act, we talk about this idea of being constantly and fully in action.

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What is potential energy? You can go back to whatever context you want to.

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Physics, it doesn't matter. What is potential energy? Stored up energy.

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Energy that is stored up and not yet used. A very nice young lady took my son to an amusement park about a month ago, something like that,

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I guess. And they went on these things that you've probably heard of called roller coasters.

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And so I have, probably because it was pounded into my head in like seventh grade physics, those clicks, you know, when you're going up the roller coaster and it's like click, click, click, click, click, click, click.

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Every single time I hear those clicks, I'm like, every click is a little bit more potential energy.

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You get to the top, right? You crest the top. And I don't know, when the roller coaster gets a little bit more than halfway over the top, what happens?

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All that potential energy turns into what? Kinetic energy. And you're going down at,

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Kingda Ka was what, 126 miles an hour or something like that? Or is that the tall one, a fast one? I don't know.

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All I know is I can't go on the spinny things anymore. That's pretty much, that's what I know, right? But all this potential energy is all this buildup, right?

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It's when you think of things like capacitors, which are storing energy, they're holding all of this potential so that they can unleash it, right?

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I'll never forget when I was probably in high school, I went to a motivational speaker, you know, remember those guys, those motivational speakers?

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And he said, oh, who here has been told that they're full of potential? The hands go up because you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

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And then he kind of drops the bomb on you, which is, oh, well, if you're full of potential, then you're wasting it.

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Come on, I had my hand up. I'm in honors math. What do you mean I'm wasting it? All right, what was his point?

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His point was that if you have potential and you're not acting on your potential, then you just have this wasted reservoir of whatever it is, right?

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Whatever that thing is that you're storing. But the key is, and this is kind of his point as the motivational speaker, it's he kind of wanted to be the trigger, right?

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To kick off, you know, out of the nest. Go, shoot, right? That's what we as parents do.

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A kid turned 18 or whatever. We're like, all right, all that potential, you know, out. No more spaghetti, right?

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I like how all the young adults are like, right? The point is that all of this potential, all of this stored up stuff needs to be actuated.

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It needs to be kicked off. It needs a trigger, right? Now, if you're thinking back to everything that we thought about before, there's another attribute that would suggest that this doesn't make sense.

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Anybody know what that might be? Potential energy requires an actuation.

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God does not change. Well, we know that. We'll get there. We'll get there. Okay. God doesn't have potential because he is pure act.

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Potential requires a trigger to become active, right? Let's set aside the A team and we'll go to a different A.

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Aristotle who posited the idea of what? The unmoved first mover.

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We talked about this before, right? We've talked about the unmoved first mover in this class. I'm not crazy. Okay. I mean, I am crazy, but that's not the point.

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So we talked about impassibility being the corollary to immutability, right? But especially when we think about this, when we think about this idea of pure act, of God not having potential because he's acting on his potential,

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Rennie actually states that impassibility is not just the corollary of immutability, but also the corollary to aseity.

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Who remembers what aseity is? Self -sufficiency.

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If God requires a trigger, how could he be self -sufficient, right?

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How could he be self -sufficient if he required someone or something, I don't know, the big bang, whatever it might be to kick him out of the holy nest?

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Doesn't make any sense, Charlie. That's, I actually already have a headache.

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I told Anita that on the way in. But if I didn't, that would make my head hurt even more.

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You'd have to deal with the divine math equation of which one is going to infinity faster, right? Like it just, it doesn't make sense.

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So when we look at question four, that's our definition of pure act. The idea that God is full of action.

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He is fully capable within himself of fully acting in accordance with his nature and decree to execute his plan, which for us can be analogically described as an emotional act within the context of our timeline.

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Right, right. Well, and plus, I mean, action kind of defines some kind of timeline, because something has to go from where it was to where it is, and God exists outside of time.

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And so when he inserts himself into a timeline, by definition, it's just always acting, right?

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So impassibility helps us understand immutability and aseity, both.

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Sure. If we understand God's anthropomorphic emotions and their consequences as things that are entirely self -derived.

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They have to come from himself. Getting into question five.

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Having no need to be activated by anything outside of himself, God can be said to be, quote, maximally alive.

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Maximally alive. All right. So we've kind of answered the question, but not entirely answered the question that we posited at the beginning.

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The title question of the chapter, does God have emotions? We can dig, in fact, a little bit deeper into this.

