Equip 2024: Our Blessed and Boundless God #5 - He Who Suffers Not: Divine Impassibility

Divine Impassibility and Why It Matters

Yeah, Kofi is very right, and he was very wise to put this before lunch, not afterwards. You don't want to be thinking about divine impassibility on a full stomach. And this will be, so we'll finally answer the question that we raised in our first session last night, is if God is blessed, is that good news if we're depressed?

And what does that mean? And really, impassibility is, you're now prepared to think about it. Part of the reason that when Christians first encounter divine impassibility, the fact that God does not suffer, is because they haven't thought through what we've tried to think through already.

So if you've been tracking fairly well in the first few sessions, you're now prepared and have the mental equipment to think through what we must now say for God being impassible. And effectively, when we say God is blessed, that's our positive description, and if we're going to say that, we necessarily have to deny them that God has passions, that He's passable.

So we're saying the same thing. Now today, as it stands, it's fairly common for Christians to reject the idea that God is impassible, that He's without passions. But this we just need to know that our generation is out of step with the vast majority of Christian.

History.

So Christians took for granted, for like 18 centuries, that God is without passions.

He's impassible.

It's in every major confession and doctrinal statement prior to and coming out of the Reformation. But it's basically become culturally out of vogue. Popularly, many people will say that the answer to human pain and our suffering is that God weeps with us, that God suffers with us.

And especially since this became popular since the 20th century and after the two world wars, that in view of just horrendous human suffering, that God is suffering along with us. And that's the proof of His love for the world.

And we want to push back on that and say why that's actually short-sighted and is not consistent with who the Bible says God is and really our hope in Him. And you're prepared now to think through this as we think about impassibility.

Here's one definition of impassibility from one theological encyclopedia. Impassibility is the divine attribute where God is said not to experience inner emotional changes of state, whether enacted freely from within or affected by His relationship to and interaction with human beings and the created order.

So impassibility is the attribute where God does not experience inner emotional changes of state. So that's what we mean by passion. It's an old word. It's rooted in Latin patio, which means to endure or undergo.

So when you suffer, you undergo, you're passive. You undergo what you don't want and you change. And so in many ways, impassibility is just filling out our definition of immutability.

That we just looked at.

God's unchangeable means He doesn't experience inner emotional changes either, like we do. He doesn't undergo. We could reduce impassibility down to say there's basically, as someone said, three.

No's.

So we're denying three things when we say God is impassible. We're saying that God is not able to suffer, first. God doesn't undergo suffering. We're saying God does not have emotions, second. And we're saying, third, God cannot be acted on outside Himself.

No one acts on God. No one changes God or affects God. So God doesn't suffer. God doesn't have emotions. God cannot be acted upon. And again, we're just denying what we've already said positively. God is most blessed.

He's absolute. He never suffers. Now sometimes theologians try to get out of this and say, well, God doesn't have emotions but He has affections. But it means the same thing, to be affected. Or God doesn't have passions.

He has emotions. But emotions come from the French word, immovoir, which means to excite or to disturb. It's to be moved. No one moves God. God doesn't get affected by His creation. He doesn't get impacted by what He's made.

Now again, underneath all of this, we're just reiterating what we've already said. God never changes. He doesn't undergo anything internal to Him. He's never in a state derived from His circumstances.

Now this again was plain, vanilla, ordinary Christianity for like 18 centuries. Christians took it for granted. And it was assumed that when Scripture ascribes emotions to God, as it does, that we treat it the same way as when Scripture says God has arms and legs, or wings, or that God's a strong tower.

That it is a figure. It's a metaphor. It's a picture communicating to us. And what's key to remember again is that impassibility is consequential to God's blessedness. So John Gill on your handout says, properly speaking, there are no affections and passions in God to be wrought upon or worked up so as to disturb and disquiet Him.

He is invariably and unchangeably the same and so most blessed forevermore. The reason we know God is blessed is He does not undergo passions.

He doesn't change. He never suffers.

John Calvin said, God we know is subject to no passions and we know that no change takes place in Him. It must ever be remembered that God is exempt from every passion. Now again this was normal. We reject it today, sometimes outright, mostly because what changed in the last couple centuries that wasn't true in the 18 centuries prior of Christianity.

