None Greater (part 8)

So this morning, I thought I'd do something a little fun for a review. We're going to do a little review quiz. Hope you're ready. But this week, how I'm going to do this is I'm going to recite the question that Barrett asks as the title of each chapter.

So if you've actually been reading the book, you might have seen that each chapter title is a question that is then answered by one of God's attributes, right? So I'm going to ask the question. And you can raise your hand, and you can reply with yes or no, what the answer is to the question, because they're all yes or no questions.

And then name the attribute that is the reason for why it's yes or no. OK? Ready? It's not too hard, I promise. There's only four. For all the weeks we've been doing this, we've actually gotten only through four of them.

So Andrew and I are on standard BBC pace, right? OK. Can we know, number one, can we know the essence of God? Can we know the essence of God? Yes or no? What's the attribute? No. But I appreciate that you still went out on a limb for us there, Raleigh.

Thank you. Yes, Janet? No. No. Very good. All right. What's the attribute? Attribute. Why can we not know the essence of God? Yes, Janet? Yes. Incomprehensibility. That's the biggest word from this morning, so it's all downhill from here, OK?

Incomprehensibility, right? We cannot know the essence of God. Why can't we know the essence of God? Yes. Why are we stupid, though, at least relative to God? Right. Right. We're finite. He's not. Almost by definition, anything that is finite cannot possibly fully comprehend something that is infinite, right?

And since God is the only infinite one, he is the only one who can comprehend himself, OK? All right, number two. Does God depend on you? Yes or no? No. Taylor says no. Why, Taylor? What's the attribute?

It's the Latin word. Brawley? Yes, aseity, but close enough. We'll take it. Aseity. Aseity. From himself is what that Latin term means, from himself. God doesn't depend on you. God doesn't depend on anything, anything at all, right?

He is totally self-sufficient, totally self-existent, totally self-attesting. All right, number three. Is God made up of parts? No. Very good, Brawley. Why? Simple, yes, simplicity. Simplicity. That's Dave Smith's favorite attribute so far.

All right, and then last, number four, and that's also again this week. It was last week, and it's going to be again this week. Does God change? No. Yes, why not? Immutability. Immutability. And that was last week, immutability.

And as promised last week, we're going to further plumb the depths of that attribute today. Now, if you remember or if you have your worksheet from last week, if you still kept it in your bag, you'll know that when we speak of God not changing, what about him does not change?

What about him does not change? We went through a whole list from Packer, J .I. Packer, although there's a similar list that Barrett has in the book. What about God does not change? First off, he doesn't grow or age.

And we said that's his life is not changing. He does not grow or age. He also, his attitude, his heart, his temperament, they are the same today as they were any time. The same as they were in Bible times, especially we were focused on.

But really, it's true that any time, he is the same. That's his character not changing. Also, his promises, his demands, his statements of purpose, his words of warning all remain valid because his truth, his word does not change.

Another one was that he doesn't try anything new. He doesn't pilot anything. He deals with his creatures as he always has dealt with them because his ways do not change. His ways are immutable. And then last, and this is when we're going to be really crucial to our further discussion this week, is his purpose doesn't change.

Because what he planned from the beginning, that is what he has done, is doing, and is always going to do, and will do. His purposes do not change. Now, we could state it. And in fact, if I remember right, as I was calling out and asking folks to do the worksheet, by the way, there are worksheets on the stools again this week, if you didn't pick one up on the way in.

We could state that his plans do not change, right? Purposes, plans. Very similar synonyms, right? That his plans do not change. Because God has had the same plan for history and the same plan for salvation, the same plan for how he's going to deal with us and how he deals with us now.

Now, we live in time. We live in time. And so in time, we see a progression. We see steps of that plan as they unfold. We see, for example, we could say that the calling of Abraham was step one, that Exodus was step two, that the Davidic covenant might have been step three, that the incarnation of Jesus is step four.

I mean, don't quote me on this. I'm not trying to lay out a new theology of what the steps exactly are. But there's a sequence there of steps that we're experiencing in time. But that doesn't mean that God is changing as the plan goes or changing the plan as the plan goes from step two to step three, right?

In eternity past, the plan. But we experience the plan as it unfolds. The plan is still the plan, all right? So we're going to get into that quite a bit as we go through. Because today, I promised that while last week we sort of focused on the joys to really understand immutability and what it means to us, especially as Christian believers, and why immutability is such a source of rejoicing for us, of thankfulness for us, this week we're going to talk about questions about immutability, challenges to it, to figure out the things that you might hear, or apologetics, basically, around immutability.

