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

Redeemer Bible Fellowship

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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,

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His eternal joy, and then how that means we must deny any passions or affections or emotions in God.

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But we wanna begin looking at God who needs nothing, and we can assume if God's not like us, we cannot know

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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,

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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?

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I said, yeah, exactly, that's it. God's not like us. God is wholly other than us.

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But sometimes that troubles Christians because they think that if God's not like us, then how can we have a relationship with Him?

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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.

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It is actually, and it may be initially counterintuitive, but stick with it, it is actually God's otherness that secures

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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.

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And it's a good thing that God's not like you. And that's why we can love and know

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God. And it's His otherworldly blessedness that we talked about last night that secures our confidence in finding joy in Him.

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And we return again, as I said, to that pivotal text in Exodus 3. You remember in Exodus 3,

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God is speaking to Moses about who He is and what He is. God's whatness.

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And we see here, as we come to Exodus 3, again, we'll start in verse one, Moses is there at Mount Horeb or Sinai, and the well -known now angel of the

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Lord in verse two appears in a flame of fire out of the midst of the bush.

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Remember we said last night, because God is incomprehensible, we can't know who He is in His essence, but we know

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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.

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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.

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It reveals God's inaccessibility. He dwells in unapproachable light.

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This fire cannot be approached in that way. But notice also significantly, the bush is what?

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Not consumed. That means this fire is not fueled by creation.

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It's not sustained by creation. The fire is not being fueled by the bush.

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This fire is independent of the creation. It's in it, but not of it.

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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.

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So what God is doing in this, in many ways, simple work is revealing Himself and what

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He's further explaining with His words, His name, I am who I am, the

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Lord. Now, what we have here is effectively God's singularity,

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His unity. And this will become the basic confession of Israel later in what is called the

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Shema in Deuteronomy 6 .4, Yahweh our God, Yahweh is one, He's singular, He's united.

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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.

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Everything comes from Him, therefore He depends on nothing for Him, for Himself.

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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.

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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

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God, so God is therefore irreducible, He's simple. He's not dependent on anything.

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So that's basically what I wanna unpack this morning in our first session, is think about God's independence and God's irreducibility.

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Or the theological terms we'll explain for that as God's aseity and God's simplicity.

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Well, let's think about independence first. And let's return again to God's answer to Moses in verse 14, when

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He explains His name is I am who I am.

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Notice God does not class or compare Himself. He does not say, I am this or I am that.

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He just, I am who I am. God does not belong into any category.

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There's no class of which He's a member. God is not a species of any genus.

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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.

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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

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Panthera genus. And like us and every other creature, we can all be categorized.

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We can all be classed. We can all be compared. I could say I'm a human,

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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.

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God has none. We say God's most absolute. He's independent.

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He is self -existent. The fancy word we use for this in theology is aseity,

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A -S -E -I -T -Y. It's just a made up English word from the

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Latin ase, of himself. That's all it means. God is of himself. He is ase.

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He is not from himself because God's not self -caused. He is of himself. He's without cause.

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And you can remember aseity kind of like the acai berry. So the acai berry is a super fruit.

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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.

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Laura, okay, so Laura has the illustration. It's a super fruit, right? So aseity is a super attribute.

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In fact, it's not even really an attribute. It's God's godness. So in Colossians 2 .9,

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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.

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It's God's independence. It's God's, Hermann Baving said that aseity is

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God's primary attribute. And again, in ways, it's not an attribute. It's just who he is.

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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.

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

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His identity is existence, or his essence is identical with his existence.

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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.

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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?

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We have been brought into existence. And our human nature is divided and shared.

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If one of us stood up and said, I am human nature, we'd give him some meds, right?

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There's something wrong with you. But not so with God. God is identical with his existence.

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He alone possesses the power to confer existence on others. We all exist dependently.

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He exists necessarily. It's possible for us, and in fact true, that we have not existed.

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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.

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We are a portion of a group. But God does not relate to his essence as we relate to ours.

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God's nature is his existence, and he exists necessarily, which means that the existence of everything else, that's not

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God, and all there is, and all of existence is God and not God. And everything that is not

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God depends on God for its existence, because he is existence itself.

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Or what's been said, God is his own is. He's his own reason for being.

