Matt Slick Bible Study on Godly Emotions - 4/19/2017

How about that, test one, two, one, two, three, four, now we're good, all right.

Hey man, it's about time, I'll look, all right, since we only have six people here,

I'll move this thing over, yeah, there we go, all right.

So, since people are now watching, we're coming, since people are watching, not many people show up, that's okay, so what we're gonna do tonight is go over the issue of simply emotions, now the one who asked me to do this a couple of weeks ago, because last week was on vacation, which

I didn't get much vacation time, only my vacation was working 30 hours instead of 60, so that was pretty, we went fishing too, and we got completely skunked, it was fun, didn't even see a fish, hmm, oh just some ponds,

Staten Eagle, a little river, yeah, we knew it, you know, but it was something to do, yeah, it was called fishing, not catching, that's, that's for sure, so at any rate, and my vacation didn't turn out too well, because we had a funeral stuff to do, and some helping some people, and things like that, and you know, you know how it goes, all right, so Stacia asked if I would do something on emotions,

I've been thinking about this for a while, off and on, on the issue of what we're, you know, made in the image of God, we'll go over some of that, and emotions, and I don't have all of this worked out,

I got a lot of notes, and as I started to study this, I realized, as is often the case when

I take a topic, and see what God says about it in the word, what I'll do is, I'll go through, and just, you know, look up anger, look up hate, look up love, look up compassion, and see who, just see how it's done, so today, for example,

I was going through looking up the word made, and formed, because I took a little bit of a tangent, and I started seeing things, discovered some stuff, and when

I do that, I don't have, often, I don't have enough time to put everything in a coherent outline, and that's fine, because it's just an issue of learning, as well, for me, because I'm always learning, all right, so maybe say she'll come in later, hopefully she's okay, but I'm going to tell people now, and online, next week, my plan is to teach an eschatological study,

I've done that before, and I'm going to do a kind of a combined thing, where I'm going to go through a little bit of amillennialism, and then

I'm going to go through what I see in Scripture, the things that are going to take place before Jesus returns, and it's just going to be a depressing study, where things get worse, and worse, and worse, and it's going to be bad, so I believe, in all seriousness, that things are going to get so bad, that if Jesus doesn't come back, the

Christians are going to be murdered everywhere, and we destroy our planet, it could be an economic, not only economic, but biological collapse, death,

I do, I believe it, and I'm going to start in the book of Genesis with that, I've done it before, kind of put things together, but I'm going to do this as a single study, and I'm also interested in some feedback on some issues

I've been thinking about on the issue of marriage, I've done things on marriage before, but I'm thinking about doing a series on the theology of marriage, where I do the biblical basis of marriage, and then do the man's responsibility, the woman's responsibility, and actually have it done up, so that we can film it, and maybe produce a workbook out of it as well, so I'm thinking about doing that, and also one of the things

I want to do, I'm just rambling here for a minute, is I hope to be able to, if anybody wants to do this on the

Karm Amazon wish list, I want to get a projector, and someone has given me a projector, but it's so complicated,

I can't get it to work, and I'm a computer tech, and I need something that's just simple, so I've got one on the

Amazon wish list, and what I want to do, I already have a screen, so that I can then, with a clicker, and computer, and PowerPoint, do a presentation, and just say here's the verses, we can go through,

I want to do that kind of stuff too, that's just down the road, and maybe we'll get a third camera, they can have it on there, you could do that right, a third camera on that, we can swap, switch around for a third camera, probably, probably, and stuff like that, okay, so what

I'm gonna do is get into the emotions, and I do want your feedback too, remember, so people have been letting me know, where they're listening from, and stuff like that, and I appreciate that, all right, so emotions, so I had to write a definition of emotions, and that was really a difficult thing to do, because what is an emotion?

Well, emotion is something you feel, well what's a feeling? It's an emotion, and so we get basically no place, so how about this, what's an emotion, or what are emotions?

Can you close that door, just because the noise, okay, conscious experiences that are not the mental abstractions of logic, or simple choices, but are often accompanied by a subjective feeling, that could be considered pleasant, or unpleasant, so I'm gonna read this again, because it's a little confusing, what are emotions?

Now, this definition I'm giving, is a combination of several definitions, and some other things, that I just put together, emotions, conscious experiences, so it's something that happens in the brain, that are not mental abstractions of logic, so if I were to say, if A equals

B, and B equals C, then A equals C, that's a logical abstraction, but it's not an emotion, so emotions are mental abstractions, but they're not the mental abstractions of logic, or is this somebody making a choice, like I'm going to choose now to do this, and put my paper down, that's a choice, but it doesn't, it's not an emotion, now

I could do it emotionally, and so you know, we can mix things, and so there's these mental abstractions, that are mixed with emotions, and things like, you're already smiling, you like that, when