We've become obsessed with emotions. In fact the reason that we now ascribe emotions properly in God is because we've deified emotions. We've deified feelings. We think actually in our culture that feelings are definitive of identity and reality.

And it's because we've undergone that socially that now we have difficulty looking at God and saying well God is without this because we actually think these are constitutive of reality, of being. We even see that when we, I always pay attention when someone answers a question, when they're asked a factual question, notice how often they start with I feel.

Think of that, that's very significant. We no longer say I think or I reason this way. We say I feel about something that's a factual discussion. We're obsessed with feelings. And further sometimes when we hear that God is impassable, what we hear from that is He's therefore dispassionate and apathetic.

He doesn't care. And we have to say at the outset we are not saying that at all actually. What we're actually saying is that it's impossible for God to care any more or any less than.

He already does.

Because if He will perfectly cares, He perfectly loves. So we're saying it's impossible for that love to ever be altered. It's impossible for it to ever change. Or His joy in any way diminished or need to grow.

So by saying God has no passions, what we're actually doing is protecting His perfections. We're protecting them as perfections. That God's love, His joy, His goodness, His justice is perfect and eternal.

Divine Impassibility in Genesis 1–6

Now let's pull this together and just ask some questions. Is impassibility true?

Is it good?

And is it beautiful at the end of the day? Now is impassibility true? Now let's start applying what we've considered as we've thought about God's otherness and as we've thought about analogy and how God communicates to us according to what is the proper of nature of creature and creator.

And we can start where the Bible begins. Let's just start in Genesis chapter 1 and we're going to work our way to an important passage in Genesis 6. But I want us to just remind ourselves about how we read the whole of the Bible and start with Genesis 1 verse 1, the very beginning.

The Bible begins, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Before there was anything else, there was what?

God.

Right?

There was God. God created the world. Our world has a beginning so our world is an eternal.

God is. But we are not.

And the inception of the creation was the commencement of change. To be created is to change. That's the nature of creatures. That was the beginning of time. Time is the measure of change. That was the beginning of measuring the relations of things that change.

So with the heavens and earth here, God created the heavens and earth, that's just a description.

Of everything.

All things. All that was made. God made all things visible and invisible from him, through him, and to him again. And because God is no thing, he's eternal, immense, immaterial, and immutable. He's unlike all things created by him.

So we have here, on the very first verse of our Bible, the aseity and eternality of God. God is distinct and separate from his creation and all things that he's made. But notice what we're told in verse 2.

The spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. Now, should we think that God's spirit here is like some helicopter swooping down on the.

Waters?

Was there a wake being stirred up by the hovering of God's spirit?

No.

God who has no space was not moving over the waters, leaving a wake. This is an analogical statement. It's a figure. God's enlivening presence by the spirit, the giver of life, was present in creation.

Or what about in verse 3, and God said, let there be light. God spoke creation into existence. But does God speak like us? Does God have vocal cords? Does he talk? Was he speaking Hebrew when he spoke light into existence?

Did air pass through his throat and produce sound?

No.

So even the phrase, God spoke, it's analogical. It's similar, but it's not the same. Matthew Poole on this passage here helps us. He said, God commanded, not by such a word or speech as we use, which doesn't agree with the spiritual nature of God.

Or to say God has vocal cords doesn't agree with God being spirit. This either means, Poole says, an act of his powerful will, called the word of his power, or by his substantial word, his son, by whom he made the world, who is called the word partly for this reason.

So you see, something very significant is happening when we see in verse 3 of the Bible, God spoke, said creation into existence, and we're told that he made the world through the word later in the New Testament.

Something very significant is happening as God, the triune God, is creating through the.

Son.

So it's the beginning of the revelation of God. But we see these statements here. We're not to take them, we might say, literally. We don't take them univocally. Or we could move on. Genesis 3, verse 8.

Adam and Eve, after they sinned, it says they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden. Did God grow legs? The sound of him walking, was he bipedal, moving through the garden? No, the idea of God walking is an image.

It's communicating to us the presence of God. God manifesting himself. He manifested himself specially, and he's coming, of course, to expose and confront Adam and Eve. What I'm doing here is just giving examples how it's almost intuitive.