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I am slightly more than halfway through my notes. We'll make it. Okay. So I mentioned before, impassibility is less related to emotion.

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It's more related to what? Passion. Passion. And so as we look through the book and we look at the examples that Barrett uses, he describes this picture of someone whose house is on fire and members of their family are stuck in the house.

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Right? And the person runs out of the house and they're just, like, freaking out, right?

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I mean, I'd like to think that I would be the impassable one in this scenario.

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I don't know, and I don't really feel like I need to find out. So I'm just going to trust the image here, the parable, if you will, that Barrett provides to us, right?

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So we freak out when we run out of the house. Our kids are stuck inside. Our cat's inside.

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Right? Whatever it might be, we're freaking out. But then a firefighter comes, right?

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And maybe they see someone calling from a window, right, upstairs, and they know somebody's got to go get them, right?

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But they have training. They may have an emotional response, concern. Oh, there is a human being trapped on the second floor, and this house is going to fall down because it's on fire.

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Not because two crazy people are cutting it up with a pack of Sawzall, right? But they're not overcome with the same kind of panic.

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Instead, even if they have that emotional response, they suppress the reaction to deal with the situation.

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Barrett writes, Many who react against the attribute of impassibility will object that such a belief eliminates compassion.

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God becomes an uncaring monster of some kind. Ironically, we do not apply that same logic in our human experience.

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Does the fireman lack compassion? No. As it turns out, he was the most compassionate of all.

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While the compassion of others led to emotional meltdown, the compassion of the fireman led him to act in the most heroic way possible.

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The truth is that despite this common objection to the idea of God's impassibility, how could he possibly be like this?

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We've already, in our lives, especially as Christians, rationalized many of these seeming paradoxes, right?

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Every parent here should be nodding. What are some examples in our lives where we have this thing that is seemingly a paradox, where we act in a certain way which may appear dispassionate, but it is motivated by emotion?

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I have two very small examples. Discipline! Totally! I hate discipline.

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I don't want to do this. You made a bad decision.

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Now we have to deal with the situation, right? But we do it. Why? Why do parents discipline their children?

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Because we love them, right? Do they think it? No. I think it was

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Claire that would scream during discipline, You hate me! You hate me! You hate me!

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Thankfully, the windows were closed. Oh yeah, you want me to die. That was another one. I will confess, as a fallible human,

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I had an emotional reaction to that. Yeah, how about the cross?

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What is the most common objection when we talk about Jesus Christ, the Son of God, dying on the cross, and the fact that it was the will of the

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Father for him to go to judgment? What do we hear all the time? Oh yeah, cosmic childhood.

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You must hate him! What? Are you crazy? No. The cross was perhaps the biggest act of love in the history of creation.

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So we kind of already rationalized some of these paradoxes, and that's why, from an apologetic perspective, and I'll give you a nice nugget later, it's really, really important for us to have a good understanding of impassibility.

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The firefighter analogy does break down because, you know, the firefighter could be like, I'm going to Starbucks.

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You know, I mean, they could do that, right? They're people, they can make these decisions. God is not like that. God is not capable of being acted upon, of being passable like this firefighter.

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So the necessary consequential question that comes after this is, if this is true, why do we see what look like emotional reactions in scripture?

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Now, Cory has already stolen some of my thunder on this one. But that's okay, because we involved Greek gods before, so here's

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Zeus coming at you. Just kidding. We have been talking a lot about analogical language, right?

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Anthropomorphic language. These are kind of critical as we try to understand these infinite things in a finite context.

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Back at the beginning, in the before, not before times, before we had like a month break or whatever, we talked about incomprehensibility of God.

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That was the first chapter after the introduction. And we were, I say we, it was me, defined three different kind of types or aspects, if you will, of anthropomorphism.

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One of them was just classic anthropomorphism. Does anybody remember what the other ones were, by the way?

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Anthropopathism, right? And the other one was, well, it was anthropoesis.

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I don't know how to conjugate that into the appropriate whatever. But anthropopathy or anthropopathism deals with describing non -human things in a human context as it relates specifically to emotion.

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Path in there deals with this idea of suffering. It's the same root as suffering.

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And so, as we often try to remind you, you would do well to remember that a lot of this is kind of this idea of divine eliciting, this divine baby talk to help us understand what's going on.

