2023 BBC Bible Conference - Session Four "The Immutability of God"

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Well, it is really a joy being with you and even interacting on our break times by the interactions and questions.
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It's wonderful to see you're getting it and chewing on it. Just my plan for tomorrow on the
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Lord's Day, we'll have covered, Lord willing, by the end of this session, sometimes they're called the metaphysical attributes or the absolute attributes of God.
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And then my plan for tomorrow is in Sunday school to deal with holiness and the morning sermon we'll look at Malachi 1 and talk about love,
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God's love, and then the evening sermon we'll look at Malachi 2 -3 and talk about God's justice. So we'll continue and we'll build on and for you specially chosen, the elect that have come to the conference, you'll have a head start in terms of what we'll build on tomorrow, looking at God's word together and expounding it.
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But we want to come and wrap up our time that we began last night and think about God's immutability and impassibility.
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And if there's any more modern hymn that's become something of a favorite, it has to be Chisholm's Great is
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Thy Faithfulness. Most of us probably know the first verse by heart. Great is thy faithfulness,
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O God my Father. There is no shadow of turning with thee.
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Thou changest not. Thy compassions, they fail not.
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As thou hast been, thou forever will be. How can you know that God's compassions will fail not?
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How do you know that his compassions won't fail when you fail? How can you be sure that your next sin won't be the last straw for God?
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Only if thou changest not. And that's the key of God's immutability and impassibility.
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Only if we can say, you forever will be, can we be assured our salvation is as secure and eternal as God promises in his word.
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So I want to think first about immutability and then impassibility and how we're really saying the same thing with both with greater definition.
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But let's consider first God's immutability. Defining it, it just means God is unchangeable.
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He cannot mutate. He's not a ninja turtle. He doesn't mutate. He's immutable. In our confession, we confess
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God to be immutable. The Puritan Stephen Charnot gave this definition. God is unchangeable in his essence, nature, and perfections.
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So that means that everything we say about God is unchangeably true. His love, his blessedness, his goodness are unchangeable.
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At times, folks object, well, if God truly loves, then he must change and adapt and react to his beloved, his creatures.
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I mean, if human relationships involve response and change, how could a relationship with God be real if he does not change?
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Now we'll press this even further in a little while later, but as we've already seen, when we make
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God like us, he actually grows more distant. We lose God and ourselves, and it's always a bad bargain.
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And we also have to remember, because God is absolute and God is simple, then reality is what he defines it, so we have to be really careful when we say, if it's like me, that's the only definition of real, and what we've done is subtly supplaced
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God with ourselves. And everything we've already considered, blessedness, incomprehensibility, aseity, independence, irreducibility, simplicity, all of those truths logically entail immutability.
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God is blessed because he is who he is, eternal, independent, irreducible. That means he cannot change.
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If God could change, he would be composed, because he would not be independent, he wouldn't be eternal, because creation is defined by change and time is a measurement of change and so on.
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So everything we've already said, God is independent of creation, he is immense, he's not bounded by space or location, he's not subject to change, he's eternal, he's self -sufficient, he is what he always was and always will be, so he cannot change.
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All change must come from a cause, there is no cause prior to God, he is.
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This is what Charles Hodge concluded, he said, as an infinite and absolute being, self -existent and absolutely independent,
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God is exalted above all the causes of and even the possibility of change.
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Because of who God is, he cannot change. Or Stephen Sharnock again said, if God does change, it must be either to a greater perfection than he had before or to a less.
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If to the better, he was not perfect and so was not God. If to the worse, he will not be perfect and so be no longer
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God after that change. In other words, all what we've already said means
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God is changeless. And if God were mutable, then none of what we've said already could be true.
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That's why John Owen said, any suggestion of mutability in God is atheism.
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He said, to ascribe the least mutability to God's essence is transcendent atheism in the highest degree.
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Change is a characteristic of creation. If God changes, he is a creature.
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If God's a creature, all that exists is material existence and creation and there is no
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God. So to ascribe any change to God is essentially to be a logical atheist.
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God is the infinity of goodness, love and joy. He is. He's a pure spirit.
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He is life itself. He cannot possibly be any different. Wilhelmus O 'Brackell said, no one can add to or subtract anything from his being, neither can anyone increase or decrease his blessedness.
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And again, this reminds us that God is not immutable like a rock. He's unchangeable like an infinite fountain, the fullness of which cannot be added to and cannot be taken away from.
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And this is exactly how God argues in scripture. God argues from his essential name,
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Exodus 3, I am Yahweh. And he concludes and argues with us in his word that because he is who he is, he must never change.
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His immutability is the consequence of his perfect being. John Calvin said that God argues from his essential nature and argues with us from his own nature and reasons with us.
