Linked Together: God's Attributes

An Introduction
This afternoon I listened to the first lecture in Steve Lawson’s teaching series on the attributes of God. I recommend it. (Ligonier Ministries is offering the first lecture free, but the others must be purchased.)

Impassibility
If God has love, compassion, and wrath, how can we say he is “without passions”? It’s because

[p]assion as passion is an undergoing, a “happening to,” so to speak. Emotional experience brings to its subject a new state of actuality that was not previously present. For example, the one who falls in love is said to experience love as a passion because a new affective state of love comes to exist in the subject where previously it did not. Some movement and alteration has taken place in the human lover. 

“Passion” then, tells us about “the manner in which affections come upon creatures.” God, however, 

does not undergo intrinsic change, yet he is truly loving, compassionate, angry at sin, and so forth. The perfection indicated by each of these terms is real in God. But this reality did not come into his possession by way of passion, that is, by way of unfolding emotive experiences to which he submits himself. 

Read the whole piece, which is a sample of an article by Dr. James E. Dolezal in Journal of the Institute of Reformed Baptist Studies. It’s one of the clearest explanations of impassibility that I’ve read.

Transcendence and Immanence
Justin Taylor uses a chart to illustrate the biblical definitions of these attributes. 

Election Circumscribes the Atonement

Some argue that Christ’s atonement is general—he died to save everyone—but the application of the atonement is particular—God elected some to whom this general atonement is applied. However,

John 6 indicates that the Father gives a specific group of people to the Son for whom he then comes to die in order to give them eternal life. Particularism attends the planning and the making of the atonement, not just its application. Thus it is election that circumscribes the atonement, not the other way around.

From Matthew S. Harmon’s essay on definite atonement in the Synoptics and Johannine literature in From Heaven He Came and Sought Her: Definite Atonement in Historical, Biblical, Theological, and Pastoral Perspective.

Previously posted quotes from this book.

• Someone for Some People
• Death Is the Penalty
• Election Is the Spring

Thankful Thurday

This Thursday I’m thankful 

• for this promise from God: “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease” (Genesis 8:22, ESV). Yes, summer will eventually come, and that’s something to be thankful for.
• for clear skies. We’ve been able to see the northern lights, and they’ve put on some spectacular shows. And while the temps drop way down on our cloudless nights, the bright sun warms things right up during the daylight hours—and chases away the winter blues, to boot.
• for safe travel on winter roads. 
• that all my children live nearby. Extended family living in the same town is a wonderful thing. My grandchildren see their cousins, aunts, and uncles often, and know them in a way I didn’t, nor did my own children. Things may not always be like this, but I’m thankful for it while we have it.
• that all the books are finally back on their shelves in the church library. Did I mention that we had a little flood in January?
• that Christ came to bring Jew and Gentile together in one body, and that in him I am included in the household of God.

What are you thankful for?