2023 BBC Bible Conference - The Fount Of All Joy Session One Q&A "Divine Blessedness" with Pastor Steve Meister and Pastor Mike

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Do you want to give us your testimony of how the Lord saved you? Yeah, sure. I grew up in the

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Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints. You did? I did. I did not know that.

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Really? So, that's the branch.

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That's not the Utah branch. That's the Missouri branch. So, after Joseph Smith with Lynch, then Brigham Young took the big group to Utah, and then

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Joseph Smith Jr. took the group that was left back to Liberty, Missouri, where the paternal side of my family is from.

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So, I grew up in that environment. I mean, honestly, I really worship Joe Montana, not anything else.

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And the Lord was very kind through neighbors, invited my family to, we relocated to Monterey County, where I mostly grew up, and then invited us to a

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Baptist church. It was not a healthy church, unfortunately, but the youth ministry there was faithful, and I heard the gospel, and I came to Christ when

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I was 15, in the summer of 1994. And, yeah, the Lord was very kind and saved my family, and so all my parents and my brother are in the

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Lord as well. And then the call to gospel ministry, how'd that work? So, I went to school in Fresno, where I met my beautiful wife, at Fresno Pacific University, the

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Mennonite school, and a Christian school, went there. I was a pre -law major, but I was part of a church plant there in Fresno, and I began to care more about the church and ministry than I did about the law

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I was studying. I worked for a lawyer. I worked in the courthouse. Legal work is dreadfully boring. It's not at all like what you see on TV.

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And so, my gifts and desires for ministry were being affirmed in that context, so then

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I went to ministry from there after I graduated. I have a variety of questions that we've put together, especially with the help of Pastor Steve, and we could just kind of make it no -compromise radio stuff.

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A couple shows today, you didn't know what I was going to ask you, but you did a good job. You talked a little bit about God in the radio interview.

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We're known as nouns, and you said God is known as a verb. You might talk about that more tomorrow.

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Yeah, I will tomorrow. What do you mean by that? God's name is a verb, and our name is a noun? What do you mean? So, God is,

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Psalm 36, verse 9, the fountain of life. And so, sometimes when we say things like God is immutable,

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He doesn't change, God is impassable, He doesn't undergo change in the form of emotion or impassionate changes, people draw the wrong connotation that, well, therefore,

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God's like a stone, He's inert, He's apathetic. What we're saying, actually, is the exact opposite.

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When Moses asked God, and we'll see this tomorrow in Exodus 3, you know, who are you, God gave him three names,

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I am who I am, I am, and then the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God's essential name in Yahweh is connected grammatically in Hebrew to I am who

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I am. God's essential name is to remind us that He is, He's a verb, to be verb.

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So God is, even though technically the title and description of God is a noun, we must always remember it stands for one who is a verb, and He's named by a verb, we are qualified by verbs,

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God is a verb, He's the fountain of life, He's pure, what we call theologically, He's pure being, He's pure life.

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We talked about it a little bit when R .C. Sproul said the word human beings is probably wrong because humans always become, and so there's one divine being that never changes, but human beings are human becomers, does that make sense?

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Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly right. And in a sense, God doesn't, we use being because what else are we going to say, but He's not a being like us,

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He is. You were talking about Revelation tonight and God accommodating

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Himself so we can understand. Can you talk to us a little bit about what we might say would be anthropomorphic language or anthropopathic language, what is that and how can we kind of spot it in Scripture so we're not ascribing things to God improperly?

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Yeah, so what we'll do, and in essence what we're doing this weekend is we're thinking about the absolute statements of God and how they must govern everything else that we say or think about God in Scripture.

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It's on, but I have half a lump. How's it working up? Want to go higher?

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Check one, two. Alright, thank you. Thanks guys.

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Shall I repeat the question? Would that help? No, no question. In the beginning was the

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Word. I went to the lung doctor this week and I said, you know, if I can't ride a bike that's fine and if I can't, you know, surf or whatever that's fine, but I would like to be able to talk and to preach.

