Equip 2024: Our Blessed and Boundless God #3 - He Who Needs Nothing: Aseity and Simplicity

Yes, I've spoken to a couple of you in our church. We meet just six blocks from the California State Capitol, so appreciate your prayers. We, right there, as somebody said yesterday, right in the heart of the beast, and I guess that's one way to put it, but we're thankful for the ministry the Lord's given us.

What I wanna do this morning is really pick up from where we were last night in Exodus 3, so we'll go back to Exodus 3, and just in terms of our logic of the day even, our first session and our last session will be the heaviest, and the mutability will go easy on you, as it were.

We'll be a shorter time, and usually, a mutability's a little easier for Christians to grasp, in my experience, and the heavy lifting, mentally, will be here as we think about God's divine independence and aseity, we'll explain that, and then His impassibility, and we'll kind of, there's an arc that we're making as we started yesterday evening with God's divine blessedness, His eternal joy, and then how that means we must deny any passions or affections or emotions in God.

But we wanna begin looking at God who needs nothing. We can assume if God's not like us, we cannot know Him. We've quoted several theologians, and we'll continue to do so. I haven't quoted my favorite, which is my beloved wife, we've married 22 years coming up here in a couple of months, and she gets the first draft of all of my ministry, of course, and I was explaining to her what was going on with some controversy related to the doctrine of God with plenty of hand motions, and after about 20 minutes of my explanation, I said, so, what do you think?

And she just shrugged her shoulders and said, God's not like us, what's not to get? I said, yeah, exactly, that's it. God's not like us. God is wholly other than us. But sometimes that troubles Christians because they think that if God's not like us, then how can we have a relationship with Him?

How can we know Him? How can He know us? But I wanna show this morning in our first session, it's actually the opposite is true. It is actually, and it may be initially counterintuitive, but stick with it, it is actually God's otherness that secures His nearness to you.

It's actually His otherness that is the basis of His love for you and your knowledge and love for Him. And it's a good thing that God's not like you. And that's why we can love and know God. And it's His otherworldly blessedness that we talked about last night that secures our confidence in finding joy in Him.

And we return again, as I said, to that pivotal text in Exodus 3. You remember in Exodus 3, God is speaking to Moses about who He is and what He is, God's whatness. And we see here, as we come to Exodus 3, again, and we'll start in verse 1, Moses is there at Mount Horeb or Sinai, and the well-known now angel of the Lord in verse 2 appears in a flame of fire out of the midst of the bush.

Remember we said last night, because God is incomprehensible, we can't know who He is in His essence, but we know Him by His works and His word. And here we have a work of God. You have a fire that is in the midst of a bush, but notice this fire.

It's a vivid depiction of the being of God. The fire can't be touched, it can't be grasped, it can't be contained or controlled. It reveals God's inaccessibility. He dwells in unapproachable light. This fire cannot be approached in that way, but notice also significantly the bush is what?

Not consumed.

That means this fire is not fueled by creation. It's not sustained by creation. The fire is not being fueled by the bush. This fire is independent of the creation. It's in it, but not of it. In fact, we might even say the bush is being sustained by the power of the fire, contrary to our created expectation of natural fire.

So what God is doing in this, in many ways, simple work, is revealing Himself, and what He's further explaining with His words, His name. I am who I am, the Lord. Now, what we have here is effectively God's singularity, His unity.

And this will become the basic confession of Israel later in what is called the Shema, Deuteronomy 6 .4, Yahweh our God, Yahweh is one, He's singular, He's united. Now, there's two main truths that we wanna unpack that are actually related to the unity of God.

As we think of something as fundamental as God's unity, we have to think of God's independence from all things. Everything comes from Him, therefore He depends on nothing for Him, for Himself. It's all arising from Him.

And then that means that God depends on no thing, so He's not only independent, but He's irreducible. Or what we'll call that is He's simple. We'll explain what that means. If God, if all things come from God, then no thing can compose God, so God is therefore irreducible, He's simple.

He's not dependent on anything. So that's basically what I wanna unpack this morning in our first session, is think about God's independence and God's irreducibility. Or the theological terms we'll explain for that is God's aseity and God's simplicity.

Well, let's think about independence first. And let's return again to God's answer to Moses in verse 14, when He explains His name is I am who I am. Notice God does not class or compare Himself. He does not say I am this or I am that.