We do this all the time.

We know that such statements like God spoke, the spirit hovered, God walked, we know they can't be literal. We know that. But neither are they meaningless, are they? God is communicating important truths, and he's revealing about his manifestation and his presence, but we know that we have to interpret them according to the spiritual nature of God, or else we'd have to make a whole hash of who God tells us who he is.

What we say is that God here is communicating anthropomorphically, human-like. He's communicating in a human-like way so we can understand. Remember, we looked at it last night.

We talked about God's baby talk.

The Bible is baby talk. He's cooing to us. God is accommodating himself to us. So that's why he says he created by speaking. The spirit brought life by hovering. God confronted Adam and Eve by walking.

We know these aren't literal. They're not proper of who God is, but God is communicating himself so that we can understand how the omnipresent God, self-sufficient God, would do these things. Now, turn to Genesis 6, verse 6.

The Lord regretted that he made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. Now, based on all that we've already looked at just in the first three chapters, why would we now, if we came to chapter 6, take this literally and directly?

Maybe we can start just with heart. Does God have a heart? No, he's not physical. He doesn't have a body, right? So, does God then grieve?

No.

Does God regret properly?

No.

And we can see elsewhere in Scripture where we are pushed to have to say, well, this is some kind of figure. This is some kind of image by which God is communicating to us in a non-proper, non-literal.

Way.

So, for example, in Numbers 23, verse 19, elsewhere, we read, God is not man that he should love, or a son of man that he should change his mind. That is, regret, naham, his mind. Has he said, and will he not do it?

Has he spoken, will he not fulfill it? Or Psalm 110, verse 4, the Lord is sworn and will not change his mind or regret his mind. So, the Bible says elsewhere that God never regrets. He doesn't change.

But probably the clearest example is in 1 Samuel 15. Because in the same chapter, in 1 Samuel 15, in verse 10, we read this, I regret that I have made Saul the king, for he has turned his back from following me and has not performed my commandments.

In sin, Saul rebelled and turned against the Lord. So, the Lord reveals regret. But later in that same chapter, in Psalm 15, verse 29, Samuel rebuked Saul who lost the kingdom and says this, the glory of Israel will not lie or have regrets, for he is not a man that he should have regrets.

So, you have in the Bible, in the same chapter, you have God revealing himself as regretting that he made Saul king because he doesn't have regret. Regret was ascribed to God because God is altering his action towards Saul and now treating him in holy justice, just like a man, when he regrets, what does he do?

He changes his actions. The normal course of action that was expected is going to change. And God takes the image of regret to reflect how he is changing his course of action. And the fact that God puts both of these in his word, he describes himself as regretting, and then he also says, I'm not a man, I never regret, means he's forcing us to have to reason this out.

We're expected to derive these conclusions from his word and to understand it. God is expecting us that by saying the Lord regrets and he will not regret in the same chapter, that we're to interpret the descriptions in light of God, who God says he is.

When he reveals himself, absolutely like in Exodus three, I am who I am. God is who he, what he does. He does by who he is. So just as here, God doesn't have a heart. When we say also God doesn't have passions or affections, he's impassable.

He's God. So when we say God's impassable, we're saying the same thing. God says in his word, he's not a man.

He's not a creature.

He's God. And the true God is therefore very much like the false gods of the pagans who are projections.

Of humanity.

And we see this, another example of God's impassability in Acts 14. In fact, one of the clearest statements is Acts 14, where Barnabas and Paul, they go to Lystra. And after they heal the crippled man, if you remember in Acts 14, all the pagans begin.

To worship them.

They begin to worship Paul and Barnabas as the healers. And in verse 14, that Luke says they tore their garments. They got very emotional. They were angry because they were there preaching the gospel and they were being worshiped by the idolaters.

And then in verse 15, we read this in Acts 14, men, why are you doing these things? We also are men of like nature with you. And we bring you good news that you should turn from these vain things to a living God who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them.

Now the ESV has like nature, but you have to go back to the old King Jimmy to get the full imports of this statement. So the King James here says we are also of men of like passions with. You see, Paul and Barnabas were amongst all these pagans in Lystra and the point of contact they made with them to show how they could not be God.