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God derives nothing from what is outside of him, and all that's outside of him derives everything from God for its existence.

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Let's get some old guys to help us with this. This is why God is blessed. John Gill on your handout.

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God is his own blessedness. It's holy within himself and of himself.

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He receives none from without himself or from his creatures, nothing that can add to his happiness.

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And he himself is the blessedness of his creatures who are made happy by him.

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God doesn't need you and I to be happy. We don't add to his eternal happiness.

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We need everything from him in order to be happy. God is of himself.

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He's independent. That's why he's blessed. He needs nothing. So Edward Lay said

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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.

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Or Edward Pohl, he'll put it this way. God all sufficient. That's another way to talk about aseity.

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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 excellency.

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As we start meditating on this, we see this is the radical difference between us and God.

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The radical otherness. We need everything from without us. God needs nothing outside himself.

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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.

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A helpful illustration is thinking of how John Owen thought of the difference between angels and worms and us and God.

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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.

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So John Owen said this. What is an angel more than a worm? A worm is a creature and an angel is no more.

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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.

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They agree in something. But what are all the nothings of the world to the God infinitely blessed forevermore?

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So think about the illustration Owen's laying there for us, the comparison. Think about an angel.

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What does an angel look like? That's a trick question. Angels don't look like anything.

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They're invisible. So whatever thoughts you have, you can remove those from your mind. Angels don't look like anything. They're invisible.

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They're spirits. And yet they are not identical with their existence.

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Angels aren't eternal. They're creatures. They've been made by God. They depend on God like we do, like worms do.

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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.

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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.

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He needs nothing. He's the creator of all things. We're all creatures.

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We're all dependent. God is the creator. He is the only one who's a se.

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He's of himself. He's independent, the independent creator. For many

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Christians, their vision of God is just as a big angel. And if you ask many Christians, well, describe

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God to me, they're not any different attributes than an angel would be. This is the big difference.

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He's a se. He's absolute. He's independent. He needs nothing. He's self -sufficient, a most pure spirit.

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We have life. God is life. That's what we're saying.

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We're saying God is independent. He is life. He is the fountain of life. He's being himself.

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And that's the name he gives us. Significantly, the name God gives us, I am who I am,

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I am. Now think about every other created thing, including us.

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We're all named by nouns. Rock, tree, grass, dog, man, woman.

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We're all named by nouns. That's what it means to be created. You're finite.

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You can be categorized, classed, compared. We're creatures. But God names himself,

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I am who I am. God names himself with a verb, with life.

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And God says, this is my name forever. And the word that's in our

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English Bibles, all caps, Lord, is a representation of the tetragrammaton, the

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Yahweh is how we pronounce it. Older pronunciations, Jehovah. And we don't have to get hung up on that.

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What's important to note is that the word is sort of a pun on I am who I am.

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It's the same letters, yod -hay, wah -hay. And it means a lot and it means very little.

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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.

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I am who I am. He is. That he is being in existence and life itself.

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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.

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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.

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Every time we hear or say the name Yahweh or Jehovah, Lord, we're being brought to mind being itself, life itself, the

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God who is. Calvin said that God's eternity and self -existence are declared by his name.

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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.

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God is a verb. He's life itself. He is. And he's given us the name

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Yahweh or Jehovah to remember that he is life. He is being. He is life itself.

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We're qualified by verbs. Man standing. Woman sitting.

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God is a verb. He is life. He is pure being. And he gives life and existence to everything else in creation.

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All that is because God is. So when we say that God is independent or he's of himself, he has a seity, we don't mean that God is independent like an iceberg.

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We mean God is independent like the ocean. He is an ocean of life.

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And he is self -sufficient and the infinity of life in himself.

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And he's independent of the bounds of creation. So again, we've benefited from our friend

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Herman Bobbink. He said, God is no abstract, fixed, monadic, solitary substance, but a plentitude of life.

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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.

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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.

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He's an infinite fullness of life. His fecund productivity. This is, we call

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God by a noun, but always remember he's a verb. God is. He is alive.

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And all that we say of God is to protect the pure being of blessed life that he is.

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Let's think of some of the implications about this. How does this touch down in just some ways?