He just, I am who I am. God does not belong into any category. There's no class of which He's a member. God is not a species of any genus. So there's no genus of deity of which God is a species of it.

So genus is a category of things that are made up of species. So you have Panthera is the genus of big cats. You have lions and tigers, not bears, but you have leopards and things in the Panthera genus.

And like us and every other creature, we can all be categorized. We can all be classed. We can all be compared. I could say I'm a human, I'm a male, I'm American, I'm of German descent. I can list all sorts of things that belong in my biography, my categorization.

God has none. We say God's most absolute. He's independent. He is self-existent. The fancy word we use for this in theology is aseity. A-S-E-I-T-Y. It's just a made up English word from the Latin ase, of himself.

That's all it means. God is of himself. He is ase. He is not from himself because God's not self-caused. He is of himself. He's without cause. And you can remember aseity kind of like the acai berry.

So the acai berry is a super fruit. If you're into that, I'm from California, they're into those things. You into acai berry stuff up here?

No?

Okay, well, all right. Laura, okay, so Laura has the illustration.

It's a super fruit, right?

So aseity is a super attribute. In fact, it's not even really an attribute. It's God's godness. So in Colossians 2 .9, when Paul refers to the Lord Jesus as the fullness of deity, the Theodotes, in bodily form, the godness, that's what we're talking about, is godness.

It's God's independence. It's God's, Herman Boving said that aseity is God's primary attribute. And again, in ways it's not an attribute. It's just who he is. It's his godness. And it reminds us that even when we use terms of God, like being, or nature, or essence, or existence, we're not talking about it in the same way.

We talk about it with us.

In a very real sense, God does not have existence.

He is existence.

His identity is existence, or his essence is identical with his existence. We'll explain that. What we're saying is, when we refer to our nature and our existence as creatures, and when we say that of God, we are talking about it on a whole different scale.

We're talking about it, as we looked at last night, analogically. It's very different. For us, our nature and our existence is not identical, because we have not existed, right? We have been brought into existence.

And our human nature is divided and shared. If one of us stood up and said, I am human nature, we'd, you know, give him some meds, right? There's something wrong with you. But not so with God. God is identical with his existence.

He alone possesses the power to confer existence on others. We all exist dependently. He exists necessarily. It's possible for us, and in fact true, that we have not existed. It's impossible for God to not exist.

He is.

And we know this, that we're humans, we're male and female, but we know that our humanity, our masculinity, our femininity, that does not begin and end with us. We are a portion of a group. But God does not relate to his essence.

As we relate to ours.

God's nature is his existence, and he exists necessarily, which means that the existence of everything else, that's not God, and all there is, and all of existence is God and not God, and everything that is not God depends on God for its existence, because he is existence itself.

Or what's been said, God is his own is. He's his own reason for being. God derives nothing from what is outside of him, and all that's outside of him derives everything from God for its existence. Let's get some old guys to help us with this.

This is why God is blessed. John Gill on your handout. God is his own blessedness. It's holy within himself and of himself. He receives none from without himself or from his creatures, nothing that can add to his happiness.

And he himself is the blessedness of his creatures who are made happy by him. God doesn't need you and I to be happy. We don't add to his eternal happiness. We need everything from him in order to be happy.

God is of himself. He's independent. That's why he's blessed. He needs nothing. So Edward Lay said God's happiness is that attribute whereby God has all fullness of delight and contentment in himself and needs nothing out of himself to make him happy.

Or Edward Pohl, he'll put it this way, God all sufficient. That's another way to talk about aseity, all sufficiency, self-sufficiency. He must needs be his own happiness. He hath his being from himself and his happiness is no other than his being radiant with all excellencies.

As we start meditating on this, we see this is the radical difference between us and God, the radical otherness. We need everything from without us. God needs nothing outside himself. He is fully satisfied in himself and fully sufficient.

That means when we talk about God's being, he's on a whole other plane of existence.

And being than we are.

A helpful illustration is thinking of how John Owen thought of the difference between angels and worms and us and God. That the difference between us and God is a difference in kind, not just degree. God's not just a really, really, really big creature.

So John Owen said this. What is an angel more than a worm? A worm is a creature and an angel is no more. God has made the one to creep in the earth and made also the other to dwell in heaven. There is still a comparison between these two.

