All right, well, it's so good to be with you again this morning. Thanks for coming out. Our text this morning is 1 Timothy 1, 17. Just a small passage again. Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen. Our doctrine this morning is that God is immortal, undying, everlasting. not subject to the limits of death. Now, I think this is one of the most obvious perfections of the divine nature. I mean, of course God is immortal. And of course, our text says so. In an outburst of praise, Paul lifts up Timothy's heart and mind to behold the beauty of the King, eternal, invisible, immortal. I mean, what would you call a God whose life could run out? Mortal, not God. As I say, it's obvious. But the Bible has a special way of talking about divine immortality, a way that emphasizes its character or quality rather than just its ongoingness or duration or extension. So God is immortal. Well, what kind of immortal? The biblical answer is absolutely, essentially immortal. It's not just that God's life doesn't run out or end, It's that God has the kind of life that cannot end. That kind of life, a life with immortal character, is the divine life. So for more detail, I want to look a little more closely at our passage, 1 Timothy 117. The king eternal, immortal, invisible. We would expect the English word immortal here to be a translation of a pretty simple, straightforward Greek word for death. The Greek word for death is thanatos, not thanos, the blue guy from the Marvel movies, but thanatos. So we would expect the word that we see here in English as immortal to be something like thanatos negated, no thanatos, a thanatos. It's a good Greek word, but it's not what's actually here in this text. Instead, in 1 Timothy 1.17, we get a strange Greek word, an unusual word, aftharto. I'll try not to say it too often, I'm going to offer an English translation of it to go along with the translation immortal, but aphtharto, A-P-H-T-H-A-R-T-O, aphtharto. Our word we would use for that most often in English is incorruptible, incorruptible. And now to the king eternal, immortal in the sense of incorruptible. For our purposes, it would be helpful if the key word happened to be translated in this passage by incorruptible, but I'm not here to argue with translators. Whenever I'm disagreeing with a translation or thinking I need to negotiate this differently, I remember the entire committee of translators is made up of people 10 times more qualified each than I am. So I need to be humbled about that. But I also have to say what I'm seeing as I study deeper into the text. It's rendered as immortal in the vast majority of English versions of this passage. It's built into songs and hymns. There's no getting around it. 1 Timothy 117 is going to say eternal, the king eternal, immortal, invisible. But I do want to take this opportunity to point out the importance of the distinction between immortal and incorruptible. To follow the tradition of translating affarto here with the word immortal is justifiable, but it's definitely a simplification of what we see. Immortal rightly indicates that God is not subject to death or mortality. But offering that translation smooths over the detail of the particular kind of death that God is immune to. God is immune to, perfectly immune to, death by decomposition. That is, by corruption. To say that God is incorruptible is to say that he does not come apart. He is not subject to decomposition. In rendering afflarto in this verse with immortal instead of incorruptible, I think the long, like, 500-year tradition of English translation is interpretively harmonizing it with the passage at the end of 1 Timothy. 1 Timothy 6, 16, Paul says, God alone has immortality. And there it is, the word we would expect, athanasian. He doesn't have thanatos, or death. God alone has immortality. In fact, that longer doxological passage at the end of 1 Timothy is kind of Paul's own expanded recapitulation of this opening verse here in 117. What I mean is Paul has given us this little burst of praise. It sounds like how a letter should end, right? Be glory and honor forever and ever, amen. Sounds like, okay, well that's the end. No, that's just verse 17 of the first chapter. I think that's in the back of Paul's mind when he gets to the end of the entire epistle and comes back with another doxology about God who alone has immortality. Nevertheless, simplifying incorruption to immortality in most English translations of 117 omits this key concept of corruption. What is this key concept of corruption that we substitute the idea of death for here? There's a bunch to be gained from recognizing that the word used here is incorruptible rather than immortal. So bear in mind several differences between the concepts of death and corruption. First difference, death lacks the idea of losing composition, of coming apart, right? You might just die without having in your mind the concept of, oh, I am decomposing, I am coming apart, I am being disassembled into my component, constituent parts. Second, while corruption suggests a process or a continuum along which things can be more or less corrupted, Death suggests a condition more like a toggle switch. You either are or you're not. It's punctiliar. Do we still use the word rheostat for a light dimmer? The dimmer switch. You've either got a toggle switch, lights are on or off, or a rheostat where you can dim things. Death sounds like, well, which is it, dead or alive? Corruption sounds like you could be corrupted or very corrupted, right? There's a whole scale, and our passage is saying God is not on that scale. It's not just the simple God's not gonna