I do stuff like that, you know, some people just like it, when I get weird, I don't know, they just think it's funny, what's that, why you keep showing up, that's right, you notice my wife doesn't show up, because I think she's tired of my antics, after 30 years of marriage, she's heard it all, and seen it all, so anyway, a conscious experience, emotions, conscious experiences, that are not the mental abstractions of logic, or simple choices, but these experiences are often accompanied by a subjective feeling, that can be considered pleasant or unpleasant, emotions have that value of pleasantness, or unpleasantness with them, so love is generally a pleasant thing, a broken heart is an unpleasant thing, jealousy can be unpleasant, the receiving mercy, and feeling compassion can be a pleasant thing, so we have pleasant, and unpleasant emotions, and I don't know, if we could have any emotion, that would be neutral, in its expression of pleasant or unpleasant,

I don't know, just haven't thought through it enough, all right, so of course, we have biblical examples of emotion, we have anger, and Saul's anger burned against Jonathan, and he said to him, you are son of a perverse, rebellious woman, that's 1st

Samuel 20 30, and so we have examples of all kinds of emotions in the scriptures, we have bitterness, contempt, conviction, disappointment, fear, weeping, we have all kinds of emotions, this is just a short list of what

God has given to us, revealed in the word, okay, so as I like to do, you know,

I want to begin things with the examination of the proper standard of all things, which is God himself, so when we are to discuss the issue of emotions, what we need to do is understand that God has emotions, that we can say he has emotions, because the

Bible says he has emotions, God so loved the world, he gave his only begotten son,

John 3 16, or Psalm 5 5, and Psalm 11 5, where he actually expresses hatred, he definitely does, check this out,

Hosea 11 8, how can I give you up, oh Ephraim, this is God talking, how can

I surrender you, oh Israel, how can I make you like Adma, how can I treat you like Zeboim, my heart is turned over within me, all my compassions are kindled, now this is interesting, because this is the inspired word of God, this is supposed to be

God's word to us, and we understand, of course, that there is anthropomorphisms, so an anthropomorphism, okay,

I hope you can see that on the screen, anthropos, man, morphe, form, so the form of a man, and what that means, an anthropomorphism is that God has expressions of emotions, we're going to get to impassibility here in a little bit, and so he expresses himself with love, and hatred, and anger, and even jealousy, and things like this, and so the question is, are these emotions a condescension?

You know, God lowers himself to our level to communicate, so the divine being,

God, lowers himself and he communicates to us in such a way that we can relate to what it is he's talking about.

Now, this extent of, say, God is love, all right, and that's 1st

John 4, 8, where he, you know, he loves, but what does that mean?

What is that in the heart and in the mind of God? Now, when

I love my wife, for example, I want the best for her, I have a, you know, we've been married 30 years, we've known each other like 40, and so, you know,

I still get this little, just love her, and have that feeling, and I just do after all this time, and I know she isn't about mean,

I don't care, it's all right, because, you know, usually I walk in the room, hey baby, you know, but it's all right, because that's what love is, it's other -centered, you gotta love her.

I'm gonna erase her over here, you know how it is. So what she said I do, it was over, and then

I didn't have to put my socks away anymore, and belching was permitted. She still said it isn't, but I know it is.

So first John 4 .8. Okay, so when God loves, he does it perfectly.

So what I'm gonna do is build a little case for something. He loves perfectly.

I don't love perfectly. I'm not capable of loving perfectly. I don't believe anybody in this room is, or anybody watching, unless it's

God watching, I don't believe anybody is capable of loving perfectly. Now what does that mean, for example, in love?

Well here, you know, it's the Greek word agape, from agabao, and so we have this thing, you know, love.

Okay, and most people say agape is divine love. Don't go with that. It's utterly committed, given over to, kind of a love, because the

Pharisees loved the high seats. I think that's Luke 11, either 53 or 51, but nevertheless,

God loves, but he does so perfectly. His love is really interesting, because it's not alone.

What we often do, as people, is we will talk about love.

Now I was talking to somebody on the phone today, and he said that he was talking to a pastor a while back, and the pastor's sermon was basically mamby -pamby, mediocre crap, and so he lovingly went to the pastor and said, and said, look, you know,

I thank you for preaching, but he had this criticism. He said, your sermon was not very, he says,

I don't know how to say this, biblical. The issues that the text that you read, you didn't even go into, and you talked about love, which was good, but you missed the truths, and you weren't talking about Jesus has the only way, because you were saying there are other ways, and this is a problem.

And so he, you know, obviously it was a heresy the pastor was teaching, and he told me, he said that the pastor said, look, you're taking the

Bible too seriously. What we want to focus on is love. We want to focus on love, and that's what we want to do.

Now, so if, let's see if I could do this, if we have a scale, you know, let's see how to do this, right?

Whoops, messed up. Okay, we have a scale, right?

And we want a balance of things. We don't want an imbalance.

If we were to put love here, what happens is this thing just cranks down here, and nothing is here to counter it, counterbalance it.

Now what do I mean by that? Love is a good thing, but it can't be alone, because with love we must have other things.

We must have stuff like this. We must have wisdom.