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When we talk about descriptions of God using his hands, being under his wings, seeing the breath of God, hearing the breath of God, most people in an apologetic context would be like, oh, well, those are,

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I mean, those are figurative. Like, it's anthropomorphism, right? I mean, that's kind of, okay, sure. Like, we get that. Like, we understand that, right?

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But then why is it so hard? Why do we immediately respond to the language about God's emotional responses as being anything other than anthropopathic?

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When we have these kinds of debates, and usually these are gonna be debates with people that would ostensibly identify as Christian or part of some

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Judeo -Christian belief system or whatever. When we talk about God and emotion, and it's so hard for us as people to reconcile this idea that God's emotions and the reactions of God could possibly be anthropopathic.

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Even at the same time, it's very easy for us to say, well, God doesn't really have wings.

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He doesn't really have hands. Like, this is anthropomorphic language. So why is it so hard for us to do it on the other side?

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What's the difficulty there? And this is why Barrett says, more than any other attribute, impassibility may be the most counterintuitive to Christians.

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So there's a, it's like 12 pages in this chapter that really deal with this idea.

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I mean, look, there are many mysteries in the hypostatic union that we will never understand. Hypostatic union is the union of God and man in the man

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Christ Jesus. This side of glory, probably on the other side of glory, we still don't perfectly understand it, right?

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But certainly on earth, we will not perfectly understand it. But there's like 10 to 12 pages in this chapter that I'm gonna summarize in one sentence.

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When Jesus Christ suffers during his life, like on the cross, which is the key moment, he does so, listen, as a man, not as God dwelling in a man, okay?

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And this deals with the uniting of the divine nature and the human nature. God on the cross suffered as a man because the penalty of sin was death for, well, it was death, right?

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It was the penalty of man's sin, not the penalty of God dwelling in man's sin, but the penalty of man's sin.

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And so when Jesus suffered on the cross, he suffered as a man, not as God dwelling in a man.

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Like I said, it's 12 pages in the book. Bear with me here. I just, I thought we would be just like hammering on the same thing over and over again.

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I didn't think it would be particularly fruitful. You wanna add something? I mean, he goes into a whole bunch of stuff about it and calls back to a lot of the philosophy, the ancient theologians and stuff like that.

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I would really just say, read it. And we could certainly talk about it after the fact if you'd like to.

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All right. So I think that, oh wow, we're gonna actually finish well on time.

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Van Hooser describes this very well in this quote.

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He clarifies impassibility extremely well when he says, Jesus was sinless yet subject to real temptation in the same way that an invincible army is subject to attack.

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Something similar may be said for divine impassibility. God feels the force of his people suffering.

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I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, Exodus three, and I've heard their cry because of these taskmasters.

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I know they're suffering. Yet as Jesus feels the force of temptation without sinning, so God feels the force of the human experience without suffering change in his being, will or knowledge.

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Impassibility means not that God is unfeeling, but that God has never overcome or overwhelmed with passion.

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God genuinely relates to human persons via his communicative action, but nothing humans do conditions or affects

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God's communicative initiatives and God's communicative acts.

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Selah. Anybody have questions about that? I didn't stop for questions very often, but people are pretty good at the hand raising.

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Anybody have any questions, by the way? I should stop now. Well, and as we look at God and all that he has done, we are driven to our knees to give him that glory.

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If we looked up at the Godhead, and we're like, I got that at Disney.

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We're not giving him glory. We do, in fact, need to be constantly and continually amazed by him, which gets all the way back to the core premise of the book, which is that God is,

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I can't say, he's got weird English for it, is the one of whom no greater can be conceived.

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Right? And it's exactly that thing that gives us this continued reflexive response of giving

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God glory. So question six.

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I actually had to scroll back up because I accidentally skipped this, but we'll be okay. When faced with the knowledge of certain creaturely actions, he,

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God, invariably acts in a way that is appropriate to that action, given his divine purpose.

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And so appears to the creature to do what? What do you think?

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Respond, react, right? Any of those kinds of things. It looks like God is saying, oh, all right,

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I guess so. Sure, Moses. But in reality, and we really, we hammered on this last week,

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God is existing outside of time. All of these things are happening consistent with his nature. And so when the appointed time comes,

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God responds in exactly the way that he knew that he would, right? He's not being acted upon by that intercession, right?

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And then remember Corey said, well, then if God does not react to our intercession, if God does not react to our prayer, then why do we pray?

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Because he tells us to, right? It is another act of submission to God.