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And he said, I'll hear some steroids go. I didn't get any this week. Alright, here's my question. Some of the language of Scripture, God has a mighty right hand or something like that, that we might say to ourselves, oh, we're thinking about God wrongly.

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How do we think about anthropomorphic and anthropopathic relating to God's form or God's passions?

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So when we're reading the Scripture, we'll automatically say, oh, that's right, I understand that. This is a language of accommodation.

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Yep, God is accommodating himself and talking to us in ways that we can understand so that we can grasp something of his acts and his decrees in creation.

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So we've already gone down that road thinking about his blessedness. God is blessed, period, that's a fact.

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That must mean that when we encounter statements in Scripture like Genesis 6, God was grieved, well then that must not be absolute or literal because you can't have a blessed

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God grieve. So we understand that to be anthropopathic, that is a human -like passion.

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And God speaks to himself that way, we'll talk about, so that we understand the acts he takes and it communicates who he is.

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Otherwise, Scripture would be, can you imagine if God only spoke to us literally or absolutely and he just said things like,

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I'm going to act according to my infinite perfection. Okay, cool, what's that mean?

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You know, I can't comprehend that. And so God, what we call accommodates, Scripture is accommodated revelation,

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God speaks to us and condescends to speak to us in ways that we can understand and grasp. And it says something actually really important, won't give away the third session tomorrow, but it says something really important about God's constancy and his unchanging goodness and love and blessedness.

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Yep, as nurses are wont to do, lisping to the infants. Yeah, that's what I meant to say. Sorry, I wasn't trying to fuck you.

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There's only one Steve Cooley in this congregation and they're not him. Okay, sorry. I think, by the way,

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I've been healed. If somebody said to you, you simply explain the

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Trinity, not explain it completely, but what would be a good way for Christians to think of the

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Trinity? Well, there is no just, and we'll talk a bit more tomorrow morning, there is no comprehension of God's Trinity.

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In fact, Augustine, not infamously, but famously said in his De Trinitate, we speak of three persons, not so that we might say who he is, but that we may not remain silent.

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And what Augustine was saying is that even here, we're grasping at the ham of glory. We don't have full comprehension, but we have to say something because we see it so clearly in Scripture.

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And so what we would say simply, the God who is, the only

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God who is, is Father, Son, and Spirit. And so we don't want to, what we don't want to do is separate the being of God from the persons of God as though they're like different things.

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The older words, and sometimes people get tripped up to hear the word mode, we're not talking about modalism, but the mode of God's being, how

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God exists, is as Father, Son, and Spirit. That's how he subsists his older language.

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So the second London in Chapter 2, Paragraph 3 says three subsistences, so as to communicate and not have any hang -ups with the word person.

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When Tertullian first applied person to the three modes of subsistence in God, he did not have any of the connotations that we might have now on this side of modernity of self -consciousness and self -will.

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So we don't have three wills in God, we don't have three people like a family. The one God who is, is the

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Father begetting the Son in the mutual love of the Spirit, and that is

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God. Well, I mean, depending on the urgency of the marital problem, maybe.

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But I would say stepping back, you know, I was once told by a

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Christian that if, you know, I couldn't explain it to them to their understanding in ten minutes, then it must not be worth knowing.

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And I just sat and I thought, I'm like, you know, all the things I know that are worth knowing in life, that literally drive my life and the decisions

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I make as a man, as a husband, a father, and certainly as a pastor, took like a decade to understand.

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And so I think in the bigger picture, and our Confession says something wonderful in Chapter 2, Paragraph 3, about God's trinity being the basis of all our comfortable dependence upon Him.

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How do we know that the God who has acted and that the Gospel that we cherish is real and true and accounted for, and it all comes back to God's trinity?

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And that's why the insights of God's trinity show up so often in Scripture.

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I'm in the Gospel of Matthew right now in my ordinary preaching, and we just looked a couple weeks ago at the baptism.

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And you have, and Augustine again said, if you want to learn the trinity, go to the Jordan. Because you're there at the

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Christ's baptism, you have the voice from Heaven, the Father, to His beloved Son, as the Spirit descends, and the act of salvation is the act of God, as Father, Son, and Spirit, each person acting according to their proper order in the mission, reflecting the being of God.