With love, we've got to be wise in how we are to be loving and be other -centered. We need to be patient, because sometimes we can be loving too quickly and harm someone by giving them what they want.

We're not wise in our patience. Love is also, by nature, gracious, so it needs to have grace associated with it.

But also, here's something else that a lot of people are not interested in anymore.

Truth. So love must be accompanied with truth.

And if we were to have love, and if we're to have truth, and we're to have grace, and we're to have patience, and we're to have wisdom, the effect here is a balance, a harmony between things.

If we were to take one attribute, one issue, and we were to focus on it alone, then what happens is other things get sacrificed.

In the case of the illustration of what I was talking about today, and what seems to be largely happening in the church in a lot of areas, is love is elevated so much that truth is sacrificed.

You can't be loving without being truthful. Now there's wisdom in how to be truthful.

My wife comes out with a particularly new hairstyle. What do you think of this, honey?

How does it look? It's different.

You know, okay, she'll say, no, I want you to tell me the truth. What do you think? Well, you see, when you walked out, I was like,

I don't think it's really good. Now she can handle that kind of thing with me, okay, but the thing is that we're going to be, you know, truthful.

I'm not going to say, well, you look like you just got out of a zombie festival, and look like some birds had a big fight in your hair, and one of them's stuck in there still.

You know, so I don't know. Are you going to go out like that? You know, there's wisdom. You don't want to say something like that to your wife, but I am good at this.

What I'm really good at with my wife is this. That's the slow motion version of ducking, okay, when things are thrown at me.

All right, so with love, we have, as an example, we need to be balancing it with truth.

Now, I think that truth is something that we all need to study, because where do we get truth? We get truth from the

Bible. We are sacrificing truth for these things, like love or compassion, right, and the more

I think about this, the more I'm thinking they all need to be connected to truth.

Truth is what we need. Truth is what we have to have, because with truth, these things, well, are balanced.

Not that having them by themselves is an imbalance. It's just that what we do is we tend to go too much on one thing.

We tend to focus on one thing. Notice what God is. God is love, no problem, but God is also jealous.

God also gets angry. People will say to me, how could a loving God send anybody to hell?

Well, I'd say to them, God is not only loving, but he's also just. He's also holy.

Now, here's the thing. If you have a diamond, and this diamond has many facets, many edges to it, and you take a light and you shine through, you're going to see a multitude of colors.

You're going to see a multitude of stuff, but if you only look at one of the facets and one of the reflections, then you're going to get an imperfect understanding of what that diamond is.

The same thing is here. This is what the world is focusing on to the exclusion of things like God's holiness and justice, and because of this, what they're doing is now defining love in an unbiblical way, because if you're going to have truth, it has to come from the

Bible. Love has to be understood biblically, and if you don't have all of these as in a revelation of God, you will not know what true love really is.

So, for example, we have an immigration problem. Illegals are coming over.

Now, people say, don't talk politics. Just listen. Should we be loving and have people come in?

Of course we should. Should we be loving and have everybody in any country just come in?

That's loving, right? No. Why? Because, well, we've got to issue wisdom, because we know that people are bad.

So, how about this? I think because we're so loving, we should invite the ISIS people. Just come into our country.

We'll give you homes. We'll give you cars. That's loving, and obviously, that's way out of balance.

We know that, well, we can't trust certain people. Well, that's the truth of what it is, and just because we're loving doesn't mean we can't be truthful.

So, what we need is to have truth and wisdom with the emotions that we are going to exemplify.

We're just using love as an example here, because it's something we most often relate to. The world wants us to be loving.

The world will often beat up the Christian. You're not loving enough. You're too judgmental. You're this. You're that.

You have no compassion. The world will try and lecture us about what true love is, and I say, no, you don't even know what true love is.

It's other -centeredness, but it's with wisdom and godliness and patience and kindness, and you don't even know what it is, and you use it like a whip to try and get people to bow to what you want in your liberal agenda, which lacks truth, which lacks grace, which lacks patience, and which lacks wisdom.

The way of the world is to elevate one thing, and they do it apart from God, because they don't need him.

They don't want God, so their definition of love is man -centered, and that's the problem.

Man -centered love is the definition of love on a human level, and human level definition is just let people do what they want.

Just do not much. Just open our borders. Just let's tax the crap out of everybody.

You have too much money. We need to be loving and distribute it to everybody. Love without wisdom and truth leads to all kinds of things, like socialism, communism, liberalism, idiocy, wackiness, because they want to use this as a euphemism, this love, and then what they do is they use it in such an ungodly way that what they're doing is supplanting what true love really is.

Okay, I kind of digress a little bit, so let me continue. We are made in the image of God, all right?

We have communicable and non -communicable attributes, and what this means is that some of the attributes that God has, we can have.

God loves, we can love. God hates, we can hate. God thinks, we can think. God's omniscient, but we are not.

God's omnipotent, but we are not. Some things God gives to us, we can communicate. We can understand them. All right, so God has perfect emotions.

