Keep it Simple

Though we can not comprehend Him as He is, we must be careful not to fancy Him to be what He is not.

Stephen Charnock

One of the most oft-quoted verses about the nature of God is that “God is love” (1 John 4:8) We hear it quoted endlessly in popular Christianity. There have been songs sung, books written, movies made, and endless conversations had about how God is love. It seems, even to the exclusion of other attributes of God we see clearly in Scripture. Modern popular Christianity has so emphasized God’s love that they have forgotten about His holiness, wrath, impassibility, simplicity, aseity, and many others. They have replaced the classical Christian perspective with a watered-down, weak, soft version of what is revealed in Scripture. They have taken the God from whom the Earth and sky will flee (Revelation 20:11) and replaced Him with a god who wants to be everyone’s friend, and is never wrathful or angry.

Why this departure from a balanced, Biblical view of God? I think one of the major contributing factors is a wholesale abandonment of sound theology proper. Theology proper is a sub-discipline of the greater theological system (known as systematic theology,) and is primarily concerned with the attributes of God.

[ref]For a more in-depth study on this subject, I recommend All That Is In God by James Dolezal.[/ref]

In abandoning theology proper, modern popular Christianity has filled the gap with emotionalism, letting their emotions drive how they see God and how they read the Bible instead of letting the Bible inform how they see the world and how they see God. When we sacrifice God’s simplicity and impassibility all in the name of “love” what we end up with is a god who is able to change, a god who is subject to his universe instead of His universe being subject to Him. A god who has fits of rage and bouts of sadness. A god who changes his mind with the seasons, and thus cannot truly be trusted to live up to his promises, for his reliability is in question.

The vital importance of us confessing an unchanging God lies in the fact that we are changing. Mankind is so fickle and capricious, our promises are fallible and our word is breakable. We cannot depend on the reliability of man. How much, then, do we need a God who is good to His word, a God whose promises we can trust, and a God whose law we know will stand in utter perfection. We cannot have a god that is like us (changing and emotive) how can we rest and trust in a god who may change and rescind his promises at a moment’s notice? One of the greatest comforts of the Christian faith is that we worship a God who does not change, and whose Word is true yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

What does this have to do with the modern church emphasizing God’s love over all else? When we confess that God is simple, that means He is identical with His attributes, that God is not made up of parts. His goodness is His mercy is His justice is His love is His eternity is His omnipresence. Because God is not a composite being, a sum of a certain number of attributes. There is nothing you can take away from God, and there is nothing you can add to God to make Him “more.” If I get in an accident tomorrow and lose an appendage, I’m still me and I’m still human because I am not identical with my attributes. God’s simplicity is intrinsically intertwined with His impassibility and aseity. The only way we can confess an unchanging God is to confess a simple, impassible God.
So if you hear teaching that God is love, but that He isn’t wrath, or if you hear that God “became” this or that, or that He gains anything from His creatures, just remember that to be able to rely on the unchanging nature of God, we must confess the simple, impassible, a se nature of God.