They had passions, they had emotions, they got angry when they were being worshiped falsely. And that should prove by itself. We're not God because what's the conclusion to draw? God doesn't have this.

God does not act this way. God does not have passions like we do. It proves we're not God because God is impassable. God's not a man that he should regret. And God, any more than God is a man that he should walk.

So that means that his perfections of love and joy and goodness and holiness are impassable. Now we struggle with this as we've said, but we don't struggle with saying, well, God doesn't walk, of course not, he's a spirit because of the particular affection and devotion we've given to emotions that leads us to humanize God.

But that's not a good exchange. So let's ask next, why is it good? Why is divine impassibility good? Why is it good to know that God is impassable? Why is God's word here in Genesis 6, it's good for us to know it's not literal.

It's not proper, we would say, of God that he grieved and regretted of what's in God. Remember, when you see a father get down with his little children to play, and when you play with little kids and you make silly sounds with them and get down and play with them, we don't think, well, look at that father manipulating his children.

We say, no, what a good dad, getting down there, playing with his kids. God is a good father, and so he speaks to us figuratively like we understand. He gets down, as it were, and he communicates to his children like a good father.

And William Ames gives us the import of why God speaks this way. He says, the affections attributed to God in Scripture, such as love, hatred, and the like, either designate acts of the will or apply to God only figuratively.

And notice what Ames says, they designate acts of the will. God describes his sovereign acts with human-like passions so that we would understand them. John Owen said something similar. He said, it's agreed by all that those expressions of repenting, grieving, and the like are figurative, wherein no such affections are intended as those words signify in creative natures, but only, notice this, an event of things like that which proceeds from such affections.

Now, significantly, Owen says, this is agreed by everybody. Again, this is normal Christianity. This isn't even debated in Owen's days. No one argues with this. But just like William Ames, Owen says, these affections attributed to God in Scripture signify events or acts that proceed from man-like affections.

That is, God takes these affections to describe the acts of his will and his acts in creation to help us understand and communicate what he's doing. So, with passionate language in the Bible, by God taking this to himself, he's describing how he acts according to his perfections so that we can understand them, because otherwise, we would be very, very diminished in understanding the acts and the will of God.

So, on this verse here in Genesis 6, Matthew Poole says, after the manner of man, God speaks. We know what it is to have a heart turn, so God speaks of himself here. Now, let's just think about this passage here just a little bit here in its context.

We see in verse 5,. Notice the parallels there in heart, right? God sees the heart, grieved in his heart. That's important. God's responding and seeing the heart of man. And we also have deliberate contrasts that go all the way back up to even verses 1 and 2 of chapter 6.

In verse 2,. And this is evoking creation itself, where God saw creation and it was very good. So, man is usurping, as it were, the place of God and surveying creation, but not to bless it, but to curse it and to be destructive and evil.

Man is multiplying on the face of the earth, but he's not a blessing. What we have here is the undoing of God's created intent. Man is spreading in sinful destruction, not in productive blessing. And just as man, in verse 5 then, is plotting only evil in his heart continually, so God's heart corresponds, in verse 6, with regret and grief.

And as his heart is turned away from God, God, in holy justice, expresses his heart in regret and grief. Now, what God is doing here is he's showing how he acts according to his perfections. Think about regret and grief.

What do they communicate? What does it say about you when you have regrets about something or someone or you grieve it? It comes out of your love. You don't regret and you don't grieve what is unloved.

You don't step on a bug and then regret or grieve it because you never loved it. It's an evoking of love. And it also, regret and grief, speaks of our sense of righteousness, right? When we regret something, we grieve or we grieve over what's wrong or undeserved.

It's our sense of justice or conscience or righteousness. And when we talk about regret, it's indicative of a change of course. When we regret something, that means something different is coming, something that would have been unexpected had we not regretted.

It's a redirection of plans. So here, as God is communicating grief and regret, it's evoking the God who is love and is justice. His love for his creation still is reflected in the image of regret and grief.

It's reflecting his continual purpose for his creation. And the fact that he has regret shows that his holy love for creation must now act contrary to the prior assumed course. What's coming in the very next verse?

Verse 7, I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land. So what's coming now?

Judgment.