His emotions are perfect, and the reason his emotions are perfect is because they're consistent with his nature, and his nature is holy.

His nature is holy, which means no sin, no unrighteousness, but also his nature is omniscient, the omnis, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent.

He has complete knowledge of all things that are consistent with his holiness, and his emotions exist within himself, and then he communicates to us in a condescending way, and not in a negative condescending, but it's a lower himself to our level, and the reason we have emotions is because we're made in the image of God, and he has emotions, all right?

We're made in his image. Genesis 126.

So God's emotions, now here's the thing I want you to get. All of God's emotions, no matter what we were to list, anger, love, compassion, mercy, whatever we might say, all of them are simultaneously proper and perfect within God all the time, so that there is no imbalance of one above another, and that's what we do in our idolatrous procedures, is we will find something in God that we want, and we'll elevate a particular emotion because it suits our needs.

That's not wise, and it's not something that lends us towards truth.

Our tendency in our emotions is to go overboard, so I'll use my wife and I as an example.

We've been married 30 years, and we've had our problems, and I've been angry with her, and she's been angry with me, okay?

People are married, we're sinners, so anger.

Anger is not a sin. God gets angry, and he says,

I forgot where, be angry, but do not sin. I can be angry against heresy, which is a good thing.

I can be angry at my wife because she, I don't know, did something

I didn't like, whatever, doesn't make any difference, you know how things are, and so there's righteous anger, and there's unrighteous anger, but I can be angry because I made an image of God.

Now also, I can love, so I can love my wife in a godly way.

I can open the door for her. I can give her my paycheck, which is what she gets, all my paychecks.

I can be long -suffering when she is sick, when sometimes she's, let's just say, a little moody about something for no reason

I don't understand because she's a girl, and so I can try and be loving to her, but I can also be loving in a bad way because I can demand from her to be reciprocal in my love to her.

I'm loving to you, but you're not loving to me. Is that loving? No. It's a form of legalism.

Have I ever done that? Yeah, hate to admit it, but yeah, so the thing is that what

I will do, and maybe you guys are the same way, is

I will do one of these at a time, and I will tend to do them to an excess.

I don't know how you guys are, but because I've asked burgers, I'll just do things like excessively, like focus on one thing at a time, and so I can be very angry.

I can be at home going, and this is what we do.

When we focus on one, and we divest it from what it's related to in the totality of emotions, and we divest it from the issue of truth that's found in God's Word, that's when these things become wrong.

Emotions aren't bad. Emotions are good. Emotions, however, must be understood in the context of God's nature.

God's nature is that he is kind, and patient, and merciful, and long -suffering, and wise, and all -knowing, and all -powerful, and sacrificial, and all of these things are perfect within God, and he doesn't elevate one attribute that he has above another, and then judge all things by this one thing.

He's complete, and he's completely whole, totally forever, and so therefore he manifests these things and everything in between perfectly and properly.

We don't, and the reason we don't is because we don't have all knowledge. We don't have all the ability to be able to be complete in the areas that we are.

We're going to add sin into the mix. We're going to mess it up, and this is one of the things.

Now because, you know, as I mentioned I have Asperger's, I don't need, I don't need to have,

I got another one of those in there if you've been rummaged through it, and there's one in the car too. I don't need as many as emotional connections as most people do.

Seriously, it's just one of the diagnoses of Asperger's, and which for those who don't know, it's just a social deficiency thing.

I do really well because I started body language, and I've learned how to to cope. I'm very humble about it because I'm so good at it, everything like that.

Okay, so I don't need as much emotional stimulation as a lot of people do.

I just don't. Okay, fine. My wife, you know, she has those things called chick flicks.

I don't understand those things. Women, they will, they go, chick flicks are where a bunch of girls are in a room talking about some guy, and in the same sentence he's both good and bad and handsome and ugly all at the same time, and then they have this secret language they talk to each other about.

Then they change topics and are back on the other thing, and everybody knows it. Then when they're done talking there, they move to another room and do some more of the same thing, and then another room, and another room, and then the credits roll.

It's no guy gets that. Okay, it's not just an Asperger's thing, and so that's what

I understand a chick flick to be. There's no explosions, no abductions, no screaming, no machine gun stuff.

What's the purpose? I don't get it. So, you know, doesn't make sense to me.

But, you know, anyway, throw a good alien in there and you're good. Actually, I had a discussion with, what's the,

Frank Peretti on my radio show a few years ago. You know, Frank Peretti, the

Christian author, written all these books, and so he's supposed to be on my show for 15 minutes. He and I just hit it off. We did the whole show, and finally, he's sold like millions of books, millions of them, and I said, you know,

I said, Frank, I got some writing advice for you. And he pauses. Really? I said, yeah.

Yeah. He goes, really? What is it? I said, well, if you just add explosions and car chases, everything's better.

And, you know, so he got a kick out of it. He goes, yeah, that's right. Anyway, we're talking about that, but that's how guys are.

