A (0:05)

Hello, I'm Kevin DeYoung, pastor at Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina, and you are listening to Doctrine Matters. Each week on Doctrine Matters, we explore the rich doctrine of the Christian faith. We'll pull from the church's long history, complex debates, and over the course of the year, the hope is that we'll begin to frame out what is a clear, accessible, systematic theology, be looking at different Christian doctrines and their relationship to each other. And the hope, Lord willing, is we will grasp more and more the riches and the beauty of God's word. Thanks for listening. Let's turn to this week's Doctrine Matters. Last week on the podcast began to look at theology proper, the doctrine of God, as we've been doing for the last couple of weeks, and introduced the attributes of God, the incommunicable and the communicable attributes of God, which is the typical way of distinguishing between two kinds of attributes. Communicable. Think like a communicable disease, something you can catch. So those are the attributes we can in some way share with God. Or we we can have the attribute of goodness or kindness, where the incommunicable are things that are properly true of God alone. And I want to talk today about several of the incommunicable attributes. Of course, there are lots of them that we could talk about. We don't have time to hit all of them, but just try to hit a few that are I don't want to say most important because we're going to hear about this first attribute, that we shouldn't rank them, but maybe most instructive for understanding the the Godness of God. So the first one is the simplicity of God. And this does not mean that God is simple as easy to understand, but rather simple here means the opposite of composite. So God is not made up of things. He doesn't have parts. He's not like a tower of blocks or a kitchen recipe with lots of ingredients. Simplicity means that God is what he has. We've talked about some of that already when we talked about substance and accidents. So the simplicity of God means that as a divine being, he's not composed of body parts, nor is he composed of attributes as if they were parts of Him. So you don't just say, let's get love and justice and holiness and immutability and let's roll it all together, and then we get God. No, to say he's a simple being means that he has every attribute and he is every attribute. Now, that last line is important because sometimes you hear People say, well, God has justice, or he may have holiness, but doesn't the Bible say He is love? And the implication is that love is really more central to the nature of God, truer to his real identity. People talk this way and think like this all the time. It's a, it's a ranking of attributes. And the simplicity of God tells us that no, there are no essential attributes and then relative attributes, but every attribute God has, He has to the fullest. And every attribute is who he is. And just think about the statement God is love. Of course that's a verse in the Bible, so we want to affirm 1 John 4:8, God is love. But that doesn't carry any more metaphysical weight than several other passages in Scripture that have the same formula. God is light, for example. For example, 1st John 1:5, God is spirit, John 4:24, or God is a consuming fire, Hebrews 12:29. So God does not just have some attributes. Those examples of God is are just grammatical ways, and most of them are from John's writings of how to describe God. But just because a verse says God is doesn't mean that God has other attributes in some kind of ranking. So we should not first conceive of a class of beings called God and then relate certain attributes to this particular God. He's in a class by himself. God is not a type of a divine being, like a giraffe is a type of mammal. No, there's only one way to be God. And everything about this God is absolutely essential to being being God. God is whatever he has. Every attribute is identical to his essence. Now, as we see it from a human vantage point, we need to deal with distinctions and delineations. It's perfectly fine that we talk about attributes and we distinguish among them. So long as we understand that in a metaphysical sense every attribute is identical to his essence. He is not the composite of these attributes, some greater, some lesser. He is a simple being without parts or pieces. The next incommunicable attribute we can talk about is his aseity. Aseity comes from a Latin ah meaning from and se, meaning self. Divine aseity means God exists in and of himself. He's before all things, and on him all things depend. He exists absolutely independent of anything or, or anyone else. In a way, this is the very first thing we meet when we meet God. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now in the Hebrew, the verb is just there, bereshit bara. So you could say the first thing we meet about God is bara. That he creates. But similarly in the English the verb is put later, but it says in the beginning God. So what we encounter as we read Genesis 1:1 is that there is a God there before there is anything else, before there is even time. He is the one who has always existed because he doesn't have a beginning or an end. And notice there in Genesis, there's no prefatory material before the first verse. There's no background, there's no action to get things started. There's no struggle between gods and goddesses. That's not the God of the Bible. He doesn't need something or needs someone. There's no pre existent matter, there's just God. Sat means God is distinct from his creation. We live and move and have our being in God and not the other way around. Maybe just one or two more. Thinking about the incommunicable attributes of God, divine infinity is another one. And we can understand this in three different ways when we talk about God as infinite. And many of us will, especially with kids, will think of the Toy Story movie, Buzz Lightyear, to infinity and beyond. So but what does that word mean? Well, with relationship to God, we can think of it in three ways. God is infinite. First, in relation to Himself. We can call this God's absolute