They agree in something, but what are all the nothings of the world to the God infinitely blessed forevermore? So think about the illustration Owen's laying there for us, the comparison. Think about an angel.

What does an angel look like? That's a trick question. Angels don't look like anything, they're invisible. So whatever thoughts you have, you can remove those from your mind. Angels don't look like anything, they're invisible, they're spirits.

And yet they are not identical with their existence. Angels aren't eternal. They're creatures, they've been made by God. They depend on God like we do, like worms do. And so what Owen is drawing out is you see, despite the almost immeasurable distance between a worm and an angel, worms and angels have more in common than you and God because they're both created.

God's the creator. So, and even though we can't measure the distance between angel and worms, it's infinitely more the distance between us and God. He needs nothing. He's the creator of all things.

We're all creatures.

We're all dependent.

God is the creator.

He is the only one who's a se, he's of himself. He's independent, the independent creator. For many Christians, their vision of God is just as a big angel. And if you ask many Christians, well, describe God to me, there are not any different attributes than an angel would be.

This is the big difference. He's a se, he's absolute, he's independent. He needs nothing. He's self-sufficient, a most pure spirit. We have life. God is life. That's what we're saying. We're saying God is independent.

He is life.

He is the fountain of life. He's being himself. And that's the name he gives us. Significantly, the name God gives us, I am who I am, I am. Now think about every other created thing, including us. We're all named by nouns, rock, tree, grass, dog, man, woman.

We're all named by nouns. That's what it means to be created. You're finite. You can be categorized, classed, compared.

We're creatures.

But God names himself, I am who I am. God names himself with a verb, with life. And God says, this is my name forever. And the word that's in our English Bibles, all caps, Lord, is a representation of the tetragrammaton, Yahweh is how we pronounce it.

Older pronunciations, Jehovah. And we don't have to get hung up on that. What's important to note is that the word is sort of a pun on I am who I am. It's the same letters, yod-hay, wah-hay. And it means a lot and it means very little.

It's a name and a non-name at the same time. It means I exist, I am. So God gave us a name to remember the verb, I am who I am, he is. That he is being in existence and life itself. Some friends help us remember this.

Herman Witzius here says, the name of God is not some empty thing which merely tingles in the ears or holds out a picture to the eyes or produces an illusion on the mind. It is being itself. Let us only remember that God himself, so far as his attributes are made known to us, is denoted by the name of God.

Every time we hear or say the name Yahweh or Jehovah, Lord, we're being brought to mind being itself, life itself, the God who is. Calvin said that God's eternity and self-existence are declared by his name.

So grammatically, technically, right, God and Lord are nouns. But every time we say them or hear them, we have to remember this is a noun that stands for a verb. God is a verb. He's life itself, he is.

And he's given us the name Yahweh or Jehovah to remember that he is life, he is being. He is life itself. We're qualified by verbs. Man standing, woman sitting. God is a verb. He is life. He is pure being.

And he gives life and existence to everything else in creation. All that is because God is. So when we say that God is independent or he's of himself, he has a satiety, we don't mean that God is independent like an iceberg.

We mean God is independent like the ocean. He is an ocean of life. And he is self-sufficient and the infinity of life in himself. And he's independent of the bounds of creation. So again, we've benefited from our friend Herman Bovink.

He said, God is no abstract, fixed, monadic, solitary substance, but a plentitude of life. It is his nature to be generative and fruitful. Those who deny this fecund productivity fail to take seriously the fact that God, note this, is an infinite fullness of blessed life.

The reason we'll say next that God doesn't change is because it's impossible for him to be more alive than he already is or to lose any life that he has. He's an infinite fullness of life. His fecund productivity, this is, we call God by a noun, but always remember he's a verb.

God is. He is alive. And all that we say of God is to protect the pure being of blessed life that he is. Let's think of some of the implications about this. How does this touch down in just some ways?

It covers everything. First is the radical dependence we have on God. It reminds us of our dependence. One theologian said you could reduce the message of the entire Bible to Romans 11, 36. For from him and through him and to him are all things.

Charles Hodge on this verse says, the reason why man can lay God under no obligation is that God is himself all and in all, the source, the means, and the end. By him, all things are. Through his power, wisdom, and goodness, all things are directed and governed.

And to him as their last end, all things tend. We depend on God for absolutely everything. I always kind of chuckle when sometimes Christians will remark about a remarkable providence or something and say, well, that was a God thing.