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And we are, salvation really is at the end of the day, what does salvation mean? It means being caught up into the triune life of God, that the eternal love between the

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Father and the Son, by the Spirit, is now ours. And God is bringing us into His divine life.

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We're not being deified, but we're being brought into the divine life of God, and that is salvation. And so, while it's not intuitive, and it takes time and effort, the foundation of our confidence and our courage and our wonder and joy and hope are all connected to God's trinity.

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Steve, there's another error. So, when you say something like that, what you inevitably end up doing is, if I could just kind of reduce it to its basic error, is you end up pulling

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God into the created realm. And when you do that, you lose, as we looked at at the beginning of the introduction, you lose not only

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God, but you lose yourself, because you have no God. Whenever we, some guys recently have said, and I'll qualify here in a moment, but God is utterly useless.

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And what they mean by that is not that there's not practicality to the Christian life that we are pursuing.

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What they mean is that God does not exist for some other end that is not God. So, we should never be in the position where we're putting

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God in the service of something. Like, God is really useful for recovering traditional marriage in America.

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Or, what it started with is actually, after the Second World War, and liberation theologians saying that God is really useful for the spread of Marxism and what they were doing in liberation theology.

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And what happened is conservatives, evangelicals, said, hey, that's pretty handy for our fights in marriage and all the chaos we see in the

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Western world. And I agree with all those things, but Scripture already tells us. And we don't need to monkey with the being of God and reject what

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Christians have held for centuries. And once we do that, you end up losing God, and you lose all the, what we've already said, are the fruits of knowing

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Him and our joy and confidence and dependence upon Him. If the relationship between the

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Father and Son, for example, is one of order and submission, you're a functional tritheist, because you now have multiple wills in God.

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Will is property in nature, so you have a collection of deities, and you have no deity. I mean, you end up functionally erasing

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God out of the consciousness and conviction of the Church. Speaking of wills in nature,

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Jesus is true, and now He has a human will and a divine will.

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So when Jesus was in the womb of the human nature there?

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The divine nature has no where. He's everywhere, and He's beyond all space.

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So in the act of creation, we want to say that the Incarnation is more than a miracle.

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I mean, it's miraculous, and it's fine to use that language, but we have to understand what's really happening. The Spirit is recreating a man in the womb of Mary.

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And so you have this miraculous act of God the Son assuming a human nature to Himself to have a union between human and divine, without mixture, confusion, or separation, is what we say.

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And that's happening there in the person of Christ. But also God the

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Son, I mean, you don't get to leave the Trinity, because that's God, right?

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And it's not three people. And so God the Son is still upholding the universe by His power, and upholding the existence of everything.

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I was just talking with a brother, we were interacting after the session, and we were just talking about the incident on the boat of the

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Sea of Galilee, in the middle of the storm, and Jesus is asleep. And you know, they wake Jesus up, but Jesus was awakened according to His human nature.

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Because the divine nature was causing the storm, for which He had to be woke up for. And so, we have to think that way, otherwise we're denying the true deity of the

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Lord Jesus, and what Scripture teaches. People bristle when

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I say this, but it's true. Think about it, the Incarnation did not change God. The Incarnation did not change

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God. The Incarnation is God the Son assuming humanity to Himself. If the

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Incarnation changed God, we're all in trouble. Because then that means that what Jesus did in His life is not just human work fulfilling righteousness for us, it's some kind of tertium quid, or mixture of human and divine, so we don't have real human nature.

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And then also the God who is saving us to Himself is not really the God we've looked at and will consider further as the

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God who is. He's some lesser form of deity, and He's changeable, and so on.

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And so you erode all confidence in the Gospel, and in the wonder and miracle of what's actually happening in the

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Lord Jesus. For us as men and women to be saved, to merit righteousness for us, it can't be a thing.

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Right, exactly. It's kind of fun, isn't it? We sing in Charles Wesley's song,

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He emptied Himself of all but love. We talk about a doctrine called the kenosis, and sometimes people say something like this.

