Good evening. This evening we have arrived at our third lesson out of four, and this one deals with impassibility and deity. Impassibility and deity. But before we begin that, as Brother Shiflett was reading the reading for this evening, I remember that I in no way explained the reading for the second lesson. We read about Abigail and David and Nabal and never mentioned them throughout the lesson. And the reason that I asked for that passage to be read is because it shows how passable man is, where David is angry and upset and ready to kill Nabal and all the males. And Abigail comes and she appeases him with her words and with her wisdom. And then David changes completely with regard to, because of what Abigail has said to him. And then you see Nabal who's feasting with the mirth of a king. He's having the best of times that humans can have, so to speak, understanding what I mean. And then Abigail goes to him and tells him what has happened. And what does it say? His heart died within him. All she did was speak the truth to him. She communicated what had happened, and Nabal basically died as a result of those words being spoken. And it shows just how changeable and passable we are, how David is moved from this state of wrath to a state of peace with Abigail in the house of Nabal. And Nabal moves from mirth and merriment and enjoyment to death. essentially. We could have picked many other passages. One of my favorite ones to show how passable humans are is Belshazzar at the feast, when he's, again, reveling with all of his officials, and the whole kingdom is rejoicing, and suddenly a hand appears and is writing on the wall, and it scares him so bad, it says, his knees knocked together. He was utterly terrified from one moment he's rejoicing and reveling, the next moment he is scared out of his mind. So that is why we used that verse previously. And I failed to explain that, forgive me. Well, what have we seen this morning in our first two lessons? We scanned the scriptures and we collected a variety of verses that describe God in human language, and yet say that God is not a man, and so we should be careful the way in which we read those verses. We also saw that mankind, as we were just talking about, is eminently passable, extremely passable. We're made up of parts, body and soul, we have faculties, and all sorts of things outside of us are constantly changing us as we encounter them, interpret them, and react to them. And where all of this has been driving is to the doctrine of divine impassibility, that God is impassible. And so we can return now to our definition, which we gave in the first lesson, the definition of impassibility. So if you have the handout, the first lesson has this definition that says, God is not acted upon and cannot be acted upon by anything, either from within himself or outside of himself. Nothing acts on God to change him. God's never the patient receiving the operations of an agent. And so now we are going to dive deeper into what that means for God, why we say that, as well as why that's such a wonderful truth for the people of God. God is impassable. Now, to show why God is impassable and how God is impassable, what I want to do is to list five fundamental elements of the doctrine of God to help us to better understand why it is that God can truly be described in the language of human emotions, even though He does not have human emotions like we do. And so, as you can see on the screen, we're going to talk about God being simple, infinite, eternal, immutable, and impassable. Those are the five fundamental elements that we're going to look at to begin this message. And so let's start, then, with God's simplicity. God is simple. Now, very much like impassibility, the simplicity of God is something that many people have not heard of or are not familiar with. If I ask you, please define, just briefly, what you know, define the simplicity of God, you may not have a ready answer for that. That would be common, that would not be strange, and so I hope that we can briefly give you an idea of what God's simplicity means, and what we mean when we say that, and why we say that. So, what does it mean that God is simple? And to say that God is simple is to deny that there are parts God. We are denying that there is composition in God. God is simple, not in the sense of unintelligent or something like that, of course not, but simple as opposed to complex, simple as opposed to composite. Simplicity means not composed. Now, why would we say this? There are many reasons, but from the scriptures, why would we say this? And I want to point out or bring you to remembrance of something that I said, keep this in mind, keep this in mind, which was the divine name revealed in Exodus 3, verse 14, where God says, this is the name by which I am to be known. I am who I am, or I am that I am. And that name belongs with other names of God as He reveals Himself, namely what we often refer to as Jehovah or Yahweh, or Yah, and many, many Hebrew names end with Yah because they're referring to God. Those names, I Am That I Am, Jehovah, and Yah, are very important because they all derive, they all come from the Hebrew word, to be. God chooses for his most sacred names, his most clearly self-revealing names, he chooses words, the