Like, beloved, your next breath is a God thing. The fact that your atoms are now being held together is a God thing. Everything is a God thing, as it were. All things are from him and through him and to him.

He's the ultimate cause, the sovereign me, and the great end of all things. And we deny that God has done anything to somehow fulfill some lack in him. God did not create us. God does not need us. God was not lonely.

God did not have a human-shaped hole in his heart, and so he made you. God is the fullness of life, and he created us only because of his generative, productive, fruitful life that he might confer life to us and glory and joy to us.

Or what Paul said to the Athenians in Acts 17, verse 25, that God isn't served by human hands.

As though he needed anything.

God needs nothing. He has no need. He is the self-sufficient God. And bringing there, that brings us to the next implication, even thinking of Paul's address in Athens in Acts 17, to communion and worship.

How does this impact, then, our worship of God, our devotion to God? Remember, this is the point that Paul is pressing here. He said, the God who made the world and all things in it told these Athenians with their city full of idols and temples that he is not served by human hands as though he needed anything.

God has no need. He's self-sufficient. He's independent. He's separate and distinct. Paul is basically teaching a class on theology proper to these philosophers and explaining the true God. But what does then Paul go on to say?

He says, God himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And then he quotes their philosophers and say, it is even in God that we live and move and have our being. You are because God is.

He is the is for your ising. Everything lives in and depends on him. And then Paul goes on to say the reason for this, that they should seek God. He is actually not far from each one of us. You see, establishing God's distinct otherness, his aseity, his independence, is actually the motivation for our seeking him because he is the source of all things.

It does not, by removing God from us in his being, is the motivation for us seeking God in worship. He is not far from any one of us. He's as close as our own existence. So when you ask, well, if this God is so independent, is he near?

He's as near as your existence. Augustine put it this way. You, speaking to God, were more inward to me than my most inward part and higher than my highest. God is more inward than our most inward being.

He accounts for it. God, and we depend for him on everything. Do you realize we're as close today to non-existence as all of creation was a second after the act of creation? All God has to do is, you know, people make jokes about God will send a lightning bolt or something.

God just has to stop you and we're done because everything we are is upheld by his sovereign creative plan. And it's God's absolute separation from creation that assures us that communication and communion with him is possible.

You see, what we're doing here is if God were not this distinct from his creation, he would be enmeshed in it and it would be impossible to know who or where or what God was. We couldn't have any genuine interaction with him.

He'd be like the force in Star Wars, part of the created realm. And he'd be removed from us, changing and distant. It's actually God's independence, knowing that all things depend on him, but God is not in any of the things that we can seek him, wherever we are and whoever we are.

He's not far from any one of us. It's God's otherness that accounts not only for his transcendence, but also his nearness and that God is near to every single person made in his image and he's created us to seek him.

And this reminds us then thirdly of what's happening in worship. If God has no need, why do we worship? And I think, for my money at least,.

If we could put it this way,.

This is one of the missing factors in Christian's minds for their devotion and excitement in worship and the means of grace in the church and even privately. You may want to write this down. You want to revolutionize your devotional life.

God doesn't need your worship. God is not a beggarly pagan deity who needs you to worship him to pay attention. What does that mean worship must be there? It means worship is a gift to us. This is what Christians have said for centuries.

Look at Augustine. He says, we must believe God has no need even of man's righteousness. And whatever right worship is paid to God, prophets notice not him, but man. For no man would say he benefited a fountain by drinking or to the light by seeing.

When we come to worship God, we come to be blessed by him. We bless God that we might benefit from his blessing. Worship is a grace.

It's a gift.

We're not adding to an infinite fountain. That's impossible to do. You're drinking from it and receiving life from his life. Edward Lay said, put it this way, God is also to be blessed by us, which blessing adds nothing to his blessedness, but is therefore required of us that we may somewhat enjoy his blessedness.

I've made this point. I'm currently teaching at home through the Lord's Prayer and how the Lord taught us to pray first to our father in heaven. And just before that in Matthew 6, Jesus said our father has no need to know our needs.

He knows what they are. We don't need to heap up empty phrases like the Gentiles who think the gods won't hear them. God doesn't need to be controlled. He already knows what you need. God has no need of your prayers.