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So with everything that we've seen here, I think we're at the point where we can answer the title question, which is, does

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God have emotions? Anyone?

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Yes, but not like we do. So that means this is the first chapter where the answer to the question at the top is yes.

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God does have emotions. And yet we know that he doesn't react, right?

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He doesn't have feelings in the way that we have feelings. He doesn't have passions in the way that we have passions.

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He certainly doesn't react in an unexpected way, right? And as I looked at this, and I was kind of thinking about like, oh, how do you land the plane, right?

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We talk about in homiletic classes and things like this.

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How do you end? How do you land the plane? All I could think about was what we see in scripture.

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That's a good way to end to land the plane, right? It's to read some scripture. Psalm 18, Hebrews 6. Many more passages, but these are the two that I landed on where it says, the

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Lord is my rock. And my fortress and my deliver steadfast, right?

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My God, my rock in whom I take refuge. My shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.

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And then Hebrews 6, we see this. We have this God's promise. If you look earlier in Hebrews 6, we have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul.

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I hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf, having become a high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.

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So we're not wondering about how God will react to us, whether or not he had a good day, right?

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Because God's will is steadfast. God's will is sure. We can rely on him.

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We can trust him. And now all of that is the description, really, of the impassibility of God.

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Do you have something before I pray? So, well, he doesn't possess them, he is them. Well, so love is an emotion that has a coupled action.

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That's fine. I'm looking for a quote that at one point I actually had in this message.

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All right, well, I'm not gonna worry about that. So, Dan, it's possible.

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The quote that I was looking for basically says that as we talk about God and emotion,

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Christians would do well to be mindful that our language around emotion is most likely not so much wrapped up in ancient theology as it is in modern parlance.

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And so it probably would have been a good idea to spend some time defining what emotion is in a theological context, right?

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There's like a half a hand here. I can never really tell if it's a real hand, okay. Well, he certainly does. I mean, of course,

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God has a will and he does all things according to his singular decree, right? Sure, well, of course, right. So he's acting in accordance with his acuity, which is of course true because we know that there is no external force that can act upon him, right?

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Which, and what his acuity means is that he's fully self -sufficient. So that everything that he does and every decision that he makes, he's not making those decisions in time.

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It's all part of the plan that he has put together devoid of external influence. So how do we describe those decisions that he made?

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I think that's kind of the question. I mean, he's not making decisions in time. All the stuff has already been decided and set for us before the foundation of the world.

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So the Bible certainly talks about God being jealous for his own glory, right?

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Now, is jealousy an emotion? Not in the sense that, because when we talk about jealousy, we're like, oh, he's just, it's always a passionate description.

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It's always about passion. He sees something, they respond with jealousy, right? That's our description of jealousy, right?

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And when we look at divine jealousy, we know it can't be that. So what is it?

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God's regard for his church. So is that emotion? So I entirely agree with you. I don't even think that's an old

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English description. Definition of impassibility. I don't think impassibility has changed. I just think the word has left our parlance.

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But I'm gonna turn that back on you and say that you just described impassibility as being devoid of dramatic emotional change.

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But that predisposes that there are emotions that could or could not change.

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So I asked the question again, does God have emotions? I thought we did too, but Charlie was arguing with me.

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So I'm just throwing it back at him. Janet? God coldly calculates everything that they do.

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Right. So I'm gonna stand where I was before.

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I'm gonna say God does have emotions. They are fundamentally different from human emotions. And they are eminently undescribable to us, even though we try extremely hard to do so.

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Well, and remember what I said before. And again, I wasn't gonna go into it. If Jesus on the cross was suffering as merely as God dwelling in a man, then it'd be like, eh, whatever.

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I'll get through it. No big deal, right? That's not real suffering, right? And how is it possible that Jesus can relate to us as one closer than a brother if he was just like,

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I'll be back in a couple days, right? That the depth of his suffering makes the cross so much more poignant to us when we look at it and really recognize what's happening, right?

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All right, well, we made it. We're out of time. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we just thank you for this time.

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We thank you for the opportunity to come together and to talk about you, to really study who you are in ways that are truly difficult,

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Lord. As we seek to know you as finite beings, understanding the infinite,

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Lord, we are constantly amazed. We're constantly in awe of you and your glory.

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I just pray that you'd be with us today, that you'd be with us as we worship you and as we praise you and as we give you glory through what we do in this church.