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It covers everything. First is the radical dependence we have on God. It reminds us of our dependence.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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We depend on God for absolutely everything. I always kind of chuckle when sometimes

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Christians will remark about a remarkable providence or something and say, well, that was a God thing. Like, beloved, your next breath is a

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God thing. The fact that your atoms are now being held together is a God thing. Everything is a

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God thing, as it were. All things are from him and through him and to him. He's the ultimate cause, the sovereign mean, and the great end of all things.

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And we deny that God has done anything to somehow fulfill some lack in him.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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How does this impact, then, our worship of God, our devotion to God? Remember, this is the point that Paul is pressing here.

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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.

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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

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God. But what does then Paul go on to say? He says, God himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.

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And then he quotes their philosophers and say, it is even in God that we live and move and have our being.

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You are because God is. He is the is for your ising. Everything lives in and depends on him.

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And then Paul goes on to say the reason for this, that they should seek

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God. He is actually not far from each one of them. You see, establishing

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God's distinct otherness, his auseity, his independence is actually the motivation for our seeking him because he is the source of all things.

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It does not by removing God from us in his being is the motivation for us seeking

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God in worship. He is not far from any one of us. He's as close as our own existence.

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So when you ask, well, if this God is so independent, is he near? He's as near as your existence.

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Augustine put it this way, you speaking to God were more inward to me than our most inward part and higher than my highest.

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God is more inward than our most inward being. He accounts for it. God and we depend for him on everything.

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Do you realize we're as close today to non -existence as all of creation was a second after the act of creation?

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All God has to do is, you know, people make jokes about God will send a lightning bolt or something.

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God just has to stop you and we're done because everything we are is upheld by his sovereign creative plan.

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And it's God's absolute separation from creation that assures us that communication and communion with him is possible.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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And that God is near to every single person made in his image and he's created us to seek him.

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And this reminds us then thirdly of what's happening in worship. If God has no need, why do we worship?

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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.

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You may want to write this down. You want to revolutionize your devotional life. God doesn't need your worship.

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God is not a beggarly pagan deity who needs you to worship him to pay attention.

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What does that mean worship must be then? It means worship is a gift to us.

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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.

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And whatever right worship is paid to God, prophets notice not him, but man.

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For no man would say he benefited a fountain by drinking or to the light by seeing.

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

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Worship is a grace. It's a gift. We're not adding to an infinite fountain. That's impossible to do.

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You're drinking from it and receiving life from his life. Edward Lay said, put it this way,

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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.

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I've made this point. I'm currently teaching at home through the Lord's prayer and how the

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Lord taught us to pray first to our father in heaven. And just before that in Matthew six,

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Jesus said, our father has no need to know our needs. He knows what they are.

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We don't need to heap up empty phrases like the Gentiles who think the gods won't hear them.

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God doesn't need to be controlled. He already knows what you need. God has no need of your prayers.

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You do not pray because God has needs. We pray because we do. And prayer is a gift.

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It's an invitation for communion with God. God calls us to him to receive of his blessed life.

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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.

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If we understand God's aseity, it will absolutely transform everything we think about our worship and communion.

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We are not drudgingly coming to a needy God who needs us to do our part. We have a

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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.

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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.

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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

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God's simplicity, what's his complexity gonna be like? Because to say God is simple is not a simple statement.

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So when we say simple, when we're talking about God or divine simplicity, we don't mean easy.

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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.

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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.

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He's uncomposed, not that he's easy or that he's understandable, he's incomprehensible. He's incomprehensible because he's simple.

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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.

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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.

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We've already denied that when we say God is a spirit. He has no body like men. We're saying

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God has no parts, he has no elements or no principles or no other things of which he's composed.

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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

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God. God is, he's simple. Now, usually Christians will ask, well, where is this in scripture?

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And it's honestly, it's everywhere. We just looked at Romans 11, from him and through him and to him are all things.

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All things are from God. There are no things prior to God. God's not made up of anything, there's just God.

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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.

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God is goodness. Or 1 John 4 ,8, God is love. Or God is light.

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That's who he is, that's not what he has. This is divine simplicity.

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So Edward Lay describes it this way. God is absolutely simple.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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And so God is without containment, he's without finitude, he's simple, he's uncomposed.

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This is why some have said that to deny this in God, to deny divine simplicity is effectively to affirm atheism.

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Because everything composed is material. And if God were composed and were not simple, then he'd effectively be part of the created order.