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So for example, in Malachi chapter 3, verse 6, it reads, for I, the
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Lord, do not change. That's the ESV. A better rendering would be,
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I am Yahweh, therefore I do not change. God is arguing from the fact that we should know he's immutable because he is who he is.
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He's exalted above all the cause and any possibility of change. Or what about Psalm 102?
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Psalm 102, verses 25 to 27, we read, of old you laid the foundation of the earth and the heavens are the work of your hands.
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They will perish, but you will remain. They will all wear out like a garment.
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You will change them like a robe and they will pass away. But you are the same and your years have no end.
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Now again, that's the ESV. And in verse 27, literally we could translate that.
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You are the same. You are he. And the translators have added the same because that's the implication.
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He is. I am who I am. All of the cosmos and all of the creative things, they all change.
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You can take them off like a garment, but you are he. The I am.
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You remain. You are the same. He transcends any limitation and any alterations and any change of creation.
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The most stable and seemingly constant fixtures of creation that we rely on, earth and sky, they're all changing.
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The Bible says they all deteriorate and God will take them off like we take off a jacket and he will remain.
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Now sometimes it's suggested that what we mean by immutability is only that God's promises will not change, but it is the immutability of God's being that assures us his promises are unalterable.
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Because remember, being precedes doing. Genesis 22, verse 16,
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God said to Abraham, by myself I have sworn. As certain as I cannot change, my covenant is true.
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And then this is picked up in the book of Hebrews, chapter 6, verses 13 to 18. We read this, when
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God made a promise to Abraham, since he had no one greater by whom to swear, he swore by himself, guaranteed it with an oath, so that by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement.
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What are the two unchangeable things? God's word and God himself.
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God's covenant faithfulness is explained by his unchangeable being.
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Why can you trust his word will never be altered? Because he is immutable and he doesn't change.
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It is God's immutable being that establishes his unchangeable promises and it is the assurance we have that his covenant promises to us in Christ, to the gospel, are always true and will be true 10 million years from now.
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If it could be otherwise, just think, if God could be changeable, how could you be sure his word wouldn't also?
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How could you be certain the covenant promises of God in Christ would not be altered? We have to, if we're honest, we have to say, well, we couldn't, because he could change.
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God never changes, so we can be assured. And this is why we can trust
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God's word when circumstances seem uncertain and distressing. And what's interesting, when you look at scripture, the places where God's immutability pops up most clearly and explicitly are all places where God's people are in great distress and great wondering what's going on and God's basic answer is, well, the one thing you can be sure is not going on is
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I'm not changing. And so we need to have a different interpretation of your circumstances. So, for example,
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Malachi 3, in Malachi, we'll look at Malachi a couple of times tomorrow, it's a key book about the being of God, God's people were wondering where he was.
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They were even asking in the chapter before this, where is the God of justice? And so God gives an answer in chapter 3, verse 6, well, you can know one thing,
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I haven't changed, I am Yahweh, I do not change. The creator is wholly different from the creation.
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And then the conclusion he draws from that, the remainder of verse 6, therefore, O children of Abraham, you aren't consumed.
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You ought to think and reflect on my immutability, it is the basis for your existence given your sin.
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And what the extension of the argument in Malachi 3 is that what you are seeing is my fatherly discipline.
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You're seeing my immutable character in effect against your disobedient posture.
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I have not changed, you have. That's why you're under discipline. That's the argument he makes.
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Or in Psalm 102, which we already quoted a portion of, Psalm 102 is a prayer of one afflicted.
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And in verses 1 and 2 of Psalm 102, the psalmist lays out his lament before the Lord and he calls on him to hear my cries.
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And then he reflects on God's immutability that we just quoted. You are the same. You remain.
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Your years have no end. And this is what he concludes, verse 28 of Psalm 102, the children of your servants shall dwell secure, their offspring shall be established.
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How can you be sure when circumstances seem desperate and unfavorable that God will be faithful to do what he promises?
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Because he doesn't change. And even if your whole world is falling apart, that does not signify any change in God, but only a differentiation in his sovereign decree for the providence and purposes of the outworking of his will.
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But he hasn't changed. Or what about the encouragement that James gains along that line in James chapter 1 in the
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New Testament. James wrote to Christians who meet trials of various kinds in verse 2 and various temptations and tests.
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But we must never say in James 1 verse 13 that I am being tempted by God. No. Instead, what do we say in James 1 17?
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Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above coming down from the father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.
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The sun and moon vary. Creation shifts from light to darkness, but there is no variation of change in God.
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So when we face trials of various kinds, it's not because God has changed, but his perfect gifts test and chasten and form us to be like God himself.
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God has changed in the outworking of his acts, but he has not changed.
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Our shifting circumstances never signal a shift in God. Ever.
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They reflect the varied outworking of his single will of grace towards us.
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It is because God does not change we can be assured in the darkest of days that his purposes for me are still good regardless of how this feels or looks.