Now, what analogy did we spend most of our time on last week? We read a lot of verses about. The analogy that the Bible uses to explain God's immutability more than any other. That he's a rock, right?

That he's a rock. And what about a rock lines up with immutability? What were the things, what are the good parts of the analogy? We thought of, we were thinking about what rocks are like, right? What is God like?

How is he like a rock? How is his immutability like a rock? A rock is hard to change, yes. Unmoving. Right. Right, yeah. They live in an area with big rocks. They didn't have John Deere tractors. It was also a very arid place, so there wasn't really even a lot of erosion going on.

Right? So to them, rocks especially seemed to exist, they certainly outlasted a generation, right? So for multiple generations, the rock was still there, the same rock, right? Exceeding the lifespan of the people.

The rock itself not really changing. What else about the rock with his immutability? Yes, Janet? Right, yes. A safety, because David very often would say like, my rock and my fortress, right? All in one sentence, as we read a lot of those different psalm examples, that as a rock, that he's spending his time in these caves all the time, and so he's just got this poetically on his mind, and he brings it out in the notion that rock is strength.

And not just any kind of strength, but like a constant, unyielding strength. You can't, especially back then, since like we said, they don't have the John Deere tractors, you couldn't overcome a rock, right?

Yes, Andrew? That's right. A little bit of wood, but yeah, mostly rock. Yep. Build it out of brick, yeah. So those are the good parts of the analogy. But here's where we're gonna pick up this week, and it's question number one on your worksheet.

Because as Barrett tells us in chapter six, the metaphor of a rock can only be pushed so far. The metaphor of a rock can only be pushed so far. We mentioned a little bit last week, of course, that there are, we already know that in real life, real rocks do change a little bit.

Right, even though they seem like they're not changing. If we go down, even down to say, a place like Purgatory Chasm where the rocks are huge, and they seem like they've been there forever, with our modern instrumentation, we can go down there, we can measure very accurately, and we can detect the slight changes in the shape and the sizes of the rock over time as erosion, wind and water do their work, right, on the rocks.

And I can take a rock with a strong enough hammer or a strong enough tool, and I can split rocks, I can shape rocks, I can put them in tumblers and smooth them out, right, all that kind of stuff. So, there's, so we talked about that, but today, what also is bad about rocks, and it gets to our first question, is that if we pushed the analogy too far about God as a rock, we might start to think that if God is immutable, then he must be, he needs to be in order to be immutable, totally inert, totally static.

Immobile, even dead, like a rock, just totally, completely unchanging. So, that's the first question we're gonna ask today about immutability, which is, is God rigidly immobile? Because, I mean, taken to an extreme, I myself, right here, I am changing ever so much every time I open my mouth and shut my mouth, or by moving over here, I have changed, right?

Or really, by any other kind of expending of energy, right, my body is changing, my person is changing in some way. But, stop and think for a moment. Does the Bible ever give you any kind of hint that God is not doing anything?

Do you ever get the sense, reading your Bible, that God is not doing anything right now? No, right? In fact, quite the opposite. The whole point of the Bible, the great overarching narrative, is that God is very busy, all the time, executing his plans according to his purposes.

So, when God tells us, in the Bible, I am the Lord, I change not, in Matthew, I am the Lord, I change not, in Malachi. We, once again, have to recognize that when he uses words like that, he's condescending to us.

Do you remember the little, kind of silly term that we said that even Calvin used about God condescending to us in his communication? Yeah, God lisping to us, God talking baby talk to us. Right, it's divine baby talk.

So, he has to use those words, because it's the only words we can understand. We even have a hope of understanding, getting back to the whole incomprehensibility part of things. So, I am the Lord, I change not.

If we're honest about what we read in the Bible, we know that God is the opposite, really, of rigidly immobile. He's always doing, he's always creating, he's shepherding, he's ordaining, he's protecting, he's steering the hearts of rulers, he's saving souls.

Doing, doing, doing, doing, doing. Now, the A team, one member of the A team in particular, Aquinas, he has a Latin term for this. This class is just full of the Latin terms. He has a Latin term for this, it is called actus purus.

That's on your worksheet, actus purus, spelled like it sounds. It translates to pure act, pure act. God is pure act, he is actus purus. Now, Aquinas says this because God must be pure, his argument, and remember, Aquinas is very big on logical arguments to prove his point.