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Could you tell me if this is a good thing to say or not? Jesus, in the Incarnation, in Philippians 2, decided to set aside some of His divine prerogatives.

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Comments on that statement? Well, it sort of ties into what we've already just said.

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What's being said, often unintentionally there, but what's being said is that God is somehow changing to be man.

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And then you don't have a real Incarnation of the only true God. You have an admixture of something happening.

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And so we have in the Incarnation God the Son taking humanity to Himself in the person of Christ.

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And Christ living according to the human nature in real true humanity, but in union without mixture, separation, or confusion with the divine nature.

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The human nature of Christ and being true humanity is what secures us having a mediator, one in our line, a new

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Adam, fulfilling the obligation to the law on our behalf. And the divine nature is what secures that the work of the last

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Adam is eternally ours, because Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. And so when we are being careful to think and speak clearly about what true deity is, that's what we're protecting and preserving.

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And so whenever you have any kind of, well, put off divine prerogatives or laid aside deity, well then you don't no longer have true

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God assuming true humanity. You've now, functionally, you've now erased that and put it in a blender to make something else.

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Why do most theologians say it's improbable? Yeah. They say it's added for a reason.

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Why? Yeah, because there's no change in God or addition to Him.

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God has no need. He is all sufficient. So we don't want to use language. I mean, don't go accosting people when they say that.

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We know what they mean. Are you rebuking me? No, no, I'm not rebuking you. I'm just trying to, you know, that's how

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I talk in my church, you know, sometimes I say things, and then the young guy, and I find out he's like, you know, railed on something.

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This is New England, where a rebuke is the gift of encouragement. Oh, okay, okay. Yeah, I don't know. So, I'm just, go easy on me,

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I'm a Californian. We're nice. Kind of.

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And shallow. And shallow. Yep, shallow. All those things, they're all true. So, we don't want to use any kind of language that implies any kind of change in God in the act of the

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Incarnation. And so, assumption, the reality that the Divine Son, along with the

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Father and the Spirit, are the causative act in taking humanity to Himself.

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What if someone said malign? Yeah, oh yeah, it's in the

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Bible. It's good. Just wanted to check. Yep, yep, no, Bible's good. To get submitted

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Himself to the Father, because He was a Son, and therefore if the Son submits to the Father, then they're equal, and so why would a wife have any trouble submitting to her husband, because Jesus submits to the

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Father? Talk to us a little bit about how we need to be careful when we think about talking that way.

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Yeah, there's lots of issues in there to be careful of. The Church has, and our

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Confession says, and again, in Chapter 2, Paragraph 3, is well -worded, succinct, it's worth reading multiple times and thinking through it to understand it, that the distinction of the persons in God, Father, Son, and Spirit, are only by particular personal properties.

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And what we mean by that is the Father begets the Son, affiliation. The Son is eternally begotten, and the

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Spirit is spirated, spiration from the Father and the Son. And those are the only distinctions between the persons of God.

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And that when we start adding, and all those come out of Scripture, and Scriptural texts and hard work that generations of Christians put into in the early

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Church, when we start adding other elements of relation, like authority and submission, we end up falling back into old eras and heresies where the

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Father is superior to the Son. Because to have a subordinate, you have some sense of superiority.

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You also have a real problem with the concept of will. To have one submitting to another, you have to have one will being brought under another will.

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So that means you have two wills, three wills in God. That's three gods. Because will is proper to nature.

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So you now have three deities in the Godhead. And if you take that further, going back to what we were talking about with the

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Gospel, that means that in the Incarnation, you have the will of the Son and the will of Christ's human nature.

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So what will is operating in the Incarnation? Is it the will of Christ's human nature, or is it the subordinate will of the

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Son to the Father? So it raises the question, is it truly human obedience, or is it just an extension of the divine act into creation, so that we can't really say it's a true

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Incarnation on our behalf? Once you start extending the logical implications of these things, you really, again, you start pulling on the threads of the

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Gospel really, really fast. And so it's really important that we understand

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God, Father, Son, and Spirit as co -equal, co -eternal. All three possessing the divine being.