Okay, so what we tend to do, get back on track, what we tend to do is focus too much on one thing.

When the world does that, it does what it wants, the way it wants, not in godliness.

And so what it does is it abuses what true emotions really are.

It abuses it. The only way to have true emotions in a godly way is to be on your knees praying and have the

Word of God guide you in how you are to be. So one of the things, for example, and I use this example, this is no joke.

My wife and I had some marriage problems early on, and I was in seminary, and I wanted her to basically be gone when

I got home. I didn't love her anymore. I didn't care about her anymore. I was hoping she just kind of like, gone, bye, see ya.

I didn't care. And I was going to seminary to be a minister to learn how to teach people about God's love.

And I wanted her basically out of my life because I didn't love her anymore. And I saw the hypocrisy, and I saw the inconsistency, and realized

I needed some help. So long story short, was in a counseling office with a professor from seminary, and I said to him, my wife is right here, and I said to him,

I don't love her anymore. I don't want to be married to her anymore, and you know,

I don't want her to commit adultery, because I didn't want her to sin, but if she had, I'd be able to divorce her, and I'd be free to go serve

God. It'd be so, you know, loopy. And he looked at me, and he said, what do you think love has to do with being married?

And that shocked me. I've talked about this before. And what he was doing was explaining to me what biblical love was.

Biblical love is not just a feeling. Biblical love is a commitment, a decision of long -suffering, where you have someone else, and that person's heart, that person's safety, that person's well -being as the motive for the glory of God, obviously.

This guy started reading me the Riot Act, and over the next few minutes, just totally changed me, because he was right, and I was wrong.

And what I had been doing was actually listening to the world's view of love.

So, you know, while C, for example, which I think is just incredibly bad.

Husband and wife on TV, in a movie, whatever, and they have a problem, they get separated. And right away, they are committing adultery.

They're going to bed with somebody else, because we're separated, so it's okay. No commitment, no truth of their covenant.

It's just, it's okay for us too, because we're having a problem, let's go out and commit adultery.

It's okay, adultery is okay, because we're separated. You know, this is the way of the world.

Its view of love is conditional. Its view of love is weak. I could do this with the issues of anger, and mercy, and how these things, these attributes, or these qualities in the world are ungodly, and how they're bastardized by the secularists.

And then, they shove them down our throat to tell us what truth is. And then the true person of who love is,

Jesus Christ, like there's, I know, I haven't watched it yet, but going on on TV, it's stuff attacking the person of Jesus, as is always the case.

Why? Because perfect love is not something the world wants, because it's too convicting.

It's too convicting. All right, so I'm going to introduce a concept to you, and we'll talk about some heady stuff.

And I won't be able to make too much sense of it, unless I stumble upon the right sentences.

So, here's a word, impassibility.

No, it doesn't mean in the diamond lane you can't turn on the left. Okay, impassibility.

The impassibility of God. So, does God have emotions?

Yes, because he says he does. He grieves, he loves, he hates. He says so, so we say he has emotions.

Now, if I were to, my friend Nathan here, I could piss him off. I could say something about his wife, which

I would never do in a negative way, and make him angry. So, I could affect him by what

I say. Of course, I made him mad for some other reasons. Yeah, my brother, you know, my brother,

I love him. I'll do stuff, and I'll just tweak these guys. You know, my brother, he goes, you're getting close, you're getting real close.

And so, like, oh good, okay, getting close. How close? Like, yo, we're getting closer now. So, I can affect people, and you can be affected by emotions, right?

Now, here's a question. Can God be affected by our emotions?

Let's think about this a little bit. Can God be affected by our emotions? Well, what does it mean to be affected by our emotions?

By our actions, by our dealings. So, if I were to take my chalk and throw it at Nathan, he's gonna react, catch it, or whatever.

It might go things like, he didn't see it coming. Probably wouldn't be what he'd do, but, you know,

I can affect him, all right? I used to put a camera on him while he's going, you're getting close.

So, I can affect him, and I also have this habit of affecting people with humor.

Try and joke around, tell them really bad jokes, and things like that, and try and get people to understand, and they're affected.

Okay, we got that. Can God be affected? Now, I would say yes and no, because no, from eternity, from eternity,

God knew I would do something stupid, right now, right? On this day, at this time, that's a clock, okay?

At this time, he knew I could do something really stupid. That, you know, would be, that was you, that's good.

That's okay. So, or cameras do something really stupid, and at this point, so, if I were to commit a grave sin, you know, if I were to commit adultery, what if I were to lie?

Just think, I'll just do something like lying. Say I were to lie, does that,

I'm gonna use this word, does it make God sad? Now, I mean the word sad in a generic, general sense of a negative kind of expression and feeling, all right?

Just generic. So, if I were to sin, right here, this is me, this is back when

I was 19. I weighed 117 pounds. Now, it's more like this, but so, is

God affected from eternity? How can he be affected from eternity if he ordained what

I would do? Because you see, we have in Ephesians 1 .11,

all right? God works all things after the counsel of his will. If all things are ordained from him by, from forever ago, when

I commit my sin now, can he be saddened by what he's ordained that I will do?