God must be pure act because stuff is happening right now. He didn't use those words. Because stuff is happening right now. If immutability meant immobility, then God, we might be able to say that God is uncaused and unmoved, but if he was immobile, he would not be the first cause or the first mover, right?

Remember, that's, the pair of words goes together. We say the uncaused first cause, the unmoved first mover. Right? It's not just that he's unmoved, it's also that he does the first moving. He moves from himself, which is, you know, from himself he moves, which is aseity, going back to that.

And of course, that means that he moves all else. He is the source of the movement. So Aquinas' argument is essentially, because you can look around and see things moving, there has to be a source of all that movement, all that energy, and that is God.

And so God can't possibly be rigidly immobile. That can't be what immutability means. Because if there was no source, then there'd be no source to the movement, and it would be impossible for anything to be moving.

We would be as rigidly immobile as God himself is. Or we wouldn't even really be here. Okay, so that's pure act. It's actus purus. One of my favorite word pictures in all the Bible is right in the beginning, in the second verse of Genesis 1, where it says, in the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

And the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And I think a lot of people blast right past that, right? We got Genesis 1 .1, we all know that. It's in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, right?

And the earth was without form and void. Like, we can all recite that part. And then we get, and then the next part, where we think the action's happening. We go, let there be light, right? But there's something happening there in verse two that we're blasting right past.

God, the spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters. Do you know that that word hovering, in the Hebrew, is the word for quivering, shaking, vibrating? And the science nerds should start to be picking up on where I'm going with this.

Vibrating, God was vibrating over that primordial cosmic waters that he had just created. That next verse, when he says, let there be light. If you know anything about light, really about all the electromagnetic spectrum, all of energy, for that matter, which I posit is encompassed by the word light here.

When he says it creates light, he's creating all of energy. You know that it is waves. The word picture is the spirit of God vibrating over the primordial waters and making waves. He is the unmoved first mover, energizing his creation.

All right, so that's the proof, as best I can lay it out for you, of why immutability does not mean that he is just rigidly immobile, okay? So the answer, obviously, on your worksheet is no. What, ah, I gotta go back.

Any questions or comments on that before we move on? Are you excited for all the other questions? Yes, Janet? Do you mean move on to question three? I mean move on to question, yes. You know, I forgot to keep a sheet with me, so I've gotta hang on.

One of you out there has my original copy. B, God is the source of all movement and all energy. All right, number three, well, it's the second question, but it's number three on your worksheet. Is God affected by anything?

Is God affected by anything? Well, if we misunderstand the attribute of immutability, we might start to think of God as if he were a computer, this infallible computer that's sort of completely devoid of any feeling or emotion as we understand them, that he's, like, because he's a being that just sort of foresees all things and decrees all things, but is not affected by those things in any way, shape, or form, okay?

And I just gave it away at the very beginning when I said when we misunderstand this attribute. Okay, so the answer to this is, yes, he is affected by things. Boyce points out, sorry, jumped ahead of my notes.

James Montgomery Boyce, in one of his systematic theology books, he points out that the ancient Greek philosophers, okay, the Plato school of philosophers, they had this idea of an immutability for their God, too, because the Platonic philosophers, they had rejected those old Greek mythological gods that we all know from the stories, okay?

And they had come up with their own sort of oneness of a God, little g God, but of a God, and they even called him the Logos, right, which is where John got the Greek term to use in John 1. They called him the Logos.

That was their conception of a monotheistic God, a philosopher's God, okay? But to the philosophers, all right, as they tried to reason this all out, their God was, and this is the Greek word, apatheia.

He was apatheia. Can you guess what English term we get from that? Apathetic, that's right, apathetic. To them, he was apathetic. He was totally unaffected by anything. He was, it was, honestly, this Platonic oneness God, he was sort of the, it was sort of the first idea of the deist sort of God, conception of God, where I'm gonna wind, I'm gonna create the universe, I'm gonna wind it up like a clock, and then I'm just gonna let it go and not pay attention anymore, right, being apathetic to it.

That's the same, the deists would say the same kind of thing for God, apathetic. But our God, the true God, he is not apathetic. And I will bring to you as proof to start, Isaiah 40 and Isaiah 43. Can somebody read for me Isaiah 40, verse 11?

Anybody? Everyone's afraid to volunteer for things today. Anitra made eye contact. Oh, but she's still digging for her Bible, all right. Yes, Mr. Cooley, thank you, sir. Isaiah 40, 11. Does that sound like an apathetic God to you?