Judgment we know as the narrative continues in the form of a flood. So judgment is now coming from God. God is revealing his unchangeable love and justice and his coming act of judgment in a way that we can understand.

He describes it with the image of a man. Like a man pained over injustice and evil in what he loves, in what he himself has created. So God's infinite love is being expressed here towards men made in his image.

And there is no change in God, but God is willing to act according to the changes in man. God here takes up the image of grief and regret because his love and his justice are unchangeable. They're immutable.

And he will now act accordingly to the sin of man. So Augustine said the anger of God is not an agitation of his mind, but a judgment imposing punishment on sin. Or Calvin says whenever we hear that God is angry, we ought not to imagine any emotion in him, but rather to consider that this expression has been taken from our human experience because God, whenever he is exercising judgment, exhibits the appearance of one kindled and angered.

So what we have here is justice, holiness, even love. God is acting according to his perfection. But to describe it for us, we've taken this image of regret and grief. It's the same elsewhere. When Paul writes in Ephesians 4 .30, do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.

The Spirit of God does not properly grieve. He's impassable. But the Holy Spirit will act as a grieved one will in holy distance from us if we persist in impenitent sin. So that's why the very next verse of Ephesians 4 is verse 31.

Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Matthew Poole again said the Spirit is said to be grieved when anything is done by us, which were he capable of such passings would be a matter of grief to him.

So when we offend him is to make him withdraw his comfortable presence from us. So God takes this image of grief, and he uses it to describe the act of his justice against human sin and impenitence. Now, why does God speak this way?

Why does God take these images? Because how else would the immutable, transcendent perfection of God's holiness be communicated to him? How else would he talk to us? That God is acting against the simple acts of his will according to infinite perfection of love, holiness, and blessedness.

That's incomprehensible to us. Can you imagine if preceding every narrative act of God, God just said, and God will act according to his simple perfection. Okay, what's that mean? We can't comprehend that.

And so God takes up these images and figures so that we understand what justice means, what holiness means, what divine love means. We have a sense of it. Augustine put it this way, if scripture were not to use such expressions, it would not familiarly suggest itself into the minds of all classes of men whom it seeks to access to for their good.

That it may alarm the proud, arouse the careless, exercise the inquisitive, satisfy the intelligent. And this it could not do, did it not first stoop in a manner to send to them where they lie. We could describe everything God does as God will act according to his infinite justice.

God could have said here, he will act according to his infinite justice. But it lands a bit wooden, doesn't it? And also a bit incomprehensible. God will act according to his infinite justice? I can't comprehend that.

I don't know what that means. But I know what grief to your heart and regret means. And so when the Bible said God is grieved to his heart and regret it he made man, that tells me something about holy justice that I otherwise wouldn't comprehend.

That tells me something about the simplicity and severity of the holiness of God. It communicates actually how other his holy love is. And that it does not change even in the face of the sin of his creatures.

So God comes down to us to reveal his acts to us in ways that resonate and resemble human actions so we can comprehend it. And we do this all the time again when we read scripture. For example, in Psalm 18 verse 2, The Lord is my rock and my fortress, my deliverer, my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield, the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.

Now we all know that God's spirit, he's not made of granite. He's not a fortress. We know he's not a shield. But we also know what all that reflects, don't we? Stability, strength, protection, defense.

God's not lying to us. He's communicating in a way that is more vivid than if God had only said, I will protect you. He does say that. But something deeper is evoked in us and in our minds when we hear rock and shield and stronghold and fortress, right?

And in the same way, God takes these images to speak to us like a good father. God is communicating to us his wonderful being so that we could understand him and reminds us that God is who he is and that his love, his joy, his holiness, they're not emotions, they're perfections.

Now we'll see this Lord willing at Redeemer tomorrow morning when we talk about what this means for God's love. And it's wonderful. And God's love is not something he's moved into. God's love is eternal and uncaused.

It's wonderful. Edward Lay says this, The attributes of God are everlasting, constant, and unchangeable, forever in him at one time as well as another. This may minister comfort to God's people. God's attributes are not mutable accidents, but his very essence, his love and mercy like himself, infinite, immutable, and eternal.

Why Divine Impassibility Is Beautiful

Well, so divine impassibility is not only true, it's good. Let's ask finally, and as we wrap up, is it beautiful?