Hebrew word, to be, as the root for his names. Why would God do that? It's because, as we read about Nabal, though applying this to God, as his name is, so is he. His names reveal to us who he is, and he chooses names from being to tell us about himself. What kind of being is he, then? Well, he is the being who is I Am That I Am. I am who I am, which means there's no explanation or cause for God other than God himself. God is the sufficient explanation for his own existence. We're really talking about aseity right now, but we're not going to dive into that word right now. God is who he is in and of himself. Nothing causes God to be what he is. And so, therefore, God is not composite. He's not put together of parts because anything that has been put together has a preceding cause. Anytime there are two things in composition, there is some cause uniting those pieces in composition. And if God is I am that I am not caused by anything but simply existing of himself, then God cannot possibly be caused. Therefore, God cannot possibly be composite. Therefore, God is Simple. The simplicity of God denies any composition in God whatsoever, because God has revealed himself as, I am that I am, or I am who I am. As I just mentioned, anytime two things are put together, there is a cause for their union. There is a cause for their composition. When you get a Lego set, It comes in baggies, little bags with all the pieces, right? If you open a LEGO box and the whole creation is already assembled inside that box, you know something has happened. Someone put this together. Any time you see a LEGO set assembled, you know this has been put together by someone. Someone caused this piece to go here and this piece to go there. And the end result of it was the completed LEGO set. Well, so also anything that has been composed, anything that is made up of simpler parts, has some cause compositing a compositor that put them together. God is not a being of parts. God exists in and of himself. We are beings of parts. God gives us a body and a soul, and our bodies and souls have parts. I have an arm, and I have a leg, and I have a head. I have body parts. God is not so. He is I am that I am. If there is a cause before God, causing God to be God, then that cause is God. That cause would be the divine being that gives being to all other things, as opposed to the self-existent divine being. Now, if God is simple, pure, perfect, it means that he cannot possibly be more than he already is. If God is simple and pure and perfect, could he be any more simple? No, that doesn't make sense. Any more perfect? No, God is simply perfect, and he is perfect simply. Nor could he be less. Could you diminish the simple, perfect God? Well... No, he either is or he isn't if he's simple. And so to diminish the simple God would be to annihilate the simple God. He cannot be lessened, he cannot be increased, he cannot be augmented, he cannot be diminished, he cannot be added to, he cannot be subtracted from. Many theologians refer to this as God's pure actuality, or that God is pure act. He can't be any more than he is. He is all that he is. He is perfect, simple being. when they talk about God being pure act, they're referring to the fact that we move as creatures from potentiality or potency to actuality. We have a potential to be changed. We have a capacity to be acted upon where we can be moved from one state of being to another state of being. I have the potential of being actualized in new ways. And that happens to me all the time. And so, a being who is simple and pure is so perfectly actual, so perfectly what it is, that there's nothing lacking in God, there's no possibility of something being actualized in God, there's no potency, simply pure actuality in God. God is I am that I am, not I am, but I might be something else if something actualizes me to be more than I am right now. No, God is I am who I am. Well, that is a painfully short presentation of God's divine simplicity, but it is a very important one. And so let's move on for the sake of time. Number two, God is infinite. God is infinite. which is to deny finitude in God. When we say that God is infinite, we are saying that there are no limitations or boundaries on who and what God is other than who and what God is. He is a free spirit. He is able to do all that he wills. There's nothing that can stop him. You can't add to infinity. You can't subtract from infinity. You cannot compose infinity. You cannot decompose infinity. Rather, God is the creator who created all things and gives being to all things from his simplicity. God is infinite. Third, God is eternal. God is eternal. To add something to God, not only would God have to be composite, not only would God have to be finite, but God would also have to be temporal. He would have to exist in a succession of moments, in which succession, he moves from not being something to being something. But to the contrary, God is eternal. Time is the measurement of motion. How do we measure time? Well, we have a watch face that moves in a consistent manner, and we measure the movements of the hands of the watch to measure time. Or we look at the movement of the planets and the stars that have consistent motion, and we measure intervals. And we say, OK, this is the passage of time. This is how we measure time. It is a measurement of motion between states of being. But the Bible says, in the beginning, God, apart from time, apart from succession, apart from the sequence of events that we know as creatures, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, as God challenged Job in our reading, saying, where were you? when I created all things. The psalmist praises God for this in Psalm 90, verse 2. