Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

Good morning everyone.

Thank you all for coming out this morning.

Let’s begin in prayer before we start and ask God to help us.

[PRAYER]

Our God never changes.

He never learns.

He never grows.

He never develops.

Who he is today is the same as he was yesterday, the same as he was before he made the world, and the same that he will be a thousand years from now and into all eternity.

Our God never changes.

On the surface, this can seem like a simple idea, but when we press into it, we quickly discover that, as creatures who change all of the time, it’s incredibly difficult to conceive of a completely and utterly unchanging God.

We all change every day.

We get hungry.

We become tired.

We get older.

Our hair turns gray.

Our personalities change as we develop as individuals.

I’m not the same person my wife married five years ago, and I think she’d testify that she’s thankful for that.

But God, God never changes.

In describing God as unchanging, theologians have used the word “Immutable” to say that God is incapable of change.

And I think that most of us are familiar with this idea.

We sing in church:

“Everything changes, but You stay the same

Your word and kingdom endure.”

We’re familiar with verses like, “Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever.”

and descriptions of God in the Bible as having “no variation or shadow due to change.”

But it’s when we press deeper, and think harder than we begin to realize how difficult this doctrine of the immutability of God can be.

Because if God is unchangeable, then he’s unchangeable in all of his attributes, and in all that he is.

“Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever.”

And while it would be beneficial for us to spend all of our time this morning talking about God’s unchangeableness broadly, I want us to look at one specific dimension of this that theologians throughout church history have called divine impassibility.

Mental Challengers

And I have to say, of all points of theology I’ve studied, this one is the hardest for me.

Steve wisely had me agree to teach Sunday School today before he told me that I would be teaching on impassibility.

In all seriousness, in studying theology, only one doctrine has ever made my head physically hurt while I’m thinking about it and reading about it: it’s impassibility.

It feels like when I’m using my laptop and I open one program after another after another and all of a sudden my fan starts spinning violently and it feels like my computer is going to take off from my lap.

This is difficult.

If you walk away with questions, that’s OK.

If you walk away feeling like you only understand 10%-15% of this, that’s OK.

In studying the impassibility of God, we become keenly aware, that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts and his ways are not our ways.

Or, as Paul says in , “who has known the mind of the Lord?”

We are immediately met with mystery.

And how we respond to mystery is incredibly important.

God would not want us to be discouraged, or intimidated by who he is.

He wants us to worship.

He wants us to love him more.

Emotional Challenges

But beyond those mental challenges, there are also emotional challenges.

In my experience and in the experience of many of those I’ve spoken to, understanding impassability and then believing in impassibility is a lot like a journey towards believing that God is sovereign.

There’s just something inside of us that naturally kicks against believing that this is true.

But after we’ve gotten through that, and after we’ve come to rest that this truly is who our God reveals himself to be, it results in deeper gratefulness towards God and truer worship of God.

Also like once we come to understand that God is sovereign, once we understand what is meant that God is impassible, it becomes hard to pick up Scripture and not see this everywhere and rejoice because of it.

Cultural Challengers

Cultural Challenges: Impassibility is unpopular with many, both inside and outside the church.

Finally, there are also cultural challenges.

Again, much like divine sovereignty, impassibility is a doctrine that has been challenged and misunderstood even by evangelical Christians, even by Reformed, Evangelical Christians.

But if you read Spurgon, Edwards, Calvin, Luther, Aquinas, Anselm, or Augustine, you’ll find that all of these church fathers, and many more, all held to divine impassibility.

Both the Westminster and London Baptist Confessions describe and defend impassibility.

In fact, John Owen in describing impassibility even says “it is agreed upon by all the orthodox.”

Until the 19th century, almost all Christian theologians believed that God is impassible.

It’s only been recently that this has been challenged, often by well intentioned people who do truly desire to be faithful to Scripture and loving towards others.

But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s take a step back and define impassibility, seek to understand it in the Scriptures, and then spend time meditating together on how this doctrine can help us love God more fully and worship him more truly.

It’s only been recently that this has been challenged by well intentioned people who do truly desire to be faithful to Scripture.

I have a definition of impassibility on your outline, the definition I’d like for us to consider today.

I’d like to give us a simple definition of impassibility today.

And this definition doesn’t encompass everything impassibility is and involves, but it’s enough for us to cover and think about today.

Definition: God does not experience emotional changes, either by his own divine will, or in response to his creation.

Challenges:

Mental Challengers: Impassibility is difficult to understand.

Westminster describes the doctrine like this, God is without body, parts, or passions.

God is without passions.

Definition: God does not experience emotional changes, either by his own divine will, or in response to his creation.

Now because I know that you all are people who love your Bibles and know your Bibles, I assume at this moment red lights are blinking in your head.

Doesn’t the Bible describe a God who is full of passions and emotions?

Full of love and mercy and wrath and compassion?

And you’d be right in that observation.

So how should we understand this doctrine?

What have faithful readers of the Bible throughout the centuries meant by this doctrine?

And how can it change us into delighting in and worshiping God more fully?

1) Impassibility and Us

First, before we start talking about what we mean by emotions and passions in relationship to God, we need to spend a little bit of time defining our terms.

This is a conversations that the church has been having for hundreds of years, and it’s best if we understand the conversation that beign had before we enter into it and voice our own opinions.

When we say that God is without passions, what do we mean by that?

Well, theologians in the past have been careful to differentiate between passions and affections.

While today we might use “passion” to mean that we feel something strongly, “I’m passionate about xyz,” that’s not how it’s been traditionally thought of.

In fact, both Augustine and Aquinas differentiated between passions, which as passive feelings, involuntary emotions that just come upon you, and affections which are active, voluntary, and reasonable.

Kevin DeYoung put it like this,

Throughout Christian thought, passions have not referee to passionate feelings.

They refer to the sorts of emotions that sweep over you and threaten to control you.”