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And so all the attributes we look at this weekend, blessedness, immutability, aseity, they apply to Father, Son, and Spirit.

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So it's not like the Father is immutable and the Son is not, or what have you. We want to be really, really clear that we're not talking about three gods who just happen to get along, or three demigods, or whatever.

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If we think about the, what's inseparable operations, and what does...

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Opera Trinitatis Ad Extra Indivisa Sunt. So... You don't have to know the

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Latin, you have to know what it means. It means that the external works of the

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Trinity are undivided. And so this goes back very, very early in Christianity, and we call it inseparable operations.

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By operation, what we mean is opera, Latin works, the works of God. So all we're saying are...

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Well, does anybody listen to Shilin here, the rapper Shilin? We're Christian people.

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Oh, sorry. He has a rap where he says, you know, when

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God does something, they probably work together. And that's inseparable operations there, in like a couple verses of a rap.

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And what we're basically just saying is that what God does, God does.

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Period. So that means everything God does, is what God does. And if God is the

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Father, Son, and Spirit, everything God does, the Father, Son, and Spirit do, according to the one will, and the single nature of God, who is

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Father, Son, and Spirit. So you see this in Scripture, where it shows up just biblically, is you see the same...

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And you've noticed this, reading your Bibles. You see the same act being attributed to different persons of God.

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So we'll look at the creation, and you'll see that all things were created by Christ in Colossians 1.

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And that has important significance for how we think about Genesis 1, and God speaking, and the

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Word, and a lot of touch points there. You see that in the resurrection. Christ was declared to be the

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Son of God by the resurrection, Romans 1 .4. You see

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Christ attributing the resurrection to Himself, John 10 .18. I have authority to take this life, I have authority to lay my life down, and I have authority to take it up again.

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So who raised Christ? God the Son raised Christ. Romans 8 .11,

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He was raised by the Spirit, who raised Him from the dead. And you could do that, and guys have written books to help us.

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You can do that, and you can go through all the acts of God, and see how they're appropriated to each person of God, the same act.

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And what's being reflected there is the singularity and the unity of God.

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Everything God does, God does. So, Pastor Steve, if I believe, how do

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I... Yeah, so they, what we would, we wouldn't use the word roles, we would talk about each person of God appropriating works that are proper to their order, not in subordination, submission, but to their order in the...

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I'm looking for another word besides taxes. In the order of God, there is a proper order to the persons of God, as Father, Son, and Spirit, in the being of God.

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And God, by so speaking to us in Scripture, is revealing who He is, as Father, Son, and Spirit, without giving any indication of subordination in God, or division between the persons of God.

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So we might think of them, as we've already said, as demigods. But we think of a proper appropriation of what is...

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It is proper that the Son, who is eternally begotten, is the one who came to assume humanity for us.

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It is proper that the Spirit, who is the bond of love between the Father and the Son, is the one who sheds the love of God abroad in our hearts, is the one who awakens us and brings us to Christ.

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And so we have God revealing Himself, even in the act of salvation, of who He is.

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Yeah. Okay, that's good. Maybe kind of no -co style now. What's a question... Uh, I don't know.

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Alright. Yeah, I'm sorry. Are you a coffee star? I am, yes. Tell me a little bit about that.

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I like good coffee, and... We have Dunkin' Donuts. Oh, that's...

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yeah, that's... you poor people. Starbucks! Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Starbucks, too. Starbucks is a scam. I like, you know, directly sourced, single origin, lightly roasted.

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We have a bunch of micro -roasters in Sacramento. It's one of the great things. We have a ton of micro -breweries and a ton of micro -roasters.

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It's a great place to live and minister. I'll actually use it in my...

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When we talk about divine simplicity, I have a coffee illustration, so we'll save that for tomorrow. You can...

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coffee helps you understand God. I've heard that because you preached at a Santa Cruz monastery. That's right. I watched it.

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That was a good sermon. Yeah, good. Have you, like, brushed it up a little bit to make it a little better? I've tweaked it, yes.