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting, you are God. Isaiah 57, 15 describes Him as the one who inhabits or dwells in eternity. So we know that God is not confined within time. He is not trapped within time. As Solomon knew that the temple, God was truly present in the temple and yet not contained by the temple. So also God causes his works to be displayed in time, but God is not trapped in time. He is not a temporal being living. His being is not a successive being. He does not move from moment to moment in his being through states of being, which means that mutation and change and addition and subtraction are impossible. He can't move from more to less or less to more or something to something else if there's no succession in God. He is eternal. Which brings us to our fourth point, number four, that God is immutable. You cannot mutate, you cannot change, you cannot alter, you cannot vary such a simple, perfect, infinite, eternal God. He is simple. He is all that He is. To add something to God, therefore, would be to add creature-being to God. There is God, simple and pure, all that He is. And then there is the creation, the good creation that He has made. And so, therefore, if we have God and creation, if you add something to God, where does it come from? It's got to come from creation, which is impossible that the creature should be composited with God. Now, if your mind instantly jumps to, what about the incarnation? What does our confession say? That the hypostatic union, the union of the divine and human nature and the person of Jesus Christ is without composition. You say, that's a mystery. We say, amen. Praise the Lord. But just didn't want your mind to chase that. Divinity and humanity do not compose. They unite in the person of Jesus Christ, but they do not compose. God is immutable. To change God, he would have to be limited. His being and his perfection would have to be limited because any change is for the better or for the worse. If you can change God for the better, he was not the best. If you can change God for the worse, he's not the best because he can be changed for the worse. If he has the capacity to be changed for the worse, he's not the best yet. Because the best would be so good and so perfect, it can't be changed for the worse. So therefore, any change, whether better or worse, pick one and you've already lost. God is immutable. And he declares himself to be the same. As we read in our first lesson in James 1.17, God tells us through James that in him, the father of lights, there's no variation or shadow due to change. And in Malachi 3, verse 6, God says, I, the Lord, do not change. And so we know and we believe and we rejoice that God is immutable, not capable of being changed in any way whatsoever. This brings us to where we've been driving today. Fifthly, God is impassable. The wonderful thing about building a system of theology is that when you get to certain doctrines, after having laid a foundation, they kind of become, well, yeah, of course, doctrines. But if you just jump straight to that individual doctrine without its surrounding pieces and its connections, you ask all sorts of questions and you're not sure how you got there. And so it's important to develop the doctrine of God, as all other doctrines, from the ground up. Because if you just jump into saying that God is impassable, you're going to be wondering, why are we saying this? How did we get here? What does this mean? But if we've laid down the previous things that we've laid down, that God is simple, that God is perfect and eternal and infinite and immutable, then when we come to this point and we say, God is not acted upon and cannot be acted upon by anything, either from within himself or outside of himself, at this point, I hope we kind of say, well, yeah. Well, yes. Because God is simple, he cannot be acted upon. Because God is infinite, he cannot be acted upon. Because God is eternal, he cannot be acted upon. Because he is immutable, he cannot be acted upon. And so really, immutability is, in a sense, a subset—excuse me, impassibility is a subset of immutability. Because God cannot be changed, at all. Therefore, when we talk about changes of passions and affections, God cannot be changed. And so we refer to divine impassibility. But if you've already accepted simplicity and infinity and eternity and immutability, impassibility cannot but be affirmed along with those other things. And we have already established in our second lesson this morning what it means to have passions and affections in the human nature. They're other things, other people, even ideas acting upon us and changing us. Is it possible to apply such things to God? No. If it is not possible to apply such things to God, then God is impassable. And so we do not hesitate to say God cannot be provoked to