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Because he never changes, and of that I can be assured. And then we can say even further than ultimately in the ultimate sense, all of my circumstances are an outworking of God's immutable covenant love.
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He must mean this for good, even if this isn't good. It must be meant for good because all his purposes are love and good for me in Christ.
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And we must emphasize this. It is such a key aspect of God's immutability. And it means that the rest of his perfections remain.
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God is who he is. One analogy that persisted in the Puritans is that God's immutability is like a string of thread through pearls of God's perfections.
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So, Thomas Manton said that God's immutability is an attribute like a silken string through a chain of pearl runs through the rest.
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Just think about what binds all of the perfections of God as perfections is because they're perfect. His love is perfect.
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His holiness is perfect. His justice is perfect. It's immutable. It never changes.
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It's never altered. He is. His mercy is unchanging. His love is immutable. His grace is unaltering.
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His justice never fades. It's the immutability of God's perfections that distinguish them as divine perfections.
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I spoke to a gentleman at a coffee shop recently, saw my theology books, asked if I was a pastor.
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People have one or two reactions when they find out I'm a pastor. They either clam up or they well up and we're suddenly talking about everything and I've got to get some reading done or whatever.
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But I spoke to him recently at this coffee shop and he told me, Well, you know, my God, and he pointed out the window, is the birds and the trees.
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All that out there. I just reminded him and I said, you know, all those birds and trees, they're all changing.
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They're all decaying. They're all going to die. So if that's your
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God, what hope do you really have? You have none. It's because God is wholly other from his creation, independent of it, immutable and self -sufficient, that we have hope that he is.
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He's immutable. He has not altered. We know that he is near. In him we live and move and have our being.
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It is the imperfection of change and constancy and inconstancy that more every other relationship we have.
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Why do friendships fray? Well, they're just not themselves anymore. They've changed.
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We withdraw from others because we've changed. We don't have more to give. We might say,
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I'm exhausted. I can't talk to another person. I've changed. I'm depleted.
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God is. He never changes. You can always seek him.
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He never tires. It is his immutable independence from creation that establishes
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God's singular presence with us in creation, though he's not of it. Beloved, those who suggest that if God's immutable, it destroys our relatedness and our ability to commune with him, just to be frank, they have no idea what they're talking about.
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It's abject nonsense. That's logical pantheism. If God changes, then he's a creature.
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You have no God. Good luck. God is immutable. We can have confidence he's the same.
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He's even perceptible apart from changing creation. And even if our world one day is a beautiful sunset and the next day is an abject disaster, you know what you can trust?
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God is. He's immutable. You can seek him, and you can trust he must mean this for the good and glorious outworking of his purposes, because he doesn't change.
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The one who never changes also entered our changing world, and the
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Son assumed humanity for us. We spoke a little bit about this last night in the
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Q &A, but the Incarnation did not change God. It is the
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Incarnation of the Son, not the transformation of the Son. In Christ, the divine and human nature were joined without mixture, separation, or confusion, so that Christ did not become some third being, but in Jesus we see true
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God and true man in one person. And as a true man,
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Christ lived for us, and he accomplished fully realized human holiness on our behalf, and he died for us and endured the curse of God's justice for our broken covenant with him.
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And he arose ascending, assuring us that his vicarious life and death and resurrection are truly a substitution for us as real people, the real human works.
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Yet, we have confidence of their eternal saving efficacy, because they are secured by the immutability of Christ's divine nature.
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It's wonderful. There's good news. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
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And if you trust him today, he can as assuredly save you as the first time that gospel was preached in Jerusalem by Peter in Acts 2.
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Because the immutable God took on humanity to return us to him. So we have this unchanging hope that if you trust the
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Lord Jesus, the same Lord who lived and died and rose again 2 ,000 years ago and now ascended, will save us.
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Edward Lay reminds us, whom God loves once, he loves forever. God's people shall never fall from grace, shall never be wholly overcome of temptation.
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And into our complete salvation, John Owen said this, God laid the shoulders of the unchangeableness of his own nature to the work.
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We can be confident that God's saving purposes will be fulfilled as he's promised.
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And we can be assured that they will never change, because in the salvation God has wrought in Christ, he's laid the shoulders of his immutability.
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It's secure. It's unalterable. So God's love and joy are immutable perfections, and we can be assured that God's love then is eternal.
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Now, this is what we're protecting and everything we've just said. When we go further and we say that because God is immutable, he's impassable.
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Because he's a fountain of infinite goodness and joy, he is not subject to passions.
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Now, when we come to God's impassibility, we come in some ways to the most challenging aspect for us, but one which we've already been prepared for since last night.
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Now, impassibility used to be taken for granted by Christians for centuries. But we live in an age, we've all grown in it, that's obsessed with emotions.
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We consider expressing our emotions as the basis of what we call authenticity. But it's often instinctively rejected because of that, impassibility.