die, but that God's not even on the scale of corruption. He is incorruptible. Richard Chenevix Trench, who wrote this excellent book called Synonyms of the New Testament, it's a very old book, but he's incredibly sensitive to slight shades of meaning between words in the Greek New Testament. He said that there is a clear distinction between these two ideas and admits that the translation incorruptible is preferable. The word predicating of God, quote, that he is exempt from that wear and tear and waste and final perishing, that flora or corruption which time and sin working in time bring about in all which is outside of God and to which God has not communicated his own incorruptibility. So finally, the third difference, as we move on from this examination of the key word, it's worth noting that there's no well-established English word that just rolls right off our tongues that accomplishes everything that we require here in service of the divine perfection we're calling immortality in the sense of incorruptibility. So when I say incorruptibility, you're probably thinking like, well, here he goes again with another divine attribute we've never thought about. But I hope to show you it's right here in the text. And to say that this word we're seeing in Greek, other options for translating it include words like imperishability, invincibility, and indestructibility. These are all things to affirm of God. These are all viable possibilities for how to get our minds around this concept. Incorruptible, imperishable, invincible, indestructible. But the closest we've ever got to a standardized term for this in English is this word incorruptible. So here's how I recommend reading and singing 1 Timothy 117. Now unto the king eternal, immortal in the sense of incorruptible, invisible, the only God. In other words, At the systematic theological level, at the level of doctrines proper, we aren't dealing with two different doctrines. On the one hand, the doctrine of immortality, and on the other hand, the doctrine of incorruptibility. No, it's one doctrine, but it goes by two different names. A general name, divine immortality, and that's why I decided to go with that word in my title. And then a special name that's more detailed, more suggestive, and richer for exploration, incorruptibility. So it's a finer focus on the character of the divine immortality that scripture describes. So let's take another run at First Timothy 117 with this idea of incorruptibility present to our minds. The language of this passage is clearly exalted. While it's more doxological, it's more an act of praise than it is argumentative, it makes an important point in the way it draws together a small but powerful cluster of theological terms. You can see that incorruptibility here belongs in a series of divine attributes that characterize God as eternal, invisible, and as Paul concludes, perhaps by way of summary, as the only God. The Greek there is exactly what you'd expect, monos theos. As Gerald Bray points out in a commentary, this is one of the few places in the New Testament where divine attributes are specifically listed. The doxology includes key terms for speaking monotheistically about God in Greek. Even if the crucial concepts clustered here are all powerfully present in the Old Testament, they're expressed here in terms that had also come to be current in Hellenistic philosophical discourse. What I mean by that is when you think about Paul expressing biblical ideas in the Greek language, You might think that all the words are going to be kind of polluted by, every word in the Greek vocabulary could be polluted by the polytheism, which is fundamental to ancient Greek culture. Think about Homer and how if you're going to talk about the god of the Old Testament and say something in Greek, you're going to have to use words that have already been used to describe the Zeus of Homeric epic, one of the gods among many gods. But there's also a strain of Greek thought running all the way from at least Plato down into this Hellenistic period in the Greco-Roman environment of the New Testament that was actually some kind of monotheistic. There was kind of a philosophical strain of Greek thought that insisted that there is one principle behind everything. And this language was very active. And so when Paul expresses himself in Greek to express biblical ideas, he's going to lay hold of language like this. And that includes this word incorruptible. Trench notes that incorruptible in particular is a word from later Greek thought, is not found at all in the Septuagint and only twice in the Apocrypha. He goes on to point out that properly speaking, God alone is incorruptible. Even heathen theology recognized this, not less clearly than did biblical. In his commentary on Timothy, Philip Towner asserts that the word incorruptible here is borrowed, quote, from Greek categories by late Jewish writers. Its usage here in a Christian doxology surrounded by key terms of monotheistic reflection establishes the term's significance as part of a very high doctrine of God, philosophically informed, as well as worthy of using in praising God. Even though Paul doesn't bring to bear any arguments about the word or linger over any analysis that might draw out the implications of calling God incorruptible, we can learn a lot by the word incorruptible, I'm saying here, by the company it keeps. You see it in a list of high words for praising the one God and say, oh, this is that kind of language. But I want to show you another key passage about divine incorruptibility that does make it part of an argument that lets you see where Paul's going