You do not pray because God has needs. We pray because we do. And prayer is a gift. It's an invitation for communion with God. God calls us to him to receive of his blessed life. We bring to God what he empowers us to do that we offer nothing to add to him, but we receive from him from his grace and his benevolence.

If we understand God's aseity, it will absolutely transform everything we think about our worship and communion. We are not drudgingly coming to a needy God who needs us to do our part. We have a God who is the fullness of life and light, and he desires to communicate his goodness and his life to us.

And he gives us these means of prayer and worship that we might receive ultimately from him, that we might receive his blessedness. Well, let's then think if God is this pure being, then he must be the most irreducible being in existence,.

Which is true.

And that brings us to think about God's irreducibility or his simplicity. Now, there's a story told of a lady who picked up a book on God and began with a chapter on simplicity, and then she quickly put it down and said, well, if that's God's simplicity, what's his complexity gonna be like?

Because to say God is simple is not a simple statement. So when we say simple, when we're talking about God or divine simplicity, we don't mean easy. We mean simple as in uncomposed. I think maybe the only place we still use this word simple is in simple syrup, because it's just dissolved sugar.

There's no other components to it. It's simple. It's simple sugar. And that's what we're talking about when we think about God's simplicity. He's uncomposed. Not that he's easy or that he's understandable.

He's incomprehensible. He's incomprehensible because he's simple. But what we're saying is if God is absolute, if he's of himself and the one from whom all things are, then he is simple and uncomposed.

He's without body and without parts. Now, when we say God has no parts, we don't mean he just doesn't have physical parts like arms and legs. We already know that. We've already denied that when we say God is a spirit.

He has no body like men. We're saying God has no parts. He has no elements or no principles or no other things of which he's composed. God was not put together in a celestial soup one day with a bunch of goodness and love and justice sprinkled together and someone stirred it out and baked God.

God is. He's simple. Now, usually Christians will ask, well, where is this in scripture? And it's honestly, it's everywhere. We just looked at Romans 11, from him and through him and to him are all things.

All things are from God. There are no things prior to God. God's not made up of anything. There's just God. Or everywhere where God is said to be identical with his attributes. We're familiar with many of these passages like Psalm 119.

You are good and do good. God is goodness. Or 1 John 4 ,8, God is love. Or God is light.

That's who he is.

That's not what he has. This is divine simplicity. So Edward Lay describes it this way. God is absolutely simple. He is but one thing and doth not consist of any parts. If he did consist of parts, then there must be something before him to put those parts together.

Then he were not eternal. You see, and the logic is pretty, pardon the pun, simple. If God were made up of parts, everything made up of parts is composed and has been put together by a maker. If God were not simple, then that means somebody would have had to make God.

There were things prior to God of which he exists. And also things that are composed are always less than infinite. You don't get to infinity by stacking a number of finite things on top of each other.

You could stack, imagine this, every single rock in the world, if it were humanly possible, and stack them end on end.

I don't know how long it'd be.

It'd probably be amazing. That still wouldn't be infinite because infinity is without number, not just a lot of number. And so God is without containment. He's without finitude. He's simple. He's uncomposed.

This is why some have said that to deny this in God, to deny divine simplicity is effectively to affirm atheism because everything composed is material. And if God were composed and were not simple, then he'd effectively be part of the created order.

He'd be part of the material world. And there would be no infinite divine creator, no true God. And when we think about God's simplicity as uncomposed, it's really necessary for us as we think about then his attributes or his perfections and what we're saying when we talk about divine attributes.

For us as creatures, for us as people, attributes are very different than when we talk about God's attributes because we understand our attributes as incidental to us. You can gain and lose them and still be you.

You still have your being or nature. I can be loving and I can be loveless. I can lose my attribute of love, but I'm still me. I'm still my nature. I have that capacity. A tree doesn't lose its tree-ness because its leaves change and fall.

It's lost its characteristic, its attributes, and so on. We can lose our kindness and become malicious, but we're still people. This is because we're composed and we're not simple. So our attributes vary and change.

We're creatures. When we think about then the attributes of God, he's not a creature. We don't mean that God has attributes like we do, things that come and go, like love, or things that change or vary.

God was loving over here, but now he's angry. We don't wanna think of God that way. We don't think of the attributes of God as various components of God that he balances perfectly. God just, out of all of existence, God has just managed perfect self-control.