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But let's start with just a basic definition of impassibility from one encyclopedia. It says, impassibility is that divine attribute whereby
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God is said not to experience inner emotional changes of state, whether enacted freely from within or affected by his relationship to and interaction with human beings and the created order.
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Pretty good. God does not have emotional changes of state, God doesn't change. He doesn't change himself and he doesn't change in response to someone acting upon him.
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No one acts upon God, he is. Now, this is again plain, vanilla, normal Christian understanding of God for centuries.
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And what's key is it's consequential to what we talked about last night, God's blessedness.
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So John Gill, for example, said, Because God is blessed, he must be impassable.
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John Calvin said, God is exempt from every passion.
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Now again, this was normal. Christians took it for granted. But we became obsessed with emotions and therapy.
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We assume emotions and our emotional life define what is real. That's why we'll have in our culture, people say things like,
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Well, I may be biologically male, but I feel like a woman because we've given ontological freight to our feelings.
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You pick it up even in more subtle ways. Notice this, when someone's asked a factual question now, they often answer with their first words,
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Well, I feel. We don't say, I think, anymore. When we're asked a question, well,
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I think. We say, well, I feel. It's like, that's significant. We think feelings are the foundation of reality.
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And so when we hear God's impassable, we think he's indifferent, apathetic, dispassionate.
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No, passion technically and historically meant to undergo change, to suffer.
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That's why we will still refer to the passion of Christ, the sufferings of Christ. And we've already seen
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God is immutable. So by saying God is no passions, what we're doing is we're protecting the perfections of his love and joy and goodness as real and perfect and proper in God.
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That's who he is. We're preserving them as perfections and not as creaturely passions.
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So to just have one example in scripture and one place to consider impassability, think of Acts 14, when
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Barnabas and Paul go into Lystra. They go into Lystra, this town of pagans. They miraculously heal a crippled man and the pagan polytheists do what pagan polytheists do.
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They start worshiping Paul and Barnabas because they have this obvious miraculous power.
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Now we're told in Acts 14, verse 14, that Paul and Barnabas tear their garments.
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That's very emotional. They're worked up, they're passionate, they're ripping their clothes.
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And then in verse 15 they say this, Men, why are you doing these things? We are also are men of like nature with you.
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And we bring you good news, that you should turn from these vain things to a living
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God who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them. Now we have to go back to the
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King James to get the full import of what's being said here. Because there the translation is more literal.
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ESV has, we are men of like nature with you. The King James has, literally, we are men of like passions with you.
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Why are you worshiping us? Can't you see how passionate and emotional we are?
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And the conclusion that Paul and Barnabas expect their audience to draw, if we are so passable, so passionate, we must not be
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God. Because he is not like us. God is impassable.
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Now we have to apply what we've considered then with how we read scripture. And consider carefully about what we discussed in our last session about analogy.
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That there is similarity but not sameness. God speaks analogically. And we apply that according to what is proper to each nature.
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So when we say God is impassable, we are saying passions are not proper in God. So William Perkins says,
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The affections of the creature are not properly incident to God, because they make many changes, and God is without change.
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And therefore all affections and the love that is in man and beast is ascribed to God by figure.
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William Ames said something similar. The affections attributed to God in scripture, such as love, hatred, and the like, either designate acts of the will or apply to God only figuratively.
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So when we read in scripture emotional language attributed to God, we are to understand that metaphorically, figuratively referring to God's acts of his will according to his perfections.
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So we call those, as we talked in the Q &A, anthropopathisms. Man -like passions being ascribed to God.
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God is acting in the form, is explaining his actions in the form of how we understand humans act according to emotions.
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So John Owen said this, It is agreed by all that those expressions in scripture of repenting, grieving, and the like are figurative, wherein no such affections are intended as those words signify in created natures, but only an event of things like that which proceed from such affections.
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So what Owen is saying here, notice two things. He is saying, first, this is normal. Owen can say everyone agrees with this.
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It's agreed by all. And the second thing, just like Ames he says, they signify an event that's similar to what we understand when we understand human repentance and human grief.
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So what Owen is saying here is helping us read our Bibles. He said when you read passages that say that God regrets or God grieves or God repents, we know that that is not truly proper to God who is without change.
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Yet God is signifying that he is about to act like a man who is grieved.
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So that we can understand something of the truth of what he is doing. We can understand he is revealing himself to us.
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So when we encounter the passionate language of God and his word, we understand that God is acting according to his perfections.
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And he is accommodating himself to our minds as creatures. So let's take as a classic example that shows up very early in our
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Bibles, Genesis chapter 6 verse 6. The Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth and it grieved him to his heart.
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Well, let's think about what we've already considered and what we know about God properly. He's pure spirit.
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God doesn't have a heart. He's eternal. The eternal one who knows all things and has himself declared from the end from the beginning.