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Can God suffer? No. Did Jesus suffer? Yes, according to his human nature.

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What's wrong with the kind of... where I'm going with that logic? So, again, if God suffers...

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And that's basically what was behind a lot when I was talking at the end about blessedness, that if we say that God isn't blessed when we aren't, what we're doing, basically, is eroding the very basis of any eternal joy or hope at all.

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If God suffers, then that means God's in the same boat we are, and that we're all in trouble.

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And so that means he's subject to change, which is a mark of creation, which means

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God is no longer... Though Christians will say that, they don't understand the logic of what they're saying.

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They're actually espousing pantheism, and that God is now enmeshed in the order of change, which is creation, and motion that we are in as creatures.

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And so he's now a part of it with us. It also erodes creation and redemption, the gospel, being an act of God's sheer goodness and joy, because God now has to rescue himself to get us out of this trouble.

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And taking it further, he really can't, because in order to pull us out of the cosmic disorder that sin has caused, we need someone who's going to come from outside, who's going to help us.

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And if God is in the boat, as it were, again with us, then there's no one coming, and there's no one to help.

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And it basically comes from our obsession with modern philosophy and our obsession with emotions today, that we are obsessed and we think that emotional expression is the basis of authenticity.

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I don't think that's true, and Christians haven't thought that for many more centuries than they have. And if we think that, well, if God's suffering with me as God, that's comforting for about 15 seconds.

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And then you realize, wait a minute, if God's in this mess with me, who's coming to get us?

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And the answer is nobody. And so we'll talk about more as we move towards the end of our time tomorrow.

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But it's really important to uphold the truth that God does not change, including He has no passions. Jesus' human nature is suffering.

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Yes, He's our sympathetic High Priest, and He suffered according to His human nature to bring us to God.

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And going back to repeating the same order of thinking we saw before, we referred to before, but if God suffers, then that means

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Christ's suffering wasn't really human? Or is it some kind of an extension of divine suffering?

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And again, it erodes the whole ground of the Gospel, and it makes the Gospel more of an enacted myth by the divine, not

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God assuming true humanity on our behalf. Yeah, I mean, basically what we're confessing when we have a confession is a reminder that the

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Bible didn't drop from the sky last Tuesday, and it didn't fall at my feet privately and personally, and that I somehow am the fount of all wisdom in what it says.

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And it reminds me that Scripture was always given to the people of God corporately, to be interpreted corporately, and to be understood within the community of the

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Church, both now and both down through the ages. And so it ought to matter to us if what we think some passage says, every other

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Christian says, well, that's not what it says. Now, is it possible we might be right and everyone else wrong?

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Yeah, it's possible, but it's not too likely. And so God has always given his word within the community of the

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Church as a guardrail and as accountability, and a confession is an extension of that reality. And so it's a reminder that we are called to believe the same gospel and the same truths about God and Christ that Christians have believed since the

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Church was birthed. And so we're standing in that stead, in that same line, and we want to repeat those same truths, and we want to do so clearly and carefully.

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These things that we understand as confessional theology, as orthodoxy, they weren't hammered out by one guy on a week.

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He sat down with the Bible on Monday, and he had something completely worked out by Sunday.

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I mean, we're talking about centuries of work, of guys working on one another's stuff to articulate things clearly and carefully and consistently with Scripture.

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So like in our confession in Chapter 8, you're pulling out of Nicaea, you're pulling out of the Council of Chalcedon, you're building on what

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Christians have done. And we are not going to reinvent a better version than what took

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Christian centuries of reflection on Scripture to do. So we want to stand on their shoulders, and we want to learn from those who have gone before and have a sturdy place to stand as we address our world.

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It also gives us, I think, even in our particular cultural moment, having a historic confession helps us in evangelism, it helps us in whatever's going on in our nation and culture.

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So after the Obergefell decision in 2015, there was a news crew at our church.

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The deacon came to me, Pastor, the news guy wants to talk to you. And I thought, oh, great. So I would go out, this was before the evening service, went outside, there was a news guy there.