with it. There are, in fact, only two passages in the New Testament that use the word incorruptible and call God incorruptible. We just looked at one of them. The other one is Romans 1. Rather than just employing the term incorruptible itself, the first chapter of Romans makes use of it in a discourse framework, an argument that establishes its meaning and shows us its implications. As Paul traces the trajectory of humanity away from God, he moves through the categories of ungodliness and unrighteousness reaching the conceptual climax in the notion of corruption. So you know the descent pattern of Romans 1, ungodliness, unrighteousness, corruption. This is Romans 1, starting in verse 20. Since the creation of the world, God's invisible attributes, that is, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, being understood by what's been made, so that they are without excuse. For even though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their reasonings, and their senseless hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and they exchanged the glory of, here's our key phrase, the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible mankind, of birds, four-footed animals, and crawling creatures. Now here the contrast between incorruption and corruption serves to mark the boundary between the creator and the creature. The incorruptible God is characterized as having eternal power and a divine nature. And if I could just pause for a moment on that phrase divine nature, there can be a tendency in contemporary theology to worry that talking about a divine nature is too abstract a way to approach the biblical God. It seems to be a category imposed by systematic theologians with a little too much philosophy in their PhD program to talk about the divine nature. I just want to point it out. It's right here, right? Divine nature. How do you talk about the divine nature in Greek? you take the word God and render it a more abstract noun. So theos, God, you just turn it into theates, right, like godness. So if we wanted to be really direct about this, we could translate this phrase divine nature in Romans 1 as godness. But again, that would be to oversimplify it and make it sound like, oh, godness. We just are in the habit of saying the divine nature. So that's what's going on here in the text. God, the incorruptible God, has eternal power and a divine nature. He has godness. Which, though invisible in themselves, are nevertheless the objects of human mental perception insofar as they are understood through what has been made. Humans, by contrast, are identified as corruptible mankind. Do you see that phrase? They exchange the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible mankind. And humans stand at the head of a descending series of creatures that get closer and closer to the ground. Corruptible mankind, birds, four-footed animals, and crawling creatures. You see that pattern of descent. An early Christian writer, Athanasius, whose name means immortal, right? Athanasius, writing from his context in northern Africa, in Egypt, really worked with this passage and explained kind of a natural history of idolatry as exchanging the incorruptible God for the form of corruptible creatures. And he picked up on this descent pattern here and traced it through what he understood of the history of idolatry. Not just that we went from God to a creature, but that we kept going to worse and worse creatures. And in his Egyptian context, he would say like, Next thing you know, you're worshiping alligators, you're worshiping birds, just lower and lower, frogs, what else are you gonna worship next? So we had this sort of descent pattern built into not just our fall into idolatry, but our continual fallingness into idolatry, descending further. Once you decide to quit worshiping God and worship something corruptible instead, you won't just stop there, you'll keep getting worse and worse. You'll worship anything if you'll worship something other than God. The essence of idolatry here, we see, is an exchange. Exchanging the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible mankind. Trading that which is creaturely for that which is divine. And here we're told specifically that what is exchanged is the glory of the incorruptible God for the form of corruptible mankind. See, the special value of focusing on divine incorruptibility here is its contrast with the idolatrous substitution of creatures, precisely in their corruptibility. Idols, think for a moment about corruptibility, the ability to decompose, the tendency to fall apart, wind down, and tend towards nothingness. Idols are composed of selected segments of wood no different from any other segment from which they were sawed. If you think about the prophetic diatribe against idolatry in prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah, Isaiah obviously is having a good time mocking idolatry. So you cut a tree down. The top part, you decided you would turn into a toilet, and the bottom part, you said was your God. Same tree, same wood, you just repurposed different parts of it. It's the laughable quality of the composition of, this is the God part of the tree, and this is the common use around the house part of the tree. They are no different, these idols, from the other segments out of which they are sawed. They are covered over with silver gathered in from Tarshish and gold imported from Ufaz, all painted with many colors. That's all from Jeremiah 10, where Jeremiah seems to point out the the international trade basis of having to put together an idol. Oh, you're going to compose an idol? Like you're going to