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He doesn't regret. It's not possible. Also, he's blessed.
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He's blessed in himself eternally so he doesn't grieve. So what is he saying?
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Well, God is communicating himself in a way that we can understand. And so he's accommodating us and speaking of his acts as though they were human, as though they were man -like.
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And he's indicating that the act he's about to take, speaking analogically, is like the act of a man who's pained by injustice and evil.
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Because we understand what that means. We understand what it means to have someone you love act in unconscionable ways and to be out of your love be grieved, have regret, and then act accordingly.
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That communicates to us. And so what God is communicating here truly is not any change in him properly, but actually changes in men whose hearts are wicked.
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It's actually because God doesn't change that he says he's grieved and regrets and he will act according to his immutable love, his immutable holiness, his immutable justice, that he's grieved over the state of creation.
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It's because of God's unchangeable love for the good, for himself, that he cannot leave it.
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God will never shrug it off. God is not a bad father who is just overcome by emotion towards his children so he puts off justice because he can't bear to judge.
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He's not wrought upon that way. He can't. He's immutable. And so the simple God will act according to his justice.
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And he communicates that to us in a manner that we can understand, like a man who is grieved and regrets and grieves in his heart.
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It's because God never changes that we know an act of judgment is coming.
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He's not just going to shrug it off and say, well, what are you going to do? Kids are kids, and I just love my kids.
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No, he can't. He never changes. And regret, well, regret is the passion that we experience, the emotion that we experience when we're about to change our course of expected action.
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We were going to do something, but we have regret, so we no longer do that thing. So now, here in Genesis 6, regret is signifying that God is going to destroy what we would have assumed would have continued according to his justice.
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And so he'll say that in verse 7, the very next verse, I will blot out man, and it comes in the judgment of the flood.
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And this is analogous, it's communicating the effects of human anger and indignation and regret that we understand
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God is acting according to them, that we understand what he is doing. So Augustine said the anger of God is not an agitation of his mind, but it's a judgment imposing punishment on sin.
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Or Calvin again says, whenever we hear, and he means by reading scripture, God is angered, we ought not to imagine any emotion in him, but rather to consider that this expression has been taken from our human experience because God, whenever he is exercising judgment, exhibits the appearance of one kindled and angered.
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We ought not to think of God as plagued by emotional excess and anger, or he's moved to anger.
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It's an indication of God's acting according to his holy justice and love and goodness.
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Of course, this raises a question for us, why does God speak this way? Why does God use anthropomorphic language, human -like language to communicate to us in his word?
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Well, how else would he communicate the incomprehensible, simple, absolute, immutable perfection of who he is?
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The simple acts of his will according to infinite perfection of love and holiness and justice would be incomprehensible to us.
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God is going to act according to the infinite perfection of his justice. Yeah, I have no idea what that means.
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It would be not communicating. There would be no true revelation. So Augustine, for example, says this very thing in the
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City of God. He says, if scripture were not to use such expressions, as we've been talking about, it would not familiarly suggest itself into the minds of all classes of men, whom it seeks access to for their good, that it may alarm the proud, arouse the careless, exercise the inquisitive, satisfy the intelligent, and this it could not do, did it not first stoop in a manner to send to them where they lie.
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How dreadful if the Bible was like some of my theology books.
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You'd never read it. You wouldn't come to hear anyone preach it. And you wouldn't understand.
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And it wouldn't reach us where it needs to, as Augustine says, to arouse and to attack our pride and to provoke our conscience.
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So God stoops to speak to us. If God only said, I'm about to act according to the infinite perfections of my being, it would land wooden and incomprehensible.
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And we wouldn't get it. It would be dull. So God comes down to us and he reveals his acts in ways that resonate and even resemble human action and human emotion, so that we can comprehend it and that we get.
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And so when we read Genesis 6, that the heart of man is evil always, verse 5, so that God is grieved and he regretted he made man.
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Whoa. Now we have a sense of what holiness means. We have a sense of what justice means.
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We have a sense this is serious. You don't mess around with the holy God. He's playing for keeps here.
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You see, he's communicating to us because we understand grief and regret. We know what that means.
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So God is communicating to us the infinity of his holy goodness in a manner that we can comprehend and that even arouses our consciences and that provokes us.
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Now, again, as we've said earlier, you know, this intuitively, you do it in so many other ways.
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When you read your Bible, you're here at preach. Let's take Psalm 18, for example, Psalm 18, verse 2. The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my
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God, my rock in whom I take refuge, my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.
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Now that ministers comfort to you, doesn't it? And you know intuitively God's not made of granite.
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He's not a rock. You know he's not a fortress. You know he's not a shield.
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He's not metal. It's not used in an equivalent manner of God. You know that because properly
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God is spirit. God is infinite. You understand that. So what we must have here is
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God taking on metaphor and image to communicate to us something of his strength and his protection and his provision to communicate the truth of us.