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He said, you know, since the Supreme Court decision, legalizing gay marriage on Friday, we've heard there are some churches that don't agree with that.

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Yeah, right. And he said, you know, we wondered if you'd like to be on camera and share what you think.

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And I was thinking, well, I don't want my church building burned down on Monday. I'm not getting on your camera. I invited him.

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You can come and worship. But what I did tell him, I said, you know, our views on marriage were actually, and what the

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Bible teaches about it, were written down in 1677. And nothing the

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Supreme Court said Friday or that it will ever say is abrogating any of that. And so that's still our view.

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And I was able to say in that moment, and then we're able to say collectively to our culture,

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I haven't gone anywhere. We've been here since the 17th century saying what marriage is.

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You've moved. So any charge of bigotry or malice or anything else is completely, it can't be honest based on that fact.

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And so I think when we have a historic confessional basis, it really does have a lot of,

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I think, evangelistic benefits to it as we're trying to testify to our world and culture and try to have a place to stand that's clear and consistent from God's word.

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...they maybe don't like in the Semantic theologies. You're using other sources to help you understand the

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Bible. As a matter of fact, those sources have probably, we agree on that, that there's so much richness even with this doctrine of God.

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Their congregation, if you read our Satan of Faith, in Chapter 2 of the Holy Trinity, you'll think to yourself, oh, the next time

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I read the word Lord in the Bible, I'll think to myself, oh, or blessed be.

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Oh, I can be encouraged by that. Yep, yeah, absolutely. All right, it is 857.

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Does anybody have a question that they're dying to ask? ...insightful, relevant, timely, smart.

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By the way, Steve has a building that they might burn down, but when we pulled in and said, you know, something about the parking lot, and here's what

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Steve said. He said, at least you have a parking lot. Their church doesn't have one, so their church, we have a parking lot.

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Yeah, we meet urban midtown Sacramento. We're about six blocks from where Gavin Newsom goes to work, and we rent a parking lot from the school.

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Has Gavin been to your church? He has not, no. That's not surprising. No, surprisingly. We're doing our best, though.

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All right, Bill, one question, one thing and one thing only.

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Okay, to repeat the question for the social media and cameras and all that stuff. So how do you,

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God doesn't suffer, how do you account for, and you can multiply your question by many texts, so the particular, I'm sorry, brother, what was your name?

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Bill. So Bill's question, you can multiply in many texts, but he mentioned grieving the

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Holy Spirit, but there's many passages where it says God grieved. We'll look at one tomorrow,

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Genesis 6. That is what we would call is anthropopathic, so it's

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God speaking to us, accommodating to us, and describing the act of God related to our status as grief.

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It is a response of holy justice. It is a response of love. And when we understand it properly, what

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God is doing is actually communicating the unchangeableness of his perfections.

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So what we might say, to put it in like a tagline, God doesn't have passions, he has perfections. God doesn't have love, he is love.

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God doesn't have joy, in the real sense, he isn't. And so by taking on human expressions like grieving the

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Spirit, it reminds us that the effects of God's simple perfections are being communicated in terms of our relation to him and our status, whether we are repentant or disobedient.

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And that the response of holiness towards one who is unrepentant or sinful, in that context, is grief.

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But we ought not to think that, we don't want to read that back in to the nature of God and think that he is grieved in himself.

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It's an accommodation to us to communicate that the God who has called you to himself in Christ, whose

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Spirit indwells you, he is no less holy, and he is not modified by us.

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And it actually is, when we understand it properly, what's literally being communicated is the unchangeableness of God.

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God doesn't have partiality. God has not brought us to himself by forgetting his holiness, or by discounting his justice.

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He's done it by satisfying it in the Lord Jesus. And so, when we understand the immutability of God, we can see these human -like expressions in Scripture as really communicating the unchangeable perfection of God.

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But we would take it as an anthropopathism, a human -like expression of emotion, this communicating literal truth about God, that when we say that, and I've had

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Christians ask me, we're not trying to get away or brush away any part of the Bible, and we're not saying it's false, we're not saying it's meaningless, far from it.