Yes. Thank you, yes. And gently lead those that are with them. Does that sound like an apathetic God to you? One who's shepherding and gently leading? No, right? How about Isaiah 43? Joe, remember that?

Isaiah 43, verse two. I will be with you. I'll be with you as you go through these challenges of life. I notice the challenges of life you are going through and I will be with you, all right. He notices, he cares.

Lastly, Psalm 34, verse 15. Psalm 34, verse 15. One of my favorite Psalms. The eye of the Lord is, sorry, read it again. His eye is on us, his ear is on us. He's never ignoring us, never dismissing us.

Ultimately, this is the answer that Boyce puts to fill in the blanks here on question number three. God notices and is affected by the obedience, plight, or sin of his creatures. So he's not devoid of any kind of feeling towards us.

At least feeling as we understand it. Might not be the same kinds of emotions that we experience, but in his divine baby talk to us, he uses emotion words to describe his disposition towards us. All right, that's question number three.

All right, next. Does God change his mind? Does God change his mind? This is a biggie biggie, right? Does God change his mind? Genesis chapter six. Turn there with me, please. There's a few examples like this, but we'll start with Genesis chapter six.

It's one that I think a lot of you, one of the more famous ones, because it's part of the story of Noah and the flood, and so a lot of people read it. This is in the prelude to that story of the flood.

Well, actually, let's go back to verse five. The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.

The Lord regretted, right? If you have an old translation, KJV and some of the other older English translations instead of the word regret, they used the word, anybody know? Repent. They used the word repent, that the Lord repented of having made man.

Exodus 32, another rather famous passage, one that's read quite often, because it's part of the story of the golden calf at the base of Mount Sinai. Exodus 32, starting in verse nine. And the Lord said to Moses, I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people.

Now, therefore, let me alone that my wrath may burn hot against them, and I may consume them, in order that I may make a great nation of you. But Moses implored the Lord his God and said, O Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you have brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand?

Why should the Egyptians say, with evil intensity bring them out, to kill them in the mountains and to consume them from the face of the earth? Turn from your burning anger and relent from this disaster against your people.

Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, to whom you swore by your own self and said to them, I will multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised, I will give to your offspring, and they shall inherit it forever.

And here it is, verse 14. And the Lord relented from the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on his people. And again, in the KJV, it uses the word repent. Right? Yes. He changed his mind, see? We're all over the place, okay?

Ah, man. So does that mean God changed his mind? Yes, Taylor. I will. Yes. Taylor pretty well nailed it on the head, but we'll keep going with that. We're gonna expand on that explanation, but it's what I said at the beginning, right?

About purposes and God's plans. We have gone from step two to step three on the plan, right? Or step six to step seven. And in the divine baby talk is repented, relented, regret, change his mind, so that we as, I like your term, chronologically limited creatures, temporally limited people, temporally challenged, can understand.

There are many more examples. Turn to 1 Samuel 5, I'm sorry, 1 Samuel 15. We're gonna spend some time in there, but we won't read it quite yet, but you can prep yourselves getting at 1 Samuel 15. There's 1 Samuel 15, there's 2 Samuel 24, there's Jonah, chapter three, after he's gone to preach to the Ninevites, and he says, I knew it, Lord, I knew you would relent from destroying them, right, from this disaster.

But interestingly, all of these examples are in the Old Testament. They're all in the Old Testament. That's on your sheet. And they're translating a Hebrew word, nakum, nakhem, get the Hebrew pronunciation really going.

Thank you, Andrew, thank you. And it's a, that word has a, well, let me get to, before I get to the part about the anthropomorphic thing, but like I said, the KJV and some older translations, they turned that nakhem into a English word repent, right, or in the moderns, regret, relent, change your mind.

But there's another Hebrew word also translated repent, and that word is teshuva, or just shoo, okay? And those words are more literally return or turn around. Okay, now, right off the bat, that should be ringing a bell, right, for our Christian mindset, for the New Testament mindset, because that's the picture that we very often hear for the definition of repentance, right, that to repent of your sin means to truly, biblically repent from your sin means to turn around, face the other way, go the other direction, run away from the sin and towards righteousness, right?

That's the turn around kind of thing. But the thing about that Hebrew word is that it's used in both, for return, shuv, is it's used both in moral and non-moral contexts. There's plenty of times in the Old Testament where it's just used for like literally turning around, right, in the story of a history saying like, we were going one way and now we're turning to go a different direction.