turn to a corruptible divine form instead? Well, you're going to need to get involved in the importing business, right? You're going to have to bring in bits and pieces and elements from all over the place to assemble into this collage that you're going to then say created everything. But, says Jeremiah, Jeremiah 10, the Lord, Yahweh, is the true God. He is the living God and the everlasting King. So as a result, the prophetic message is that the gods that did not make heaven and earth will perish from the earth and from under the heavens. Jeremiah 10, again, that prophetic diatribe against idolatry, specifically idols as corruptible. In Romans 1, Paul sets this prophetic critique of idolatry against the background of the corruptible-incorruptible distinction, thereby drawing out its implications in a more explicitly metaphysical kind of way. So what Isaiah and Jeremiah said in a rollicking good prophetic blast and condemnation, Paul puts into this, think about the incorruptible and the corruptible. It's just a slightly higher philosophical level of analysis. Assembled things can, by nature, become disassembled. or disintegrated. The mark of the true God, by contrast, is to be truly and inherently incorruptible, unable to come apart. And I'm saying come apart and decompose, but of course we could also get into all the language of rotting. In Peter's usage, especially in 1 Peter, when he uses the word corruptible, he's really talking about things that rot or decay. So you could add an element, you could add the olfactory element of stench here to things that are corruptible. Well, these are the two passages that call God incorruptible in the New Testament, 1 Timothy 1 and Romans 1. Once you start seeing this thing, though, you start seeing it everywhere throughout the Bible. To sum up the basic statement about this attribute, that God is incorruptible means that he is not subject to decomposition. He cannot disintegrate or be dismembered. God does not rot. I like to use little one-syllable words wherever I can when I'm also using big words like incorruptibility. Just a lot of syllables. Incorruptible is a double negative construction. It confesses a positive thing about God by denying its negation. Denying and negation gives you a double negative. So it belongs among that whole class of divine attributes whose power and usefulness come from their ability to teach us what concepts we must reject if we're going to affirm the truth about God's being. In rehearsing these negative attributes, like immortal, invisible, we deny that God is limited by any power or surrounded by any presence or derived from any other thing. He is not changeable, not visible, not mortal, not composed of parts. The double negative is to say, God is great. Is God ungreat? No, God is not ungreat. You get all these negative ways of getting a positive affirmation. Now I admit that there's something almost arbitrary or at least reactive about which negative doctrines we stipulate of God, since we would never bother to make that movement of negation of negation unless the possibility of affirmation was proposed to us by somebody. In other words, if I'm gonna say God is not that, it's probably because somebody just caused trouble by asserting that God is that, right? So for instance, God is not blue. But it would never occur to most people to say so, unless and until somebody proposes a doctrine of divine blueness, and then you've got to shut them up somehow. There's normally no need to insist on the un-blueness of God, but if someone starts the First Church of the Blue God, then we're going to have to get busy with the doctrine of the divine not-blueness. The history of theology has made a select group of these negations strategically important. And all these doctrines sound a little bit more positive to us in English when we say them in words that partly conceal their built-in negations. So we characterize God as having divine infinity, and we might not necessarily think about the concept of finitude when we call God infinite. But we say God has aseity, immutability, invisibility, immortality, simplicity. Each of these words are in fact double negations which gesture toward the transcendent reality of God. But each of them are in fact double negations which gesture toward that by negating a limitation. They're all indicating things about which we can also make positive statements though. What is the positive truth guarded by the doctrine of divine incorruptibility? I think it's the simple and vital reality that God is one and alive, that he is the living God. He has strong unity and perfect life. It is the one living God who Christian theology confesses as immortal in the sense of incorruptible. As the incorruptible one, God is radically distinguished from all creatures. And by grace, he offers himself to his creation as the rock of its salvation, the stable, non-decomposing source of a creature's finite, dependent integrity. It's this salvation note, the soteriology that sounds out so affirmatively from the Bible's witness to divine incorruptibility. Psalm 18, the Lord lives, and blessed be my rock, and may the God of my salvation be exalted. God lives and is an indestructible rock. On this basis, the incorruptible God saves creatures. Now I want to move from the doctrine of God proper to say a couple of things about Christology and soteriology or the doctrine of salvation. There are several possible paths by which we can trace the notion of incorruptibility from the doctrine of God as a divine perfection to the doctrine of Christ and then to the doctrine of salvation. So first of all, it's worth noting