He didn't cause me to sin, but it's within the will of God, permissively, that I sin.

So, therefore, when I do sin, is he saddened by that? Well, how could he be saddened from eternity if he's known, and he's not planned it, but within his sovereign grace, his sovereign plan, he allowed that.

So, when it does happen, is he affected? Well, logically, at that point, we'd say, well, of course not, because that's what's ordained.

How could he, you know, God ordained it, and then it happens, and he goes, oh, man, I didn't think I was going to be so sad when it happened.

Now, let's look at the open theist. Open theist would say that. Open theism says that God doesn't know everything in the future, okay?

And you can actually go to the God of the open theist and say, hey, did you hear the one about...and he'll go, no. Okay, or what does the

God of open theism say a lot? Okay. So, we could see that with, you know, a

God who doesn't know all things. But on the other hand, on the other hand, God says he's grieved when we sin.

I have verses here. God shows...let's

see, where's the other...here we go. God has compassion. Genesis 19 .16,

but he hesitated, so the man seized his hand, and the hand of his wife, and the hands of his two daughters, for the compassion of the

Lord was upon him. Or grief, Genesis 6 .6,

and the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth. Or hate, the boastful shall not stand before your eyes, you hate all who do iniquity,

Psalm 5 .5. Joy, Nehemiah 8 .10, do not be grieved, for the joy of the

Lord is your strength. Or love, John 3 .16, God's love of the world. Isaiah 6 .2

.5, for as a young man marries a virgin, so your sons will marry you. And as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so your

God will rejoice over you. How can God rejoice from all eternity?

Now, can he be affected? Well, if we were to say, in the impassibility of God, no effect.

That's one of the ways it's understood, that he is not affected in any way that brings him suffering, because suffering is something

I can experience. My wife could leave me. My wife could, it may never happen, but pass away.

It would be very, very grievous, and I would suffer greatly. And it would be an emotional suffering.

We've had physical suffering, we've had emotional suffering. I don't know which one's worse. I've had some pretty bad suffering from both of them.

Boy, I've got stories. Can God suffer? Because grief, we would say the suffering emotions would be grief, sorrow, right?

Those two, for example, those are suffering things for us and in us to some degree.

I think grief brings more suffering than sorrow. What about this?

Guilt. Now, I hate feeling guilty because it causes me a lot of grief.

I'm suffering in my guilt. I got stories about that as well. So, we know that God grieves.

We know that God has sorrow, but God does not have guilt. So, he's not going to express that. He does rejoice, and he does have sorrow, okay?

I get verses for that, but nevertheless. So, can

God suffer? That's the question. Well, what do

I mean by suffering? You're really making me suffer through this by having to talk about this.

Well, what I like to say is from eternity, God can't be affected by what we do because he's ordained whatsoever shall come to pass after the will that he's ordained,

Ephesians 111. He's not surprised by anything, but I do think that there's an actual sense, this is my opinion, an actual sense in which

God expresses negative emotions or goes through a form of suffering because he says he grieves.

It says he has sorrow, and I'm not going to sit here in a philosophical sense and try and say, well, actually what it probably means if you look at it from the holistic methodology of the humanistic position.

I'm not going to do that. He just says he does. So, he can be affected. How does that work out?

I don't know. He doesn't tell me because I don't know how it works in the scriptures because he is immutable.

He's impassable, but yet he's affected by what we do in real time, but yet he's not surprised by it.

So, how can he suffer if he's not surprised and he ordained it, but yet we do it? I'm not exactly sure, and there's debates about this that goes on within Christian circles.

I don't think anybody, any particular idea or any particular person has the right answer except God himself, and he hasn't disclosed it to us.

I think what we need to do is just keep it safe and say God tells us he grieves, and we know that grief is a subcategory of some form of suffering, but we wouldn't say that God suffers in a sense that would imply his insufficiency, but we would say or could say probably that his grieving of our sin is simply his expression to us on a level that we can understand, and so we have to by faith say that's what he says.

We don't understand how he can do that in light of his omniscience, omnipotence, he works all things, but he doesn't tell us.

It's okay not to have an answer to that. I think that's a safe position to be, and so this issue of impassibility of God is an important one, and it's worth lots of discussions, and I was working on an article on this a while back, and I forgot that I was, and I started working on it today again, and oh there it is.

I was reading through it. I had the same issues that I'm talking about now were coming up through the article because there's subdivisions of how you can analyze things, so I'm trying to find a way to communicate it in an article that's not so stinking deep where I need five layers of philosophical analysis per view.

I don't need that, don't want that, but I know this. God loves me.

I know this, that he was saddened at the sins of the world in Genesis 6 when people were rebelling.

I know that he doesn't want us to sin. He says he grieves.

It says he has compassion. It says he's he's got jealousy. It actually talks about him having joy, and these things are actually in reactions to us.