It's also used like in Genesis 3 .19, where we talk about Adam's body returning to the earth, okay? And I wish that I could go deeper here, but I just don't know Greek or Hebrew. So this is the furthest I could get.

But, so I can't really speak with any real authority on this, but I do wanna go this far and say that Nachem, and this is the anthropomorphic picture part, it seems to have a sense of to breathe strongly, to be sorry, to pity, or to regret, right?

Which is why the ESV translators most times when they see that word, they translate it into regret. Regret. And that breathe strongly one, it's very interesting because it's sort of the anthropomorphic sigh.

It's not a turning or a change, that's shuv. It's just, Charnock, theologian, he said that, one of the reformers, he said that the scriptural language of describing God as changing or repenting, just as Taylor told us, can easily be explained as an accommodation to our limited human language.

God's repentance can't possibly have anything in common with our own repentance, because our repentance stems from sort of like a want of foresight, right? We have an ignorance, Charnock says, of what would succeed or a defect in the examination of the occurrences which might fall within consideration.

Essentially, we can't predict the future. We don't know what might come about. Repentance for God is only a change of outward conduct, he says, according to his infallible foresight in immutable will, and scripture has to express these things in a human way by marking out something in God that has a resemblance with something in us.

And just to bring it home really here on how clear the Bible is on the idea of God ever possibly changing his mind is here in 1 Samuel 15 that I had you turn to. Now, in 1 Samuel 15, 11, right, in 1 Samuel 15, 11, who can read that verse for me?

Okay, I regret that I've made Saul king, so there's regret again, but in the very same chapter down in verse 29, Samuel will tell Saul this, and also the glory of Israel, just a name for God there, and also the glory of Israel will not lie or have regret, for he is not a man that he should have regret, right?

It's only 14 verses later. That'd be a really bad contradiction for Samuel to write the book like that, right? So clearly he has two different things in mind when he's writing verse 11 versus verse 29.

Nope, they're the same word, but it's the same word, again, just because it's nachem, but it's got enough richness of meaning that it's got two different meanings, that we can say that there's a distinction between God who can regret things, but regret them with foreknowledge of them, okay?

And us humans who most often regret something because we don't have knowledge of the future. I might regret taking the highway, for example, because I didn't know there was gonna be a lot of traffic on the highway, and now I'm late, and I regret it.

Instead of taking route nine, I took the pike, right? Or I could regret eating the scallops, the end, period. I could regret eating the scallops because they gave me food poisoning. I did not foreknow that the scallops were not cooked enough to give me food poisoning, but they did, and now I regret it, right?

And I've never eaten scallops since, but that's a minor personal note. Okay, one commentator said, God may be capable of looking back on the very act of bringing something about and lamenting that act, that's the sigh, right?

Lamenting that act in one regard, but still affirming it as best in another regard. For God to say, I feel sorrow that I made Saul king is not the same as saying, I would not make him king if I could do it again.

Okay, yes, Andrew. It is exactly like the feeling we have when we have to discipline our child, yep. That sigh, yes. Yep, you don't like it. There's a sense of sorrow over the fact of it, but you know it's the right thing to do, and you do it.

Yes, Charlie. I mean, many of the obedience promises, the covenantal promises of Israel are if-thens, right? Obey your parents that it may go well with you, that your days may be long. So the answer to be there is 1 Samuel 15, if you didn't get that already.

All right, we are rapidly running out of time, and we still have a huge one to get to. So I'm gonna go very fast past the next question, but we'll just touch on it briefly. Why do we bother to pray if we can't change God's mind?

All right, we can dismiss this question rather quickly by simply stating what? Because he told us to. Thank you all, bless you, I love you folks. Okay, the end, let's move along. But yeah, basically that, right?

Because God commands us to pray. Because God commands us to pray. Charnock said, prayer doth not desire any change in God, but is offered to God that he would confer those things which he has immutably willed to communicate, or to share.

That's the, when he says communicate, he means to share with us. But he willed them not without prayer as the means of bestowing them. Yes, exactly, and I had that in my notes because that's my personal experience, and it's yours, and it surely is all of you at one time or another that as we pray or in the middle of your prayers even, you get the sense of a turning of your own mind and your own will on the subject you're praying about, right?

And prayer often changes my mind to be, I trust more in line with God's mind on the subject. So if there's anyone changing, it's me in the prayer. All right, so flip over the worksheet with our last bit of time here.