wrath. God cannot be grieved. God cannot be made sorry. God cannot be made to love you. You say, okay, well, I was tracking you to that point. How is it then that God has love and wrath and such, which is what we're going to answer now. As we already said in the previous lesson this morning, what is an affection in us is a perfection in God. Those things that are affections, things that we have been moved to and can be moved away from, those things that we are constantly shifting and changing in, those affections in God are perfections, unmoving, perfect, complete, simple, infinite, eternal. And that makes them so much better, and that's why we call them So what we do here, the way in which we do this, is you take one thing, like love, and you apply love to God according to who He is as God. And you take love and you apply it to man according to what man is. And you're safe then. You then talk about divine love and human love, and they're not the same thing. And man's love is love insofar as it participates in and reflects the love of God. We'll explain this in more detail. I'm just introducing it. I'm Sean Connor introducing it. Love in us, when you take love and apply it to mankind, love is a passion. It's something that we are drawn to or led to or something. For example, like I said earlier, I don't love Diet Cherry Dr. Pepper. I never will. It's not even possible, I think. I won't be drawn to it. but I will be drawn to other things. It's a passion. I'm provoked and affected by those things around me. In God, love is not a passion. Love is not an affection. What do the scriptures tell us about love and God? The scriptures say God is love. I am not love. I begin to be loving, I cease to be loving, whereas God is love. Therefore, my love is a passion or an affection. God's love is a perfection of His very essence. It is who He is. He is love. And so, rather than depriving God of something when I say God does not have love as a passion, rather than bringing God down somewhere, saying something negative about Him, I'm scrubbing the language clean of all the human imperfection so that I can magnify and glorify the perfection of God's divine love. Because there is not this thing called love that God participates in, but rather God is love, He is the model for love, the paradigm for love, the original of love, and nothing is loving unless it reflects the love of God, because God is love. Think of it like this. We humans acquire qualities. We acquire qualities. We become what we were not. Think about a wall. You can paint the wall red. It's a wall. Now it's a red wall. You can paint the wall white. Now it's a white wall. You can paint the wall blue. Now it's a blue wall. It has gained the quality of redness, and then whiteness, and then blueness. You have given the wall those qualities by painting it. So also, we acquire qualities, we become loving, we become angry, we become all sorts of things all the time, and so my love is a quality. God does not have qualities, God is his qualities. God is all that he is, infinitely, supremely, perfectly, simply, eternally. God is, I am who I am, and he is perfect. Thinking about qualities that we gain and lose and thinking about essential perfections in God, one way to illustrate it is like this. Which is better? To have something that has been heated up or to have something that produces heat itself? Something that's heated up has gained the property or the quality of heat. If you take a stone and you heat up the stone, it emanates heat for a time and then it cools down. But if you have a fire of sorts, or in theory if you had pure flame, it would simply be its own heat. It would be its own source of heat, not requiring anything else to produce the heat, not depending on something to heat it up. And so the thing that acquires heat is not as good or perfect as the thing which is heat itself. Or another illustration is that, which is more costly? Which is more valued? Something that has been painted gold, or something that is gold? Something that's been painted gold, perhaps even with gold paint, would have a certain value. It would have certain qualities of gold, but the thing that is pure gold itself will be massively more valuable and more desirable and more perfect. And people will reduce elements down to be as pure as possible. The pure gold is the most valuable gold. What happens when you add to that pure gold? It becomes something else, something that people don't want. It's not the pure, perfect, simple element that we desire. And so we are like the stone that is heated up. We are like the thing that is painted with gold paint, whereas God is like heat itself or pure gold. Our confession of faith speaks in this way of God to help us discipline our minds. As you can see in the projector, when the confession of faith speaks of God, it adds a word that we can use about God that we can't use about ourselves. We say that God is almighty, every way infinite. And then it adds the word most to several things that we are, but we could never be the most of these things. Most holy. Are we holy? Well, God says, be holy as I am holy, so God is most holy, and we're only holy insofar as we shadow and reflect his holiness. God is most wise, most free, most absolute. working all things according to