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He'd be part of the material world. And there would be no infinite divine creator, no true

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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.

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For us as creatures, for us as people, attributes are very different than when we talk about God's attributes.

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Because we understand our attributes as incidental to us. You can gain and lose them and still be you.

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You still have your being or nature. I can be loving, and I can be loveless.

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I can lose my attribute of love, but I'm still me. I'm still my nature,

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I have that capacity. A tree doesn't lose its tree -ness because its leaves change and fall.

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It's lost its characteristic, its attributes, and so on. We can lose our kindness and become malicious, but we're still people.

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This is because we're composed and we're not simple. So our attributes vary and change, we're creatures.

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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.

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God was loving over here, but now he's angry. We don't wanna think of God that way.

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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,

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God has just managed perfect self -control. No, that's not what we're saying. We're saying that God is his attributes.

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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.

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It's not what God is made up of, and they're not things in God of which he's composed.

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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.

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So when we're talking about God's love or his holiness or his justice, we're just describing God and who

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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 and self whatsoever you call it.

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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.

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We're not thinking about a pizza or a pie that you slice God up in. You know, he's got his holiness slice, his justice slice, his loving slice.

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We're talking about who he is, and every single one is a description of the whole divine being.

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God has, at the end of the day, one attribute. God, he is. He is through and through him.

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God is essentially his attributes. He is light. He is love. He is life. He is justice.

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He is holiness, and on and on. Jeremiah Burroughs here says, whatsoever is in God is

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God himself. From this name Jehovah, or Yahweh, the Lord, he's an absolute being, nothing but himself.

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Notice this. Whatsoever you can say of God is God. The wisdom of God is

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God. The mercy of God is God. The justice of God is God himself, and so all the attributes.

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These aren't things that make God up or that God sends out.

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They are God. It's who he is. God has one attribute, Godness, and this is divine simplicity.

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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.

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So we distinguish between various bodies of water on the world based on the shores in which they touch.

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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?

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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.

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And we also know that the situation in various coastlines and in the ocean will vary around the world, not because the seawater is different, but because of the effects, the climate, of where the ocean is.

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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.

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It's horrible, a winter storm. In the same way, God is

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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.

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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.

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This is the effect of God in his perfectly simple being related to the status of the creature.

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Another illustration to try to help us mentally grasp this is, we talked about this morning,

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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.

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And when coffee is properly sourced and roasted, you taste various notes. That's what they call them, flavor notes in the coffee.

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And to get the full effect, if you do, it's called cupping, actually. So if you wanna have a fancy coffee tasting party, it's called cupping coffee.

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And to get the full effect, you actually have to slurp. It sounds rude, but it's actually how you properly taste coffee.

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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.

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And you might slurp fresh roasted coffee and you could taste nutty. Sometimes it's floral.

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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.

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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.

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And the 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.

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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.

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It's the flavor notes that they tasted when tasting the coffee. Now here's the thing.

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Those flavor notes are not added flavor to the coffee. Flavored coffee is from the devil, by the way.

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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.

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But at the end of the day, when you taste the coffee, all that is in the coffee is what?

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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?

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Well, it's coffee. What does that one taste like? Well, it's coffee. Well, what's in this bag? It's coffee.

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And they would be true, but would also be nonsensical to us because our taste buds distinguish various flavors based on the roast and the variety and the source of the coffee.

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Now, this is something of an imperfect analogy of God's simplicity and divine attributes.

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What are the attributes? Everyone is simply God acting according to his divine perfections.

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When God judges a disobedient sinner who is deserving of judgment, it's just God acting as God.

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When God rescues sinners in his son, it's God acting as God.

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When God created the world, it is God acting as God. You could say that for everything, but we can't comprehend that.

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But all that is in God at the end of the day is God. So God reveals himself to us in our creaturely frame by his attributes.

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We understand what love is. We understand what judgment is. We understand what mercy and wisdom are.

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And so God names his acts and he names his attributes to help us understand them.

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And we have these attributes and these descriptions to the single divine being because you and I cannot comprehend or take in infinite simplicity.

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We can't even begin to think of the divine essence. So God has revealed himself by varied attributes.

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William Ames says this here on your handout. He says, we are not able to take in this divine essence in one act of comprehension.