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And even more, God is communicating in a way that is far more evocative and far more, in a sense, intelligible to us than if he had just said plainly and prosaically,
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I am the Lord, I will protect you. Okay? Great. I'm your fortress.
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Doesn't that have a depth of communication based on your experience? Because you know what a fortress is. You know what it entails, hiding and shelter, fleeing from danger.
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So in God's analogical speech and in the metaphors of scripture, God is communicating to a depth of our experience that it didn't hit us as a dull and wooden concept, abstract, hard for us to grasp.
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We can say in prayer and anguish, you are my rock and my shield. Protect me. And we know what that means.
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That's how God's communicating to us. He does that so his word doesn't lose all texture and sense for us.
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Praise God, the Bible's not just a theological dictionary. But God is communicating to us that we might understand him and that he's come to us in his word to speak to us truly in an act of condescending mercy.
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And yet, God is also clear that we are not to take these images by which he speaks to us and read them back into his being so that we would think that God is some big rock in the sky out of vision or he's some fortress someone put together or that he's a man who has emotions and he's moving back and forth from grief and regret to happiness and love and being bounced around by other things like we are.
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He's God. He doesn't change. He's not subject to passions. Again, we're not saying
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God is uncaring. We're actually saying it's impossible for God to care more.
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He cares perfectly. And so he can't be subject to change and made to care more.
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Rocks are impassable and God is impassable but for two opposite reasons.
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Rocks are impassable because they're inanimate things. God is impassable because he is the fullness of life and joy and love and it is impossible for him to be made to care more than he already does eternally.
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He's perfect. And this is for our comfort. Edward Lay said,
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The attributes of God are everlasting, constant and unchangeable, forever in him, at one time as well as another.
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This may minister comfort to God's people. God's attributes are not mutable accidents but his very essence.
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His love and mercy are like himself, infinite, immutable and eternal.
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Dear Christian, isn't it good news to know that when you failed, really failed, and there are real consequences for your failure, that God is no less loving and near than he was before you failed?
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You can go to him. You can seek him. You can confess your sins and you can be assured that he will forgive you in the
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Lord Jesus and he will work to your restoration and your sanctification. Why?
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God doesn't change. He's not subject to passions. He doesn't get miffed and walk away from people.
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He's immutable. He will always love you as he's decreed.
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In fact, we'll look at tomorrow morning, God never started loving you because he's eternal. So I want to go back now to the question we asked in session one last night that I said you weren't ready for.
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Maybe now we're ready for it. Is it good news that God is blessed when we're not?
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In a world of suffering and sin and difficulty, can it be good that God is perfectly happy in himself?
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In December 2018, I was bleeding out in a hospital after surgery.
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Had abdominal surgery. My blood didn't clot. We thankfully had a nurse who was more attentive than my doctor.
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I knew it was getting serious when I came, woke up in the middle of the night and my nurse was praying over me.
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And I first thought, well how wonderful, I have a Christian nurse. And then I thought, oh no, she's praying.
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Which means she's gone to the extent of her vocational skills. Finally, the nurse sounded the alarm and a response team rushed into my room.
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I was in and out of consciousness. I lost more than half the blood in my body. My wife was ushered out into the hall.
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I will never forget hearing her sobbing in the hall, asking if I was dying. My wife was very emotional because her husband seemed to be dying.
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And then the rapid response team came in. All the lights went to surgical lights or whatever. My doctor was very calm.
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And I remember still him asking me questions. It was such a surreal experience. I was praying.
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I was remembering Romans 5 .1. I have peace with God. I don't need to be afraid to die. I was praying for my wife and children.
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And my doctor is like, how does this feel, Mr. Meister? And we're going to attach this. And he's just a day at the office.
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My doctor was emotionally calm. My wife was a sobbing mess in the hallway.
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What if they were reversed? What if my wife was not acting according to what is proper to the nature of a wife, a loving wife?
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And what if she was calm? And what if my doctor was not acting according to the nature of a proper doctor and he was very emotionally distraught, sitting beside my bed in tears?
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This is just terrible. What are we going to do? And my wife was just standing there, just calmly observing.
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Well, I wouldn't be here. I would have died because the doctor wouldn't have rescued me. You'd maybe think it might be a good thing if that's kind of the wife you had.
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Maybe you wouldn't want to be brought back but you'd wonder about that.
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The doctor, in his impassable acts, according to his nature as a doctor, saved my life.
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My wife, in her very passable emotion, as would have proper to a wife, in the distress of her husband, assured me again, as has happened a hundred times in 20 years of marriage, that she really loves me and is concerned for me.
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Each was acting according to their nature. Now, who loved me?
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My wife or my doctor? Yes, they both showed love according to their nature.
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So when we think of divine blessedness in the face of human suffering, we remember that we don't measure the divine by the standard of men.
