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then we should think of his will, not “as an act, a volition, or a series of volitions, but as an eternal, fully informed disposition.”
God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind.
In Ezekiel, for example, God says, “I am the LORD. I have spoken; it shall come to pass; I will do it. I will not go back; I will not spare; I will not relent; according to your ways and your deeds you will be judged, declares the Lord GOD” (24:14).
God makes it clear he will not change his mind: “The Glory of Israel will not lie or have regret, for he is not a man, that he should have regret”
As John Calvin liked to say, God lisps to us, like a parent or nurse
would, using baby talk to speak to a child.
So the language the biblical authors use of God does communicate something literally true about God, but that does not mean that same language should be interpreted literally.
Yet just as the biblical authors use anthropomorphic language (i.e., human form ascribed to a God without form), so too do they use anthropopathic language (i.e., human emotions ascribed to a God without passions).
Open theists are those who say the future is open to God; he does not know what will happen. Open theists turn to texts that say God “now knows” or “relents” or “regrets” to argue God does not know the future.
So why, then, did God choose to employ emotional language to describe himself in Scripture? Is he tricking us into believing something of him that he is not? “It is certain,” Calvin answers, “that God is not subject to any human passions, yet He is not able sufficiently to manifest either the goodness or the love that He has toward us, except by transfiguring Himself, as if He were a mortal man, saying that He would take pleasure in doing good to us.”
As we learned in chapter 2, the beauty of biblical language is that it speaks by way of analogy.
When we read that God has been merciful, we should think not that God has changed but rather that he has changed us. It’s not his status or identity that has undergone a revolution; it’s ours. “For when You look upon us in our misery,” says Anselm, “it is we who feel the effect of Your mercy, but You do not experience the feeling.”
“without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.”
By attributing a human attribute (passibility) to Christ’s divinity, one has confused the two natures, subjecting both to change. Such change has resulted in the humanization of the divine.
By implication, then, it is illegitimate to think that attributes of the human nature are communicated or transferred over to the attributes of the divine nature during the incarnation.
This careful nuance allows us to say, on the one hand, that Christ is impassible as he who is true God, and yet he is passible as one who is true man.
The person of Christ suffers, but he does so as a man.
For if the Son of God experienced suffering in his divine nature, he would no longer be experiencing human suffering in an authentic and genuine human manner, but instead he would be experiencing “human suffering” in a divine manner which would then be neither genuinely nor authentically human.
counterintuitive as it may seem, if Christ suffers in his deity at the cross—or the Father suffers with him as he looks on—then we have actually excluded the Son from suffering for us.
The cross is a case in point. It is precisely because God does not suffer that he is able to send his Son to suffer for us as a man.
In the end, only a God who does not suffer can accomplish redemption for a suffering humanity. Only one who is impassible can become incarnate as the suffering servant. And only one whose love depends on no one can offer grace that is free of charge.
He is not a God of change, as if he had a past and a future;
First, to be in time is to be restricted by a succession of moments.
Augustine says the reason we struggle to understand God’s eternal nature is that we can think only in this category. We try to “compare eternity with temporal successiveness which never has any constancy,”
If God were to reach his potential, that would assume he was not perfect before. He would be a God who is becoming something he was not before.
Second, if God experiences a succession of moments, it is hard to see how he is not one who can be measured.
Statements like these reveal that we are always becoming and in process.
Time always involves and includes “motion and change.”
Motion poses a problem because God does not have parts that can be moved into motion; he is simple.
no beginning, no end, and no succession of moments—the three marks of eternity.
“God sees all things together, and not successively,”
appreciate the many ways eternity is tied to all the other attributes.
The reason is that every “perfection would be imperfect, if it were not always a perfection.”
But he’s not only infinite, he is eternally and immutably infinite.
God’s eternity serves to protect, a “shield against all kinds of mutability.”
A being who is outside of time, however, cannot have parts. Imagine, for a second, how God’s essence would be affected if he were bound by time. The “supreme essence,” says Anselm, “would be cut up into parts along the divisions of time. For if its life span is drawn out along the course of time, it must have, as time does, a present, past and future.”
No parts, no change, no time. All three are inseparably tied together.
When we speak of the decrees of God, we are referring to an eternal reality. Such an order cannot be a temporal order; instead, it is a logical order.
It’s not the light in the room that causes the light switch to turn on but the light switch that causes light to brighten
All that to say, we can describe God as one who brings the created order into existence, but we should not assume that he, then, is a God bound by time as is that which he creates.
Edwards saw the miraculous and sudden conversion of many in Northampton only because he followed in the footsteps of Jesus, warning his listeners of the wrath to come unless they ran to the gracious arms of God; there only would they find eternal life.
When power is coupled with eternity, however, there can be no end to the punishment God inflicts.
As the “King of Righteousness,” Melchizedek would foreshadow the king-priest
Psalm 110, as a priest in the order of Melchizedek,
The marvel of an infinite, eternal God is that he, and he alone, can offer life eternal.
Everything we enjoy in this world is dissatisfying for two reasons: (1) it doesn’t last but is short-lived, and (2) the object itself does not prove ultimately satisfying
God defies both. Since he is an eternal being, enjoyment of God will never cease.
Our enjoyment of God for eternity will be altogether different. We will enjoy him without the threat of such joy passing by and being no more. We will desire him but without the fear that it may never come. The happiness of eternity will be as if it is always present, because the eternal God we enjoy does not change, and the dispensing of his glory never wanes.
God is more like a fountain than a cistern. Cisterns only contain so much water, but the water never stops gushing over from a fountain.64 He is a fountain of eternal delight.
“Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you; how much less this house that I have built!” (8:27).