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It is explained as manifold. That is to say, as if consisting of many attributes.

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That is to say, we describe God with these varied attributes because we can't take in his whole essence in one comprehension.

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Or Gregory of Nazianzus in the fourth century has a wonderful analogy. He says, neither has anyone yet breathed the whole air nor has any mind entirely comprehended or speech exhaustively contained the being of God.

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But we sketch him by his attributes and so obtain a certain faint and feeble and partial idea concerning him.

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Now, I love that analogy that Gregory uses of breathing the whole air. Can you imagine trying to inhale the atmosphere?

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I mean, it's impossible, right? Well, and God's incomprehensible. So just as we can't inhale the entire atmosphere, we can't take in the infinite essence of God.

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And so because we are incapable of that, we sketch him by his attributes, holiness and love and goodness and justice and so on, so that we can get something of an idea concerning him.

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And so what this means importantly is what we call the attributes of God, they're distinct in how we think of God, but they're not divisions or distinct in God.

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God is. And we must distinguish between them because of our limitations, but they're not diverse properties in God.

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God's not put together, he's not composed, he's simple. God is blessed and he always is.

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And he doesn't lose any of what he is. Well, let's tease this out then and think more about some of the implications of divine simplicity.

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Admittedly, probably one of the more difficult concepts to grasp, it takes time to think it through, but what are some of the implications that help us?

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Simplicity means first that God is personal. God is personal. And this may seem counterintuitive, but it's true.

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If we were talking about the attributes of a rock, it would be nonsensical for us to say it's circular and angular.

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It's a thing, those are contradictory. But when we're talking about God, we can use all these attributes because we're talking about a person.

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Imagine if I was rescuing my wife from some assailant, with some sweet Jason Bourne, Matt Damon moves, right?

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So I rescue my wife, I use some sweet karate moves to disarm her assailant.

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What attributes would you say I expressed in that moment? You could say, well, I showed wisdom,

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I showed love, I showed strength and power, of course, I showed justice.

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But at the end of the day, what are you describing? It's just me. They're not parts of me, it's just who

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I am. It's just what I expressed in that moment. It's the concurrent expression of attributes.

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So when we talk about all the attributes of God, it reminds us that we're talking about a personal

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God. We're not talking about an it, we're talking about a him. So we can say God is holy and loving and just and good because we're talking about who he is.

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We're not talking about a thing, we're talking about our God. And it also means simplicity has an important part to play in our assurance.

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God can be trusted. It's been said by someone else, God can't go to pieces on you because there are no parts into which he might fall.

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God's not made up of pieces, so he'll never fall apart on you. God is, God is irreducible.

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And just think if it were otherwise, if God were made up of something, then we would have to trust something other than God.

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We'd have to get behind God. Who made God? What is he made up of? We need to trust that.

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But there's nothing before or prior to God. And so we trust him and our assurance is in him.

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Simplicity also is very, very significant for our cultural moment.

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So sometimes I get the accusation of what, why do you care? Pastor, why do you care about all these things about God?

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Don't you see our world's falling apart with all the nonsense out there? And I say, yes, exactly.

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It's because of that that we need to care so much about who God is. You see, simplicity means that love and justice, they're not things.

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They're defined by their source, which is God. He is the archetype.

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He's the beginning. God is, he's the original. And it's very, very significant for all the moral confusion in our world today.

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Our society says love is love. That's nonsense. God is love.

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Love's not any eternal thing. God is the eternal one. He is love.

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And so he defines love. And when we have conversations with our neighbors and family and friends about why we believe what the

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Bible teaches about who men and women are and marriage and so on and family, and, well, why should

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I believe that? Well, it's in the Bible. It's the word of God. Well, why should I believe the word of God? Well, because God is, and he defines all of reality.

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He is the reference point for justice, for love. It's all defined by him.

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See, at the end of the day, all the complex debates raging around us, they reduce down to, what do you believe accounts for reality?

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And the answer is God. And so ultimately, they're all conversations about who God is.

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And so we have to be, this is our foundation, and even reaching our world. The love of God, William Helms of Brackel said, is by definition, the loving

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God himself. From him are all things. And so we bring and present our great and glorious creator to our world, who will forgive us by faith in Jesus.