the counsel of his own immutable and most righteous will for his own glory, most loving, and that continues to apply, most gracious, most merciful, most long-suffering, most abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin, the rewarder of them that diligently seek him, and with all, most just and terrible in his judgments, hating all sin, and who will by no means clear the guilty. That word most is an important qualifier to distinguish between you and me, to distinguish between us and God. Where we can be just, we can be holy, we can be wise in such things, but God is most holy, just, and wise, and loving. It reminds us that in God, those things are not qualities that he acquires or begins to have and ceases to have, but they are what God is. Whereas for us, sometimes we are those things, sometimes we are not, or more and less. If God's the most, can he be any more just, any more righteous, any more loving, any more abundant in goodness? No, he's the most. The most is the most. Could God be any less? Not without ceasing to be the most. And if he is most perfect, again, how could he be changed for better? Not possible. How could he be changed for worse? Not possible, because he's not perfect if he can be changed for the worse. So one simple word like most helps to protect our language and clarify the difference between God and man. Now what we're going to do is to consider three affections in particular and understand how we can posit them of man and of God to better understand the perfections of God and how the scriptures speak truly of him when they describe him in this language. We'll look at love and then mercy and then anger. So what is love? What is love? I won't sing the song. Love is God, who is good in and of himself, pouring goodness on his creatures. When God causes us to experience blessing and goodness, it is God loving us. Does God love all mankind? Yes. The sun shines on all of us. The rain falls on all of us. We eat food. We behold the good creation of God. God loves us all. There are special goods that God causes the elect to enjoy that he does not cause the non-elect to enjoy, and so we can speak of a special love of God, but we can also affirm that God loves all his creatures because he does good to them, pouring goodness upon them from his goodness, and they are accountable for spitting at him and kicking at him when he is so good to them. But the point here is to define what is love, and love is God, from the fullness of His goodness, pouring out goodness on His creatures, causing us to experience goodness. Now, this definition is very important. What is the cause, or the impetus, of God's love? Is it that God has perceived me? and God has been smitten and the Lord could not help but pour out goodness upon me because I was so good in his eyes. Oh no, everyone knows that could not possibly be the case. The same for you. So what is the cause of God's love? If the cause of God's love is not external, then it's not a passion or an affection. It is God of himself, of his fullness, pouring out his goodness upon us. And so God is love. I do not love from the fullness of what I am. I love, as we see here, when I perceive someone else as good and worthy of me pouring out good upon them. Grandparents give nice things to their grandkids. They don't run around giving nice things to all the other grandkids. Maybe they do sometimes. But in general, they dote upon their grandchildren because they see them. They perceive them as good no matter what. And then they give good things to them. They love them. Their love is a passion. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a creaturely thing. The creator loves from his fullness. He pours goodness on his creatures from who he is because of who he is, not because of what they are and what they have caused him to do by response. God does not have love as humans know love. God is love. And the scriptures tell us that we love him because he first loved us. If God's love were a passion, Could He even love us? Are we lovable as sinners, as God-haters, as rebels, as disobedient creatures? Could God love us? Could God perceive in us some good thing that would draw Him to us and cause Him to reciprocate goodness to us? Absolutely not. And so therefore, let us thank the Lord our God that he loves from the fullness of his goodness, and that he loves us first, and therefore we love him. Secondly, mercy. Once again, definitions are extremely important. What is mercy? What is mercy? Well, For us, for humans, we are moved to mercy when we see others suffering, we identify with their suffering, participate with them in that suffering, and choose to help them in their suffering. We suffer with them and we help them along. We are merciful to those whom we feel pity towards. We enter into their state, we pity them, and we are, in many cases, overcome by sympathy and compassion. If you're familiar with Spanish, you'll know that the word for mercy is misericordia, or in Latin, misericordium, which means the misery of the heart, miseria, and cord, you can hear the Latin root for heart. The misery of the heart is mercy. We suffer with those whom we see suffering. Now, how does this apply to God? If God cannot suffer, if God cannot undergo, if God cannot enter into what we feel