How does that work? I don't know. Above my pay grade, he hasn't told me, so I don't have to worry about it.

Now, what about our our emotions? Go back to this.

Women have, generally speaking, more emotions than guys, or let's just say they utilize their emotions more than we do.

They will go through a set of emotions more than what we will, generally speaking.

I have seen my wife be compassionate to a level that I can only theorize by observing.

I've seen her be patient and kind with our children in situations that would have,

I'm sorry, I would have velcroed them to the ceiling and left, and she is just beyond my ability to understand how she can be so good with her emotions in so many ways, and those are great strengths, but I think they can also be weaknesses.

We fall on our strengths as well as our weaknesses. So, you know, I think we need a balance of a dad. So, let the kids stay out in the rain.

He'd bring his kid home from school. Let them suffer. I know it's raining cats and dogs. That's all right.

Mom's like, no, you can let them in the house. You can't get a cold. Who cares if it gets a cold? You know, we go to one side.

We go, we need a balance in between, and that's fine. I've used velcro a lot and duct tape, but my wife, she just takes the exact.

Please, can you stop that? There have been so many times when

I've expressed emotions in an ungodly way. Usually, they're accompanied by pride.

My ungodly emotions are accompanied by pride because with pride, humility disappears.

When we're humble, we tend to be more compassionate, and so we'll find that our emotions are often interconnected and come in clusters.

So, we might have humility, and with humility, you might have patience, which is an attitude.

We might be more merciful. These are like a cluster of emotions, but if I'm prideful,

I might be angry because I'm self -righteous, and with that comes an attitude of judgment and often bitterness and resentment.

Come on. So, we could say this is a cluster of emotions that are kind of associated with each other, and where one is, you know, others are nearby usually, but it's the same thing with here with humility, patience, mercy, kindness, love, forgiveness.

These are like a cluster of emotions. Well, no single emotion exists by itself.

When we express one, we're choosing to express several, generally speaking.

This is not natural for us. This is natural for us, and God warns us about these.

God is the one who can be angry without sin, and he's not self -righteous.

He just is righteous. There is no bitterness with him and no resentment, but we can have these, and these things are emotions,

I would say, that we can have that God does not. So, you still see me over here?

All right. So, what are some emotions that we have that God does not? All right.

Lust. Covetousness. What would be some other ones here?

I have a bunch. Envy. Yeah, I have envy.

Oh, yeah. Here we go. I'm gonna put that one in there. Envy. How about this one?

Greed. Well, how about this one? Conviction of sin.

We can all possess these. God doesn't. Well, where do they come from?

These are imperfections in us due to our sin, due to our fault, due to our total depravity.

Sin has touched all of what we are, so we lust, we covet, we're envious, we're greedy, we can be convicted.

Conviction isn't an emotion, and that's something that God does to us. God is not convicted of sin.

God is not greedy. He's not envious. He's not covetous. He doesn't lust.

We actually possess emotions that God doesn't in that sense. Now, someone might want to come up and say, well, these might be, um, let's see, corruptions of proper.

God could be angry, and so maybe envy is a degradation of anger, you know, or greed is, um, you know, he could be merciful, kind, forgiving.

Maybe, you know, you just have, I don't know, I'm just thinking about it. I didn't have time to go through it, but greed might be, um, a corruption of some other quality or attribute of God that we have.

I don't know. I have to think about that, but something to think about. But nevertheless, we're guilty of these and these, and we should be guilty of those.

I want to read something in Ephesians, the last couple, three verses, and we've got a few minutes before we stop.

Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you along with malice.

Be kind to one another, tender -hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you.

That's Ephesians 4, 31 and 32. Let bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you.

When someone sins against us, what often happens is this.

So, let's say someone sins against us, and because of it, we are resentful, and the resentment leads to bitterness.

The bitterness leads to anger. Anger leads to murder, because we murder people in our hearts.

So, sin, when someone sins against us, we can be resentful for that. If it's not dealt with here, it leads to bitterness.

If it's not dealt with here, it leads to anger. If it's not dealt with here, it leads to murder. In some cases, actual murder.

In most other cases, emotional, intentional murder. And so, what

Paul says, let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor be gone from you. Now, he goes right to here.

I think resentment is something, you know, it's not a psychologically precise whatever, but the idea here is these things lead here when we don't look to the cross.

You see, when we look to that cross, and I see that someone has sinned against me, someone has sinned against me,

I'm now resentful, and then that's going to lead to bitterness. But in order for me to break this,

I now have to look to here. By doing this, I take my eyes off of here, and I realize that my sin that I have been sinned against is actually a manifestation of my sin against him.

And if I am going to be resentful, then ought not he be resentful to me.

I don't want God to resent me. I don't want God any bitter towards me.

I don't want him to be angry towards me. Definitely don't want that. And I don't want him to take me out because he can do it.

You are done. So, in order for me to break this, sometimes you don't realize you're resentful.