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And it is he who establishes reality for us. So simplicity means that God defines all the virtues our world is fighting over today.

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Simplicity also means that wrath is not essential to the nature of God. And this will be important, we'll think about impassibility later today.

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Wrath is not essential to God's nature. Wrath is the effect of God's justice on the wicked.

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But it's not properly, properly, an attribute of God. If wrath were a proper attribute of God, then

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God would be angry all the time, eternally. God is love, the

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Bible says, God is good, God is joy. You notice the Bible never says God is wrath, as though he's identical to it, because he's not.

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Gerald Bray put it succinctly like this, he said, simplicity makes it impossible to say God is wrathful by nature.

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Wrath is the way disobedient people experience God's justice, but it is not a divine attribute.

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If it were, God would be angry with everybody all the time. So wrath is a relative expression, we say, of the effect of God's justice on sinners.

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That's also why you'll notice in Scripture that the coming of the Lord is always described as one event having two effects, judgment and redemption.

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One example is 2 Thessalonians 1, Paul writes about the return of Christ, and he says, beginning in verse six, in 2

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Thessalonians 1, since indeed God considers it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you, and to grant relief to you who are afflicted as well to us.

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When the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels, in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know

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God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus, they will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction away from the presence of the

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Lord and from the glory of his might when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints and to be marveled at among all who have believed because our testimony to you was believed.

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Notice the parallel dual effects on the single event. He is, verse six, repay with affliction, verse seven, and grant relief.

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He is going to inflict vengeance and be marveled at. You see,

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God's judgment and salvation are not two sides of God, as we said earlier.

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It's God and his holiness. And whether you are, when Christ returns, relieved and marveling, or whether you are afflicted and judged, has nothing to do with whether you catch

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God on a good or bad day. It has everything to do with your relationship to the simple, holy

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God. And if you're in Jesus Christ and there is no more condemnation for you in him, so there is nothing to fear from his return, so we only look at the return of Christ as relief and to marvel and glorify him.

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But if we're outside of him and we've rejected Christ, then what's coming in the same return is affliction and judgment.

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You see, this is the simplicity of God being reflected here. And this is a basis even of our assurance that we can know that if we are in Christ and if his righteous life is ours by faith and his sacrificial vicarious death is ours by faith, then we have nothing to fear with his return.

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God is satisfied with us in his son, the simple God, and we look to him as a

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God of love in Christ. Simplicity also means about the gospel that it is personal and it is

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God rescuing us from himself. When I was in college,

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I had to read a whole book in a theological ethics class about how the cross was cosmic child abuse.

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It was horrendous. And I didn't have the equipment at that time to deal with it. But there is even a lot of caricatures about the gospel that God the father just out of nowhere punishes this innocent man,

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Jesus of Nazareth. But God suffers his own justice in the son incarnate.

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We see this in many places. One in John 8 verse 58 when the Jews jeered at him because Jesus declared that Abraham had rejoiced to see his day,

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Jesus said, truly, truly I say to you before Abraham was, I am. And they picked up stones to stone him because they knew exactly what he was saying.

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He was claiming to be the God of Exodus three, Yahweh. The I am who

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I am. And that's exactly what happened in Jesus. The I am assumed humanity and became a man, became one of us.

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And at the end of his ministry before the cross, Jesus said in John 14 verse six, well known to Christians, I am the way,

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I am the truth, and I am the life. Notice Jesus did not say,

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I have truth, a way and life. He said, I am it.

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He is the simple God in human flesh. He is true.

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He is life. He's being itself, incarnate as a man.

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The I am of the burning bush is the same as the Lord Jesus Christ. He's assumed humanity for us.

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It reminds us that the grace of God in Christ is not a thing. It's God.

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God gives us himself. We get Christ and righteousness through him. And it is by our salvation in faith in Jesus, we're not getting goods.

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We're getting the good. We're getting God who brings us into his life by his grace in Christ.

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Amen. Let me pray. Father, we thank you for your goodness.

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We pray that you would help us to begin to contemplate and meditate upon these incomprehensible truths as your aseity and simplicity.

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We pray these things that are admittedly difficult will become wonderful to us, a source of assurance and comfort and of even joy and worship.

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We pray you would do this for your glory, that we would rejoice to sing your praise and to proclaim your excellencies to all around.