and experience, so to speak, if such things are not happening to God in succession, does that mean that God cannot possibly be merciful? Well, no, quite to the contrary, because rather than making God uncaring or unmerciful, we can magnify the majesty of his mercy by pointing out that God's mercy is not to enter into our suffering and then respond to us, but rather God, who is goodness in and of himself, pours out goodness upon the helpless, who can do nothing to rescue themselves or deliver themselves. God helps them from his own fullness. And that makes him even freer to have mercy upon whom he will have mercy. Why? Because my mercy depends on me seeing your suffering, identifying with your suffering, caring, and responding. Whereas God is able to have mercy on all those who call upon his name, because you're not the cause of his mercy. He doesn't have to participate in your suffering to help you when you're helpless. He's like an immune doctor who can go into a tent of Ebola-stricken patients or who knows what type of terrible, extremely contagious disease. You want a doctor who cannot possibly get sick. You don't want the doctor to get sick first and then to help you. You want the doctor who's impervious to such imperfections. So also God, who is goodness in and of himself, helps the helpless. And he is able to help the helpless in a way we're not, because remember the parable of the Good Samaritan? We're like those who say, no, I don't care about that person. I don't like them. I don't want to help them. Our mercy is so fickle. Our mercy is so inconstant. Our mercy is so imperfect. As I mentioned earlier today, we're more prone to be moved to compassion by commercials of puppies than we are of many other things that deserve much more attention. How many puppies must be adopted? We must get all the puppies adopted, but what about the children? Not just the children who are not adopted, but the children that are slaughtered and murdered in the abortion mills of our country and around the world. So whenever we think that human mercy is so great because it participates in the suffering of other people, then we need to remember just how unmerciful we are and just how uncaring we are. When Sarah McLachlan sings a sad song and you see the poor puppies on TV, you can't help but cry. And then you have to kind of slap yourself in the face and say, there are much more important things in life than this minute-long commercial trying to get me to send money to an organization for dogs. I was told once about someone in Texas who used to take their dogs sometimes to a place called Dead Dog Ridge. And at Dead Dog Ridge, you can imagine what would happen there sometimes. Maybe we need a little bit more uncaring feelings towards dogs. But the point is this. The point is this. God is so different from us. That does not mean he's unable to have mercy upon us. It means he's supremely able to have mercy upon us because there's no need for him to find a cause in us for him to have mercy. He just has mercy from himself. And so to the extent that the causes of our mercy are absent in God, to that extent, God is the freer to have mercy. So that when we preach the gospel and we say, as the scriptures say, that all who call upon the name of the Lord will be saved and no one who calls upon him will be put to shame, it's absolutely true. Whereas everyone who comes to me for mercy, I promise you will not receive it. Not only because I don't have the resources to give mercy to everyone, but also because I don't want to have mercy on everyone to my shame. God is the most merciful because He helps those that are entirely unlike Him. And so we can say that every morning His mercies are new. We don't get to the God relief shelter and God says, I'm sorry, I'm all out of mercy. I just don't have any more. I used it up. No, we can say His mercies are new every morning. Great is His faithfulness. What we are seeing here is that the less God is like us, the more His love is greater, the more His mercy is greater, the more perfect He shines. And we praise Him for this. Thirdly, anger. Anger. God is frequently described in the Scriptures as angry. How do we reconcile this with what we have said about God and what the scriptures say about God? Anger perhaps illustrates, better than some of the other examples, the limitations and the problems of human language. How many times have you been angry, sinfully angry? Too many to count. How many times have you been righteously, innocently angry? Maybe never. Possibly. Maybe you could count them on your hands, on your fingers. So our experience with anger is predominantly negative, predominantly sinful. And so it's hard to have a conception, an idea of anger that is not sinful. And yet the scriptures say, be angry and do not sin. There is a pure, there is an innocent anger, there is a righteous and holy anger. And so we need to remove the passion from anger. And I want you to think about what do creatures do when they are angry? What is the action that they take when they are angry? They're provoked by something. and they want to cause some kind of punishment or revenge to be poured out on the object of their anger or the object of their wrath. You have made me angry, and so I want some kind of punishment, some kind