No, that's not what we're saying. We're saying that God is his attributes. All, or what Christians have said for centuries, all that is in God is God. That God's attributes are descriptions and perfections and ascriptions we make of the divine being.

It's not what God is made up of, and they're not things in God of which he's composed. So John Owen is typical here. He says, the attributes of God, which alone seem to be distinct things in the essence of God, are all of them essentially the same with one another, and everyone the same with the essence of God itself.

So when we're talking about God's love or his holiness or his justice, we're just describing God and who God is. Another Puritan, Lewis Bailey, says the same thing. He says, there are not in God many attributes, but one only, which is nothing but the divine essence itself, whatsoever you call it.

So if you remember, as we think about God's attributes, we're not thinking about like moons around a planet or satellites around a planet. We're not thinking about a pizza or a pie that you slice God up in.

He's got his holiness slice, his justice slice,.

His loving slice.

We're talking about who he is, and every single one is a description of the whole divine being. God has, at the end of the day, one attribute. God, he is. He is through and through him. God is essentially his attributes.

He is light, he is love, he is life, he is justice, he is holiness, and on and on. Jeremiah Burroughs here says, whatsoever is in God is God himself. From this name Jehovah, or Yahweh, the Lord, he's an absolute being, nothing but himself.

Notice this, whatsoever you can say of God is God. The wisdom of God is God. The mercy of God is God. The justice of God is God himself, and so all the attributes. These aren't things that make God up or that God sends out.

They are God.

It's who he is.

God has one attribute, godness. And this is divine simplicity. Stephen Charnock, who's classic, the existence of attributes of God, when he wanted to illustrate this, he uses the illustration of the bodies of water on the world.

So we distinguish between various bodies of water on the world based on the shores in which they touch. So we'll talk about the English Channel or the Indian Ocean. But at the end of the day, how many bodies of seawater are there on the world?

There's one.

It's one mass of ocean over the world, but we distinguish the names of the oceans based on the shores they touch. And we also know that the situation in various coastlines and in the ocean will vary around the world, not because the seawater's different, but because of the effects, the climate, of where the ocean is.

So you might be in one part of the world, it's a very placid and warm, a perfect beach day, and another part of the world, there's a hurricane. And it's horrible, a winter storm. In the same way, God is God.

And while God is judging and the effect of his holiness is experienced on one disobedient sinner, he can be saving and the effect of his loving grace in Christ is experienced by another at the same time.

Now these aren't sides of God. It's not like one person got the good side of God this morning and another person got the back side of God. This is the effect of God in his perfectly simple being related to the status of the creature.

Another illustration to try to help us mentally grasp this is we talked about this morning, I like good coffee. One of the reasons I'm fortunate to minister in Sacramento, we have a whole micro roasting sort of little industry there.

And when coffee is properly sourced and roasted, you taste various notes. That's what they call them, flavor notes. In the coffee. And to get the full effect, if you do, it's called cupping actually. So if you want to have a fancy coffee tasting party,.

It's called cupping coffee.

And to get the full effect, you actually have to slurp. It sounds rude, but it's actually how you properly taste coffee. You get a little spoon and you slurp it and the air helps coat the coffee on your taste buds so you can note the flavor notes.

And you might slurp fresh roasted coffee and you could taste nutty, sometimes it's floral. You can taste chocolate, you can taste fruit. And the roasters will go through this process and you actually have, you can get a coffee tasting wheel.

It's a whole thing. And you actually write down the flavor notes that you taste in a particular roast in a particular variety of the coffee. And they'll, coffee roasters, good ones, will write them on the bag so that when you buy a bag of coffee, you know what you're gonna get.

Is this sort of floral or is it fruity? So sometimes you buy a new bag of coffee, it'll say like dark chocolate, blueberry, citrus, whatever. It's the flavor notes that they tasted when tasting the coffee.

Now here's the thing. Those flavor notes are not added flavor to the coffee. Flavored coffee is from the devil, by the way. So just remember that. These aren't flavors that have been added to the coffee.

These are the notes that are evoked on the taste buds of those who are trying the coffee. But at the end of the day, when you taste the coffee, all that is in the coffee is what?

It's coffee, that's it.

All that is in coffee is coffee. But imagine if coffee roasters, all they put on the bag was, well, coffee, what does that one taste like?

Well, it's coffee.

What does that one taste like?