that Jesus' own teaching presupposes divine incorruptibility in a few ways. For example, Jesus' exhortation to store up treasures in heaven, Matthew 6, store up treasures in heaven, is based on Jesus' own absolute trust in his heavenly father. He states this in terms of a contrast between heaven's security and earth's insecurity. In this world, valuable things can be consumed by moth and rust. That's the language that lets you know we're in the ballpark of corruptibility. Consumed by moth and rust or stolen by thieves. But things of real value are secure against everything when they are kept by the imperishable and invincible heavenly father of Jesus. Jesus' close identification with the father already associates him with the heavenly security about which he teaches people. In that sense, there's a kind of assimilation to divine incorruptibility already latent in Jesus' own teaching. So I just want to indicate the incorruptibility of the Heavenly Father as the background of what Jesus teaches. Notice, I don't want to claim too much for this. I don't want to say, there, I just proved that the Son of God is also incorruptible by reference to Matthew 6. I didn't do that. I just got Jesus' teaching into the ballpark of incorruptibility to kind of highlight it for us. But in the next step, I want to directly apply it to Christ. The New Testament teaching about Christ goes on to include him within the divine incorruptibility. It does this in a really interesting way by invoking the Old Testament's vision of God as exalted above the created order. So think about Psalm 102, verses 25 to 27, Psalm 102. Of old, the psalmist says, You laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the works of your hands. They will perish, but you will remain. They will all wear out like a garment. You will change them like a robe, and they will pass away. But you are the same, and your years have no end." So once again, we see the art of contrast at work here. God's eternal, stable identity. You are the same. is brought into high relief by comparison with the perishing transient nature of the created heavens and earth. The incorruptible God can doff or take off these ancient works like a garment as they wear out and pass away. But God's own years have no end and he is the same. You see how this is the doctrine of divine incorruptibility put in poetic terms. This high praise is quoted in Hebrews 1, verses 10 through 12, as part of the rehearsal of the Son's divine identity in contrast even to the highest angelic creatures. Specifically, these words from the Psalm are recognized as the Father's speech to his one and only Son. To which of the angels did God say this kind of thing? And what does the Father say to the Son in Hebrews 1? You are the same and your years have no end. Of old you, says the Father to the Son, laid the foundations of the earth. Notice the words the same here. The Son has the essential divine reality of being the same. The words the same come back in Hebrews 13, 8. You remember that famous verse, Jesus Christ the same yesterday and today and forever. All things must pass, but the Son is not among all things. He stands on the other side of the frontier between creator and creation. The same is almost a divine title and almost a Christological title. He has this stability and, as we can see now, incorruptibility. Now, in the doctrine of salvation, there's a lot more to say about the incorruptible Son of God and the Christological recognition of incorruptibility. We'll come to a bit of it here in a minute, but I want to get there through salvation. In soteriology, the broadest statement about incorruptibility is 2 Timothy 1.10. In 2 Timothy 1.10, We read that our Savior Christ Jesus abolished death and brought life and immortality, again this is the word incorruptible, to light through the gospel. Brought life and immortality, incorruptibility, to light through the gospel. Now this language of manifestation, bringing something to light, is typical of how the pastoral epistles talk, how Paul writes there. It's an expansive way of stating theological claims. The details of how incorruptibility was manifested and made effective for human salvation are spelled out in Paul's other writings, especially 1 Corinthians. Notice now the key role of incorruptibility in his argument about the resurrection. And this is kind of the test to see if I have succeeded in putting incorruptibility on your radar so that you now begin registering it all over the Bible. Let's do a couple verses from 1 Corinthians 15, starting in verse 50. I tell you this, brothers, flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Behold, I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised imperishable, that is incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible body must put on the incorruptible, and this mortal body must put on immortality. So corruption, Thora, corruption Paul tells us cannot inherit incorruptibility. It can't just get better and turn into incorruptibility. That's not how it's going to work. It's on the scale of corruption. so it can't exceed the scale of corruption just by some sort of evolutionary process. There must be a mysterious change. Behold, I tell you a mystery. We shall be changed. That change that he explains is in terms of the corruptible putting on the incorruptible, donning it as if it were a protective or transformative garment. Anthony Thistleton argues that within the argument of First Corinthians, there's a contrast between corrupt and incorrupt that requires us to think of incorruption as something thicker than just extended duration. Corruption, he says, is