Something happens, we have emotions, and we go through this for a while, and then we realize, wait a minute,

I'm anger. I'm angry. How'd I get to angry so fast? Because we're so comfortable with resentment and bitterness that we don't recognize them.

Anger is a more powerful emotion. We recognize them. And so this is when, generally with me, this is when

I go, okay, I need to look here. And because of it, I have to go back and review my issues here in my own heart.

And then I do what I can. Forgive. And I'll do that a hundred times on the same issue.

Lord, I thought I forgave her. Thought I forgave him. But I guess I didn't.

You know, we've all got issues. I've got some stuff with my mom and dad. I moved 26 times before I was 12 years old.

I went to 12 different elementary schools. Dad was an alcoholic. He finally beat it in his later years.

My mom was raised during the depression and had to go out and get food in the fields, eating whatever she could find in the field.

But her father abandoned her. So my mom and dad had some real issues. And I grew up with that.

And you know what? I have a lot of resentment. And because of its bitterness, it made me angry.

And judgmental. What I've had to do over the years is learn how to forgive.

Learn how to be patient. Learn how to be kind. And say, what would I have done in their situation?

Oh, I would have been much better. Really? And I look here.

So they weren't perfect. I'm not. But he loves me anyway.

Therefore, I'm to love them anyway. The people who have sinned against me, I'm to love.

I'm to forgive. That's the proper use of emotions. Both to glorify

God. I'm going to go a little bit more than an hour here. To bring glory to God. Because that's what emotions are supposed to do.

Glorify God. And with man, our fellow man, to express that glory to people.

Now, how does that work? If I'm going to glorify God, I'm going to be forgiving.

I'm going to forgive. I'm going to love. I'm going to be patient, gracious, etc.

This is only possible because of the cross. The only reason I can be forgiving and loving and patient and gracious is because of what

Jesus has done for me on the cross. So my emotions, hopefully, bring glory to God when

I include the cross. And that's the reason. So if I'm going to be angry, let me be angry at the heresies and the lies of the enemy that get in the way of the truth of the gospel.

If I am going to be sinned against, I need to learn how to express the same forgiveness to them that I have been forgiven.

This glorifies God. And so in order to glorify God, I have to express that to people.

You can't love God without loving people. Because a lot of people want to love

God, but they don't want to love the people. They want to have God work with them, but they don't want to do it by dealing with people.

And so what we see is because of this thing, this cross here, this cross, that cross is the reason we're able to glorify

God. And that's why we're able to express the glory that we do God and love, forgiveness, patience, grace, and all that to people as well.

We're supposed to be doing that. That's what we're obligated to do with our emotions, to give glory to God and to love people.

So God, Jesus himself says, love God, love your neighbor. Matthew 22, 37 -39. He says, love

God and love your neighbor. This is the expression of true emotions.

We're running out of time. We are out of time, but I could say, I could talk about how love encompasses all of these other things to a degree because of the nature of other -centeredness.

Love cannot be unforgiving. True love can't be unforgiving or impatient or ungracious.

True love can't. But it will also be wise and truthful.

And so, you know, it's a really interesting topic to me anyway, because I see how it interrelates.

But here's the thing, I'm gonna leave with this, is the cross is the reason that we're able to love

God, and the cross is the reason we're able to love people. And our emotions that are an expression of God working through us and us being made in his image are going to be, let's just say, expressed in good ways or bad ways.

The more we do this and have our eyes here, the less we're going to be resentful, bitter, angry, and murderous.

And the more we have our eyes here, the more we're going to be forgiving, loving, impatient, and grace. We have these emotions here.

God can't be bitter. He can't be envious. He can't be greedy. These are part of the effects of our sinfulness.

But we can express these because Christ is in us. So when we're here, we need to consider this cross that puts a barrier here and stops, hopefully, this from occurring in us.

This is the idea. It's not easy, but it's true. The cross is where we have to keep our eyes.

The cross, the blood of Christ, the forgiveness of Christ, the work of Christ, the expression of the love of God in the person and work of Christ.

That gives us the ability to use our emotions properly to bring glory to him and, hopefully, use our emotions properly to bring glory to him while we're loving others, while we're expressing mercy and grace to others as well.

That's what godly emotion is. That's what true emotions really are to be, for the glory of God and the love of man and expression of man and not in judgment and condemnation and the sinful aspects of bitterness, anger, and murder and things like that.

Okay? All right. Let me pray. We'll close. Take a break. We'll get back on and do

Q &A. Lord, I thank you for this time and I ask, Lord, that you would just be merciful to us and that your love and your kindness and your grace would shine upon us and that we would respond,

Lord, with the same. That we would express adoration and thankfulness to you, but also learn how to express it to others.

It's difficult because we are encased in sinfulness, but yet,

Lord, we struggle against it and we do so because of your great work in us and the glory that you have bestowed through the cross that we might be able to then seek you and emulate your good, good emotions.

Thank you, Lord, for loving us and saving us. And we ask all this,