Is it beautiful?

Now just consider if God were like us and experienced all the suffering that we endure, all the changes of our ever-changing universe, would that really bring him closer to us? Or would it push him farther away?

I would argue it would actually push him farther away. Because it would actually make creation a threat to God. If God could suffer with his creation, then creation would be a threat for which God needs to keep his distance.

Because it would actually harm him. And then also, if God could have to suffer with us in his creation, that means God would have to be freed from his suffering if we are to be freed from ours. The one who's going to free us, well, he has to be freed.

But who's going to free God? If God is the only one who can come for us, who's going to come for the one who will come for us? And if there's no one, and if God is in the same boat we are,.

We're in trouble.

We're in big trouble, and there's no hope. But another question that Christians ask, if God is impassible, what about the passion of Jesus? And this is where things get wonderful. It's the impassibility of God that makes the mystery of the incarnation so deeply beautiful.

The impassible God came to us and assumed a passable human nature to be our Savior. In Hebrews 2, verse 10, we read,. It was fitting that He, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the Founder of their salvation perfect through suffering.

It was fitting that God, to bring us to glory, ought to make our Founder Jesus perfect by suffering. Not perfect as God, He already was, but qualified as a man to be our Redeemer. So we read on in verse 17 of Hebrews 2,.

Therefore He had to be made like His brothers in every respect so that He might become a merciful and faithful High Priest in the service of God to make propitiation for the sins of the people. The God who never grieves, in God the Son took humanity to Himself to become a man of sorrow.

To be like us in every respect, to make propitiation for our sins, and to become who He is to this day, our merciful and faithful High Priest, who is able to sympathize with us as He has assumed our very nature.

And this is all wonderfully possible because God is impassible. If God suffered like a man, then the incarnation is not the wonder that it is. It's just God being more like God, but putting skin on it.

But the incarnation is far more mysterious and wonderful than that. And God is not able to sympathize with us because He did not suffer in human nature before, but we are assured that the Son of God knows what it's like to suffer as a man.

He has suffered as us in human nature. So He's a merciful and faithful High Priest, the only mediator between us and God, the Lord Jesus Christ, who knows our every weakness. And Christ suffered not just to empathize with our suffering, but to end it, to bring it to conclusion.

The good news is that in our sorrows, God is not in sorrow like we are. He can rescue us from them. No one has to rescue God. God is the rescuer, and He's our Savior. And He's the holy, loving, and blessed, and joyful God.

And in His eternal love, He is given, unconstrained, without any need of help. We've already seen God needs nothing. He loves because He is love. And in the fullness of His love, He is overflowed in the Incarnation of the Son, the Lord Jesus, to be our Redeemer and Savior forever.

And all this hope is only true if God is truly God, and God is truly God only if He's impassible. The impassibility of God protects our great hope in Him. Athanasius in the fourth century said this of the Incarnation, It is strange that He it was who suffered and yet suffered not, suffered because His own body suffered and He was in it, which thus suffered, and suffered not because the Word, being by nature God, is impassible.

In Jesus, the impassible God took up passable human nature to be our sympathetic Savior and to end our suffering, that we might have the joy of His perfections. So all that said, I want to go back to the question now we asked in session one that I said you weren't ready to answer.

Is it good news that God is blessed when we're not? Or in a world of horrendous suffering, how can it be good that God is perfectly happy in Himself? In December of 2018, I was bleeding out after surgery and if it were not for the quick action of the rapid response team and the nurses,.

I would have died.

My life for a few hours was touch and go there one night until the nurse finally sounded me along. And when the rapid response team came into my room and I was in and out of consciousness, I remember this very vividly.

My wife was crying, of course. They took her out of the hallway to sort of get her out of the way and all the doctors and nurses came in working on me. I remember still hearing her crying as I'm laying there.

She was very emotional because it looked like her husband was dying if people hadn't intervened. However, the doctor who replaced her in the room was very calm, matter of fact. And they were sticking me with all sorts of things and asking me questions.

Mr. Meister, do you want to think of this? And he was very calm. So you have this situation here. I'm bleeding out. My wife is incredibly emotional. The doctor nods. Now imagine if those roles were reversed.