a term within the semantic opposition that carries the decisive content in relation to which the contrast is signaled by the alpha privative, that is, a tharsis, not corruptible. Since corruption denotes increasing capacities and increasing weaknesses, issuing an exhaustion and stagnation, Thistleton takes it to signal a state of decay. And if corruption is decay, then quote, the semantic contrast to such decay wouldn't be permanence or everlasting duration, but ethical, aesthetic, and psychological flourishing and abundance. even perhaps perfection, and certainly fullness of life. That's just Thistleton. And I don't know if you've seen his 1,500-page First Corinthians commentary. It's truly sprawling and massive. The opening sentence is, nobody tries to be comprehensive anymore. And then he just goes for it. It's a remarkable work. But his point here is the one that we made at the beginning. Merely saying immortal might make you think like, oh, it's just a life that goes on. But the word incorruptible says, no, this is in contrast to stagnation, decay, downward tendencies, all those things that attend created life, especially under conditions of sinfulness. Now, our participation Oh, I'm sorry. Salvation comes to us as a rescue from decay on all levels of our human creaturely reality by way of protective inclusion within the wholeness and flourishing that are best conceived as the positive opposite of rotting, right? In Thistleton's argument, we see again the great value of distinguishing between just immortality and incorruptibility. Now, our participation in incorruption is described more cosmically in Romans 8. where Paul expands the scope of his teaching on the resurrection body for a moment. It's not just the human body, but creation itself that was subjected to futility, Paul says, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God, Romans 8, 20 and 21, set free from the bondage of corruption. All creation is somehow bound by the decay-inducing power of corruption, let loose by sin, and eagerly awaits the deliverance from it, which will be manifested in the resurrection of believers. All of this depends on the resurrection of Christ himself, which is the decisive manifestation of God's essential incorruption, brought down and opened up for our participation, or put into action for the purposes of our salvation. How did this divine perfection of incorruption break through into the reality of human creatures subjected to corruption? It did so in the father's refusal to let the incarnate and crucified son undergo decay. So it becomes important here to note that we confess the body of Jesus didn't rot. He did not decay. Think of Psalm 16, which contains an oracle about a righteous one who the Lord will not surrender to corruption. Peter quotes that psalm, Peter quotes Psalm 16 and Acts 2 as fulfilled in the resurrection of Christ, who says prophetically to his father, you will not abandon my soul to Hades or let your holy one see corruption. Here's the doctrinal benefit of approaching this passage from the perspective of divine incorruptibility. It primes us to recognize that God was in Christ restoring the fallen creature to participation in incorruptibility. Just as the resurrection of Christ is the triumphant securing of the incarnate Son's invincibility at the right hand of God, so the resurrection of believers is the activation and application of that divine power for the conquering of our natural downward drive into disintegrated and decaying fragments of ourselves. Now, there are some really important Christological complexities here that we can't get into in detail. Our goal here is to establish the broad systematic outlines of divine incorruptibility as our understanding of immortality. But I do want to point out a couple of Christological details. By the hypostatic union in which the eternal son took to himself human nature, God the son came within the range, so to speak, of the corruption that attends human nature. That is, the divine nature was and remains incorruptible in itself. This has been the burden of arguing that divine incorruptibility is an attribute of God. It doesn't change. God is essentially immutably incorruptible. But the human nature, which the son assumed into personal union with himself as his own human nature, was such a nature as could be subject to corruption. Human nature as such is capable of coming apart. It can decay. It can decompose. I want to say something about this contrast between divine incorruptibility and human corruptibility. The incarnate son has both the divine nature and the human nature. And so we're only a few weeks here from Good Friday and Easter. We want to be able to affirm in the context of Good Friday and Easter that the Son of God died for us. And since the Son of God is fully divine as God, we want to be able to say things like we say in some of our hymns. I think of a Charles Wesley hymn that says, "'Tis mystery all, the immortal dies." Now when we say that, it really helps if we've already sort of rehearsed our Trinitarian categories and our theology of the Incarnation. so that we know that this one person, the son of God, while remaining fully God and having the full incorruptible divine nature, assumes into union with himself personally, hypostatically, to use the big word, assumes into union with himself a human nature which is capable of corruption. The reason this matters is when I say God died for our salvation, or we are purchased by the blood of God, or to his mystery all the immortal dies, It can be tempting to think that what we're saying in statements like that is, you know how there's humans