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If we pull God down so that he shares our pain, that means that God is no more powerful than a man.
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He's just as impotent as us, subject to frailty and pain. And that's not good news.
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It won't bring happiness. Actually, all it would do is confirm our helplessness and the fact that we are hopeless and there's no hope or no rescue coming.
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If God's passable like us, we're both in trouble. If God were not impassable, his love would not be constant and we'd have no hope.
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But because God is immutable and impassable, we know that he will bring about love and joy and perfection according to his promises of Christ.
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We don't know how all the time and it's often excruciatingly painful in the process, no doubt, and we know that and God knows that because he's given us psalms that say that very thing.
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He's aware of who we are and how we are. But we can be assured that God is working all things for the good of those who love him because he is love, he is good, and he doesn't change.
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And he is not subject to the inconstancy that we suffer under as creatures in creation.
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How do you know that God's compassion will fail not into eternity?
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Because he changes not. As he has been, he forever will be.
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Or we have Henry Light's wonderful hymn, Abide With Me. This is the second verse.
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Swift to its close ebbs out life's little day. Earth's joys grow dim, its glories pass away.
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Change and decay in all around I see. O thou who changest not, abide with me.
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How do we know God will abide with you and be with you even through the valley of the shadow of death?
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Because it's impossible for him to change. He is immutable and he is impassable.
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He will be with you to the end and through it because he never changes.
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Amen. Let me pray. Father, we thank you for the assurance of your being that gives us comfort and security in the promise of your word.
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It reminds us of the goodness of your presence with us in Christ and that you will be with us always to the end of the age.
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Help us, our Father, to draw strength and courage from this assurance of your word and help us further to grow in our understanding and contemplation of these things, many of which may be new for many of us.
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Help us in patience and humility to sink deeply in meditation of your glorious being that we might have hope and joy and be assured that you love us and that you have called us in Christ to be happy in you forever.
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We thank you and praise you for this time. In Christ's name. Amen. All right.
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Thank you very much, Pastor Meister. I was very encouraged. So you mean to tell me Tulip is right and not
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Daisy? He loves me. He loves me not. He loves me. He loves me not. All right. Just wondering that.
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If you need to be dismissed, that's fine. For about 20 minutes, we're going to take questions from you. So, Mr.
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Kent, if you can give me this yellow microphone hot. We are going to check one, two.
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Sounds good. Yep. That, excuse me, we think of it as the union between the human and the divine nature that God the
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Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary created man so that human nature and divine nature in the person of God the
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Son were joined without mixture, confusion or separation as the formula
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Christians have worked out. And so that the divine nature has assumed humanity to himself in the person of Christ that we see true
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God and true man revealed to us and then for us in his saving acts. Well, I won't speak to whether you always had it wrong or not.
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Sometimes it's not a matter of having the substance wrong. Sometimes our signs or our words are less proper.
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So, I think, again, as I've tried to reiterate, a lot of Christian truth is intuitive to you.
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You may just not have the expressions or terms to express it consistently. So, we want to be careful about whether we're just like throwing off substance.
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A lot of times it's really there. So, yes, we don't want to think of the incarnation as changing
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God or that any way that Jesus is less God. To do that, actually, the logical consequence of doing that is eroding both the humanity and the deity of Christ.
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So, if in the incarnation, for example, the deity takes on the attribute of change or suffering in the divine nature, you then have, in the human suffering of Christ, not really human suffering.
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You have divine nature suffering somehow in the extension into humanity. And so, it actually takes away the real, true human acts of Christ on our behalf and his experience, and it makes it some kind of human -divine mash -up.
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And then we no longer have the divine nature because now he's not infinite perfection. He's altered.
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So, the union we now have with God and Christ is actually to some other thing. You actually lose everything.
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You lose the whole Gospel. And so, we would say that we make distinctions as we read the
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Gospels. We talk about the life of Christ. Christ acting according to his human nature or Christ acting according to his divine nature.
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Same person, two natures. We uphold the integrity and that's why the creeds and confessions say, truly
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God, truly man. We uphold the integrity and the reality of each nature. And so, when
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Jesus, it's an accommodation, it's an analogical language in Philippians 2. When it says emptied himself, there's debate over even translation there, that he's not emptying himself of deity.
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God can't lose godness. That's part of being God, is you don't ever lose it. He's not emptied of that.
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He is taking on, assuming humanity to himself. But that means that we do, as I mentioned last night in the
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Q &A, we understand that even as Christ and his human nature is walking the Sea of Galilee with disciples, he's upholding the cosmos by his eternal power simultaneously.
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Yeah, I don't like the word kenosis in terms of, we use incarnation.
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Yeah. Good question.
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So we make a distinction on what we mean by types of change. I want to stay away from identity as a modern term.