of vengeance to be poured out upon you. Now, we're so unjust and unholy and selfish that we sin in this process. I want you to be wrongfully punished. I want to take vengeance upon you and all that. But the action is to pour out vengeance and punishment on one who has offended you. In us, this leads us to all kinds of wicked words and wicked deeds done in anger and in passion. And we know in the Ten Commandments that when we're told not to murder, One of the things that this also means is to avoid, as we teach our children in the children's catechism, to avoid angry passions. Now, how do we move from this to God? Well, it's a language difficulty, not a language problem or a language contradiction, but it's a language difficulty because when we talk about God being angry with the wicked, God is not eternally and essentially furious What would that mean? God is eternally blessed, the scriptures say. Some people call that the happiness or the felicity of God. He is eternally blessed. Job, in the book of Job, it says, if you are unrighteous, this deals with a man and a son of man. What do you do to God if you are unrighteous? We do not cause God to be so furious when we sin. But the scriptures describe him as angry. Well, anger is causing judgment and revenge to be poured out on the objects of our wrath. Does God pour out punishment and just vengeance on those who sin against him? Absolutely, with a perfect, a precise, an unstoppable justice. And so in God, anger is His justice applied to sinful objects. The anger of God or the wrath of God is simply the justice of God in relation to a sinful object that deserves His punishment, that deserves that His justice pour out condemnation upon that sinner. And so if we are told that God is angry with the Israelites, or that God is angry with the Ninevites, or the Assyrians, or the Babylonians, or the Persians, or the world, it is not because God is eternally, and essentially, and immutably, and perfectly furious, absolutely not, but rather because God is perfectly, and invincibly, and essentially, and eternally, and infinitely just. And so long as you remain a wicked sinner, He, His justice, will unstoppably, invincibly, perfectly destroy you, condemn you, and punish you. Which means that the anger of God is 10,000 times worse than my anger. Because if I'm really mad at you, and I'm coming at you to punch you, you say, wait, I have chocolate mousse! And I say, Yes, you do. Aha, very good. You can't stop God. You can't appease him. You cannot bribe him. His anger is just. His anger is his justice, pouring out revenge and punishment on the objects of his wrath. Not because they just made him mad, but because he is just and he will punish the wicked. Well, now that we've looked at three examples of applying one thing to God and to man, love to man and God, mercy to man and God, and anger or wrath to man and God, what I want to do is to conclude with two recommendations, simple thoughts for how to read the scriptures when they describe God in human language. And I'm not talking about the four principles that we looked at in the first lesson, I'm talking about We've negated all the imperfections of humanity. How do we read the scriptures and come away with a positive affirmation? How do we come away from it with knowing what that means, not just what it doesn't mean? And so now that you've seen all of the pieces of the argument in action, think about some of the scripture verses we covered previously. We looked at passages that describe God as regretting, repenting, and then saying that God's not like a man and doesn't do such things. Rather, God does not change and always accomplishes what he purposes to do. And so when you find those kinds of verses, I would encourage you to do two things. You can see them up there. First, consider what divine perfection does this relate to? What divine perfection is being described in creaturely human language? I know that this doesn't mean that God is like me because the scriptures have told me he's not a man. These things don't happen to him. So what perfection in God would this connect to? That is a helpful way to read the scriptures when they describe God in the language of human emotion. And we already know to do this with God described in the language of body parts, don't we? The right arm of the Lord. Okay, God is omnipotent, his strength. Take the human language, scrub it clean of its human imperfections, and see what perfection shines forth after that. Ask if a perfection of God is being described in human language. Second, Look past the human language or into the human language and search for a corresponding action. What I mean is we take action with passion. Remove the passion and think about the actions we take in some of the things that we've described. Let me explain to you. Think about repentance. Think about repentance. I explained this earlier today. God cannot change his mind. God does not grieve. And so remove the change of mind and the grief from our repentance, which it is good that our minds change. It is good that we grieve in our repentance. We ought to hate our sin and be sorry for it and forsake it as we teach our children. Remove the passion of repentance and what do you get? You get a reversal of actions. You get a reversal