and they have human death? Well, there's also God and there's such a thing as God death. And what we're saying on Good Friday is something like that. Do you see what a mistake that is? You can't set up that equation and say, just as humans have human death, God has divine death. And on Good Friday, God went into divine death. No, you've got to stop everything right there and say, no, you divide it by zero. Go back and check your math. That equation cannot possibly balance this. What happened was you assumed there was a proportion here so that on the divine side of things, there was such a thing as divine death. But if there's no such thing over there, if death is only something that correlates with a created nature, then when we say that God experienced death, we're saying he crossed over and went into the experience of the only death on the market. You see that? He died our death, not his own death. What would God's own proper death be? No such thing, right? Can't divide by zero. There's no concept of divine death. to correlate with the concept of the immortal and incorruptible God. If you don't have that in place, it can sound like God was scared of this other really bad kind of death, so he just went for the human death, which is little and manageable. No, no. The human death is the only death on the market. Good Friday is not about God lapsing into his own proper death, but taking on ours. Now again, all this works really well if you've thought through your Trinitarian theology a little bit and you've kind of pondered the mystery of the incarnation enough to have the basic categories. If you don't have those in place, and so if you're talking to unbelievers or under-catechized Christians who haven't spent any time rehearsing this, I freely admit, it sounds like you're saying one-half of one-third of God had a bad weekend. You know what I mean? It sounds really ad hoc. Like, I want to say something big, like, tis mistry all, the immortal died. But what I mean is, well, it was just the sun. And it was just according to its human nature. So it's not like it was death death. No, I totally understand why it sounds that way if you just now heard the Trinitarian distinctions and the Christological incarnational distinctions. But all of those are in place to explain how, for us and our salvation, the eternal son of God took humanity to himself and went into the experience of death. Yeah? That's by way of background. Here's why it really matters for understanding the incorruptibility of God and how it saves us. When the Son of God experienced human death and his assumed human nature, that human nature, think about it, did come apart in a crucial way. The created human body of Christ and the created human soul of Christ, the human livingness, were separated from each other. This is human death. And Jesus, the Son of God, died humanly. The next downward step in human dissolution is for the body, after the soul's departure, to undergo biological decay into its organic parts, and lose the functions of life and self-preservation. But this physical corruption is what God intervened to stop. He did not permit His Holy One to see corruption, but raised Him instead. And in the interim, during which body and soul were sundered in human death, Both continued to be the exclusive property of the incorruptible Son of God. We might say it this way. In the death of Jesus, body and soul lost each other in death, but the incorruptible Son of God lost neither his own human soul nor even his own human body. It continued to be his. I know this is pretty far out Christological stuff, but the implications for believers are immense. The 17th century poet Henry Vaughan imagined a dialogue between the human soul and the human body on the subject of resurrection, in which the body admits that it is exposed to the danger of decay and dissolution in a way that the soul is not. Souls have their own problems, but they don't decompose in the same way bodies do. But the body, speaking here, says that it trusts in God's promise. And here's the words Henry Vaughan put into the language of the body. Shall I then think that providence will be less friend to me, or that he can endure to be unjust, who keeps his covenant even with our dust? In less evocative but more carefully doctrinal language, classic theologians have affirmed this profound truth about the way the incorruptible God encountered human death in Christ. John of Damascus said, even though as man, the son did die and his sacred soul was separated from his immaculate body, the divinity remained unseparated from both, the soul and the body. Thus, the one person is not divided into two persons, From the beginning, both had existence in the same way in the person of the word. And when they were separated from each other in death, each of them remained in the possession of the one person of the word." This matters because the father did not let his darling one see corruption. He didn't leave him in Sheol or suffer him to undergo the fullness of decay. He came right up to the edge of it. I want to say something like, he underwent the part of soul and body disaggregating from each other that constitutes human death. But God intervened to keep him from decaying. The Holy One experienced death, but in fulfillment of God's faithful promise, he did not see corruption. The Son of God died our death for us, but did not rot for us. Instead, he made a way for our corruption to become invested with or clothed in his incorruption. I want to make one brief point here that I kind of didn't have anywhere to put in the outline. I just want to indicate that when we talk