perfection. So this means all God has, He is. And all that God is, He is ad infinitum to the uttermost. His greatness is unsearchable, his power, perfection, know no end. So he's infinite in relation to himself. Second, God is infinite in relation to time. So the first thing relation to Himself we call absolute perfection. This one we call his eternity without beginning or end. Now when we use eternity, sometimes we even say in eternity past to mean before the creation of the world. And that's okay. But technically there is no past in eternity, because past makes us think about a temporal sequence when eternity is really the opposite of time. So theologians talk about duration. How do we experience duration? God duration is eternity. Humans experience duration as time. So that means that God is free from all kind of succession that would put him in the category of becoming instead of being. So time and eternity are two different ways of describing duration. God and his creatures both have duration. But God's is eternal, meaning it's none successive. This is almost hard for us to understand because we only can think of things in time. We think of one second, then another second. And yet for God there is no unfolding. There's no before, there's no after as we know it now. He relates to us in time. And we don't want to think of God outside of time as if there's a parallel universe somewhere where they don't have clocks. But rather it's how God experiences. Duration is as one eternal moment. So he's infinite with relation to time, meaning eternity, which is, we just learned, not actually the same as time. And then third, he's infinite in relation to space. We call this his immensity, meaning he's not constrained by physicality or geographic location. This is omnipresence, which means God fills every part of the space with his being. And slightly different here, the attribute of immensity stresses that God's being is not subject to any limitations. So there's related here. But omnipresence usually is to emphasize God's immanence. There's no place that you can go where he isn't. And this doctrine of his immensity is to stress his transcendence that there is no way God can be contained. So he cannot be contained. Let's just summarize this by imperfection, by time or by space. He's endless, he's inexhaustible, he's unlimited. We are finite. God is infinite. And then finally, and I'll just put these two together and maybe next week we'll say a little bit more about the last one. And that is to talk about God's immutability and his impassibility. Now they're related. Immutability means God does not change. Impassibility means God does not suffer. He is not subject to passions, that is to experience that rushes over him and renders him passive. And we'll try to come back to this next week perhaps, because we're going to talk about a couple of heresies that are related to this doctrine of impassibility. So let's just finish here by thinking about this related doctrine of immutability. Immutability by itself is neither good or bad if you're in line at the DMV and grateful for other hard working folks there. But it is a time warp and it feels like time stands still. So immutability at the DMV is not good news, but God being immutable is good news. It means that there is no possibility that God can increase. He can't increase or grow because it would mean there's something deficient in Him. Now he can't decrease or diminish. Any change in God presupposes there's some room for, for improvement. God, to put it another way, is not just a being. He is pure being. I am that I am. God is not the sort of being that can ever be other than the truth. This is what says several places in Scripture. He is not a man that he should lie or that he should change his mind. Now it's true. There are passages in Scripture talk about grieving the Holy Spirit, talk about God who was repented or regretted that he made man on the earth. One of the most important texts is 1 Samuel 15 because they're in 1st Samuel 15 where Saul has failed and rebelled. And God says that he regrets that he made Saul king. And yet he also says in that passage two times that God is not a man that he should regret. So you just look there and it's the same Hebrew word. You have to understand there's a sense in which God regrets. And that would be from our vantage point, that there are changes as we experience them, that God does in a way respond to human interaction. So in that sense there can be a change. Someone obeys or someone repents and there's mercy. Someone sins and there's judgment. And yet that passage also tells us clearly that God as God does not regret. He's not capable of it. He cannot change. He is immutable. And you can't just set it off. Well, he has immutability relative to his creatures, but he wills mutability in Himself. No, you cannot separate some essential immutability and some relative immutability. No, God is incapable of change. James 1:17. There can be no shadow or even hint of change. He admits no variation, no alteration, no equivocation. He is immutable in his essence, in his knowledge, in his will and in his purpose. His nature cannot be altered. For better or worse, he wouldn't be God. His knowledge cannot increase or diminish and whatever he purposes comes to to pass. Again, to put it philosophically, he is all being and no becoming. He does not grow, he does not learn. He needs nothing. He does not improve because he cannot improve. He is God. He does not change. He is immutable. Thanks again for joining us on doctrine matters. I'm your host, Kevin DeYoung. Our hope and prayer is that this has been helpful to you as you look at Scripture and try to understand the best of our theological tradition as Christians. Please consider subscribing to doctor Matters. And if this has been encouraging, consider passing it on to others. If you'd like to learn more about this week's doctrine, you can ask your pastor for good resources or check out my year long mini systematic theology book called Daily doctrine. It's available in print or audio from Crossway. Org. The Doctrine Matters podcast is produced by Crossway. To learn more, visit crossway. Org.