of actions. And we see this precisely in God's decree playing out in time and space, where, as we mentioned this morning, God decrees to create man, and then to destroy man through the flood, to make Saul king, and then to remove Saul from the kingship, to threaten Nineveh with destruction, and then not to destroy them because they repented, et cetera. In these things, we see a repentance, we see a reversal, we see an opposite action, which is what we as humans do. That's what we do when we repent. But we do that also with passion, which does not happen to God. God has decreed all things whatsoever comes to pass. When God is said to be provoked to wrath or to take vengeance, It's not because he was awoken from a state of slumber into a state of rage. When you wake up your parents from a nap, what happens? It's not a pretty sight, is it? I'm trying to sleep. Well, maybe your parents aren't that way. Nor were mine. But some parents who live in my house and go by my name may react that way sometimes when they are awoken from a nap. Reports as of yet are unconfirmed. But when we're provoked to wrath, it's because we have been awoken. We have been moved from one state to another. Remove the passion. God is perfectly just. And so whenever a sinful object comes into contact or relation with a just God, what happens to that creature in time and space? Well, God may delay this, but that creature will be condemned and will be punished eternally. There's no question. And so if God causes, if God withholds His punishment and then pours it out in time and space, as humans, what do we see? The Lord has been provoked to wrath and has caused me to suffer His judgment. whereas God had foreordained every piece of that sequence, and he was not provoked to wrath. But we see it as a sudden outpouring. When the flood starts, it was sudden, wasn't it? Suddenly, God has become wrathful with us, whereas we know that that is not how it works in God. I love the way that Elijah mocks the prophets of Baal at Mount Carmel, doesn't he? the prophets of Baal are trying to summon their god to act on their behalf, to consume the sacrificed with heavenly fire, and they try to increase their provocations in order to hopefully get at Baal. And Elijah says, maybe he's in another country, maybe he's sleeping, maybe he's relieving himself in the restroom. He mocks them. He says, you guys can try and augment and increase your provocations. It's not going to do anything, because Baal doesn't exist. And he simply prays to the Lord, and the Lord sends fire down to consume the sacrifice. And so just as we should not think of God as the prophets of Baal thought of Baal, where the more we sing and dance, the more we do something provocative, the more provoked God will be. No, if you draw near to God as a sinner, he will disapprove of you and destroy you. If you draw near to God as a righteous person, he will approve of you and welcome you. This also helps us, and we'll come back to this tomorrow, this helps us to understand that when God removes from our hearts the comfort of his presence that we desire, we know that he has not ceased to be loving. We know that he has not ceased to be merciful. We know that he has not ceased to be good. We know that he has done this in order to bring about a change in us, not that he has changed. Because I know every morning his mercies are new. I know that because he does not change, therefore I am consumed. Therefore I know that he is disciplining me as a father, and the father disciplines the one whom the father loves. And so I know, maybe not in that moment, but I know well enough that if the Lord removes the light of His face from me, that it is to change me, not because He has changed. Our confession talks about this as well when it talks about God hiding the light of His face for a time from His people in the chapter on perseverance. All of these things that we've described of us seeing God do one thing and then doing another thing in repentance, of God not punishing us and then punishing us in anger and vengeance and wrath, all of these are creatures witnessing the outworking and the display of God's eternal decree. We see God threaten and then relent. We see God do one thing and then do an opposite thing in relation to the first thing. All of which are simply different effects brought about in time in a succession of events. But is God along for the ride? Is God going this way? Oh, no, this way? Of course not. That's blasphemous to even think to say it that way. It's for illustration, of course. To think that that's the way that God actually is would be to be blasphemous. God is not along for the ride. The infinite is not trapped in time, going through a succession of mutations. Rather, God is simple, infinite, eternal, immutable, and impassable. And the people of God should praise Him and thank Him for these truths. We should praise Him and thank Him that love and mercy and anger in God are not passions or affections brought about by creatures or pushed away by creatures. Rather, they are in God eternal and infinite perfections. And as we will see in our final lesson tomorrow morning, this becomes the foundation of our personal hope and assurance and confidence, as well as the foundation for our gospel message to the world.