We're gonna answer this last question. Did God the Son change at the incarnation? The Josh Bertrand special. Josh has been asking me this question since we started this book. Did God the Son change at the incarnation, yes or no?

Anybody wanna guess? Okay, I'm hearing some no's. In his divine nature, no. Yeah, what's that, what's that, Charlie? We need to define what changed. There you go, yes. It's sort of a trick question. It's not yes or no.

It's gonna go further than that, but here we go. John 1, 14 says very clearly, and the word became flesh, right? And the word became flesh and dwelt among us. So doesn't that indicate change? That's what the objectors will say.

Doesn't that indicate change? And in fact, there are dangerously a lot of theologians today who are going down a very dangerous anti-Trinitarian path with this by trying to throw out immutability on just on this basis of incarnation, okay?

And they don't realize, I don't think they realize quite the implications of what they're doing by trying to say that, no, it's okay, God does. God can in fact change in this one case. Because the word, I mean, their point is the word, the second person, the Trinity, he was once not flesh and now is flesh.

And in fact, will forevermore be the God-man, okay? So there are two ways to tackle this. First off, one way is to talk about God's relationship with time. And it's the one that we've mentioned several times already this morning, okay?

God's relationship with time. Because remember, he created time, he dwells outside of time, he is not subject to time in any way, shape or form. Only in so far as he chooses to interact with it. So theologians can say things like this.

They can say, God's eternal generation and eternal spiration, which are the two terms for the relationship between the father and the son, eternal generation, and the relationship between the father, son, and the spirit, eternal spiration, right?

That we say that Christ is begotten of the father and the spirit proceeds from the father and the son, right, in the creeds, okay. So that's the shorthand, eternal generation, eternal spiration, are an immutable eternal generation and an immutable eternal spiration, just as God's eternal willing or eternal knowing and eternal loving are an immutable willing, an immutable knowing, an immutable loving, okay?

Because they're outside of time, because God is outside of time. James Anderson, who's a professor at Reformed Theological Seminary, he gets a little nerdy with talking about God and his relationship with time.

He says it like this. He says, God's actions take effect in time and space, but God acts from the timeless eternity. So at one time, T1, Abraham is not in covenant with God, but then at subsequent time, T2, Abraham is in covenant with God.

Did God change? Did he intrinsically change between T1 and T2? Not from his eternal standpoint, he's outside of T1 and T2. It's timelessly true that God is not related by covenant with respect to Abraham at T1 and related by covenant with respect to Abraham at T2, but it's timelessly true because he's outside of all of that.

Abraham is the one who's conditioned by time in this thought experiment, not God. From Abraham's standpoint, it makes perfect sense to say, God entered into a covenant with me, but not for God. So how does this, how do you think this applies to the incarnation?

How does that apply? T1 and T2, this idea. Right, and you're in the temporal instead. Yep, yep. You can't use the if then and the when statements for God. Jesus becoming human is really kind of a loose way of speaking because it's one conditioned by our temporal perspective.

Yeah, it's timeless true, Anderson says, that God the son is not related by incarnation with respect to creation before T1, 4 BC, the virgin birth, and with respect to creation after, and is related by incarnation with respect to creation after 4 BC.

Because just like we said, Abraham was conditioned by time, the creation, all creation is conditioned by time, not God. Okay, what most classic commentators, the second way to tackle this is what they wanna do here is they wanna draw a distinction, we said it already, between the divine nature and the human nature, which were united in Christ at the incarnation.

They wanna say things like Matheson says, that the divine nature retained its attribute of immutability and the human nature united to the divine nature was mutable. That's on your worksheet, that's B.

The divine nature retained its attribute of immutability and the human nature united to the divine nature was mutable. Calvin and Charnock too, they both argue the same thing, this notion that when the two natures were united at the incarnation, that they did not mix, right?

That's one of the heresies that the council statements always have to go to. They did not mix, they did not affect each other. He's fully God and fully man. All right, and so the entire properties of each nature remain entire, Calvin says, which means the divine nature remains immutable.

Infallible too, but yeah, just to be clear, immutable. Okay? Whereas the human nature clearly changes, right? He starts as a baby and he turns into a 33-year-old man. Not instantly, but he grows in wisdom and stature as a person.

The council of Chalcedon, answer to C, affirmed it this way, that Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten, acknowledged in two natures which undergo no confusion, no change, no division, no separation, at no point was the difference between the natures taken away through the union.