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It's laden with all kinds of Kantian implications. I don't even like the term identity. I'm not even sure how we use it.
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That's another conversation. But when we talk about our natures, we talk about who we are. So certainly, the divine nature, the person of the sun assumed humanity to himself.
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The one who was invisible is now visible in Christ, we could say that. That is a change in perception, not a change in God.
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So God assuming humanity to himself is a change, and sometimes it's called, this is getting a bit technical, we called it a
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Cambridge change, or it's a change external to him. It's like, you could say, my son, who's now 13, is now right about here with me.
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At one point, he was right here. So you can say there's a change in me in relation to my son, but is that really a change in me?
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Well, no, it's a change of relation. So now in relation to my son, we're now of different stature to one another.
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But in terms of my nature, I haven't changed. But it's a virtual change, or a conceptual change, or a change of relation.
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So there is a change, certainly a change of relation. There's a virtual change that what was not now is.
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The son who was not incarnate is now incarnate. But that's not a change to the divine nature.
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That's a virtual relational change. Oh, that's a long conversation.
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Let's not go there. If you want to read an article by Stop Finding Your Identity in Christ, find me after it all.
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That's a longer conversation. I'll take us to another realm. No, in fact, so, good question.
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You're almost asking the same question our brother just asked. You're just asking in relation to creation. And this is why we also say creation is not a change.
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In order to change something, you have to have taken what something already existed and formed it.
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You take a mold of clay and you make it into a pot. You've changed it. Creation didn't exist before God spoke it into existence.
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That's not a change. That's a creation. And we confess that and we believe that because it's in the
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Bible, right? This is what the Bible says. I know you know that. You're not disagreeing with that.
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Just like we say the incarnation is not a change in God, creation is not a change in God. Yeah, no.
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That's why we say we looked at that I'm in New England, right?
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I thought we were just supposed to No, that's not. It's a good question. You're tracking great.
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No, it was not. We looked at this a little bit last night. I'm not sure if you were here or maybe we've moved through a lot so there's a lot to take in.
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Creation is utterly mysterious. It is from the sheer gratuity of God's goodness.
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There is no need in God. God was not lonely and bored in and of himself.
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Well, we better create something so I have something to play with. God and I'm taking from John Owen here is in the ineffable mutual in -being of the
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Father and the Son in the internal love of the Spirit joy in himself eternally. There's no need in him.
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As Paul told the Athenians in Acts 17 verse 5 don't think that you were created as though you could serve
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God who needs nothing as though he needed anything. So creation is now that doesn't mean creation is improper or that it's inconsistent with God's goodness.
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It is. But it is not demanded by or necessitated by any lack in God.
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It's sheerly gratuitous and the desire to communicate his goodness and his love to us.
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That's why some theologians have said that the mystery in some ways it's not that God is but that we are.
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That's the wonder. The fact that he who needs nothing made us to communicate himself to us that we might enjoy him.
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And it just heightens the goodness of what he's brought to pass. That's a good question. Yeah, this is a very simple concept.
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Well, come on. God is actus purus. Don't you all get that? So I don't use when we talked about in the second session on Exodus 3 when we talked about God being pure being and pure spirit
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I was communicating what we mean by pure act. I just wasn't using that language because it comes from philosophical conception.
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It's not necessarily there's just too much to teach to use it so I don't usually use it and it's not in the
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Bible although it's communicating a biblical truth. I was also explaining pure act when
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I said that we are named by nouns but God is named by a verb. What we're saying if we're speaking technically and what pure act means is that God has no potentiality.
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There's no potential in God. We all have potential. We all probably don't live up to our potential.
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There are things we could do and be that we are not. I could potentially be sitting but now
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I am standing. We can just multiply the examples. We're full of potentiality. I can be angry but I am not now.
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I'm now not. But I could be made angry if I don't eat soon enough or whatever. Our passions are part of our potential.
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We can multiply examples. What we're saying and using that concept of potential and act but what we mean by that is actualization.
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I am now actualizing my potential to stand. I have the potential in me to stand.
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It's been actualized and I'm now standing. What we're saying is God is fully actualized or the way
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I like to say it that I think maybe is less stiff or philosophical. God is fully alive.
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It's impossible for God to be any more alive. One theologian said, God is always in go mode.
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God never has to be made to move. Nobody has to wake God up. Nobody has to say, hey did you notice over here?
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Or any such thing. God is always present in the full power of his actual being always.
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All we're saying with pure act, it is a very significant concept logically.
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You don't have to feel constrained. Start your personal devotions tomorrow. Oh act as purist.
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You don't have to use that language. What we're just saying is that God is most absolute.
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He's the infinitude of life. He's the fountain of life and being. We all derive our existence and being from him.
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He is the source of it all and there's no diminishing or dependence in him. That's the concept that's being communicated and it's using technical
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Aristotelian terms really to explain how God is not within that logical construct.