about corruption, we usually use it in modern language as like a political term, right? Like who's corrupt? Politicians. That's who's corrupt, right? And even in the New Testament, the word corruption has a moral connotation. It's actually the last word in Ephesians is incorruptible. where Paul says, peace to all those who love our Lord Jesus with a love incorruptible. And there's a sense that if someone is behaving immorally or sinfully, they're just rotten, right? They're just really rotten. So this language of using corruptibility to indicate a moral negative quality or sin is built into the whole idea. It's not that all possible decay or decomposition is inherently sinful, but we're sort of on the same scale. And that's why all this kind of comes together in the sun's appropriation of human nature, so that he can die our death for us, but not undergo decay for us. So, God's life is perfect in itself. God lives by the power of his own life. The sun and the Holy Spirit are included within that perfect divine life, which we confess negatively by saying that their common life is not subject to decay or composition. Obviously, the Trinity's not gonna come apart. God's life is incorruptibly complete and fully realized within itself. It is simple and uncompounded, having no segment or parts into which it can be divided. The positive reality guarded by this negative formulation is that the triune God is the living God, having simplicity and aseity in the fullness of the fellowship of Father, Son, and Spirit. So in conclusion we can ask, is the doctrine of God's immortality in the sense of incorruptibility a neglected doctrine? I mean, yes and no. Yes in the sense that you've probably never heard a message on incorruptibility before. So here I am again kind of trying to corner the market on slightly ignored doctrines that are totally in your Bible and that I want you to be able to notice more from now on. There aren't a lot of scholarly articles or monographs devoted to this kind of subject either. Yes, also it's neglected in the sense that although it's a subject directly taught in the words of scripture, richly embedded in the classical theological tradition, it doesn't draw much attention from Christian theologians or preachers. It is certainly a profound theme that repays contemplation. In that sense, it's a doctrine worthy of paying more attention to and retrieving. But in another sense, no, it's not a neglected doctrine, as if it had been substantively absent from Christian theology. What I mean is when we confess God's attributes, one of the things we confess is that we can't confess them all. They are glorious and numberless, as Charles Wesley says in a hymn. Since God's perfections can't be definitively cataloged, it would be unseemly to accuse anybody of leaving one or two of them out. It's entirely possible to bring out the reality of divine incorruptibility indirectly by attending to adjacent doctrines or doctrines that it's very similar to in a way that they effectively cover nearly all the same territory, which could be surveyed in focusing on incorruptibility. For example, I think of Stephen Charnock's classic volumes, Discourses on the Existence and Attributes of God, a great two-volume treatment of divine existence and attributes. There's no chapter or section devoted to incorruptibility in it. But his discussion of divine immutability not only covers much of the same ground, but even employs much of the same terminology. Charnock takes as his guiding text for divine immutability Psalm 102, 26 to 27, which we've seen is a key Old Testament passage on incorruptibility. Following this psalm's lead, he explains creaturely immutability largely in terms of corruptibility. even contrasting it with divine incorruptibility. So it's in there, you just can't find it in the section headings. The most stable of creatures, the heavens and the earth, Charnock says, have it not from themselves that they do not perish, but from thee who didst endue them with an incorruptible nature. A little tricky there, they don't have in themselves an incorruptible nature, but God gives incorruptibility to them by sort of transmission. In all the ways that matter most, Charnock does not lack a doctrine of divine incorruptibility, though he lacks the sort of place for it, or the chapter heading for it. Most systematic theologies, in fact, lack this place. It's hard to find historical examples of theological writers drawing out divine incorruptibility. There are strategic reasons to focus our attention, as we have this morning, on particular attributes like incorruptibility, and to approach the character of God from various angles. God is immortal in the sense of being incorruptible. This brings a set of terms and concepts back into our usage, draws attention to the particular exegetical areas and systematic associations that carry the doctrine. Placing divine incorruptibility in the middle of the full doctrine of God, we can benefit from confessing God as incorruptible in all ways. Incorruptibly holy, incorruptibly just, incorruptibly merciful, incorruptibly good, incorruptibly patient, and incorruptibly Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Thanks. Will you pray with me? Father, we thank you for your word, for your self-revelation. Lord, that there is more to be seen in what you have said about yourself than we have seen before. Thank you that you are our rock, that you are the foundation of our stability and integrity. Thank you that you sent your son to pay the price and do the work of what it would take to clothe us with incorruptibility. We say all this in Jesus' name. Amen.