I couldn’t choose a title, so there’s a combined one.

Last blog post was about God’s Immutability and Impassability. In case you need a refresher, God’s immutability is His inability to change, and impassability is that God doesn’t experience emotional changes. God is impassible, but also not unemotional. Yes, this one is hard for me to wrap my head around, but I’ll try explain it as best as I can.

We NEED God to stay the same ~ a God who can and may change is not a steadfast God and would actually be scary, The crux of this matter is that God is God and we are not. We are mere humans, finite and limited beings. Therefore – this is what is important to start with, we cannot take our own experience of feelings and emotions and apply them to God. What would help before I go any further is to define what “passions” and “affections” are to God.

From the article “Does God Have Feelings?” by Mike McGarry at Livingtheologically.com, they are described this way:

PASSION: emotional response to external actions. Passions overpower the will and cause us to respond on their own power. These include reactions like anger or lust or fear.

AFFECTION: self-chosen emotional response. Affections are active responses of the will, such as compassion, love, or wrath against injustice. These are most clearly seen on the cross, where the love of God was displayed for his people and where his wrath against sin was satisfied. God was not emotionally unstable or making a knee-jerk reaction. Instead, he took pity on humanity and moved according to His love.

I hope that’s helpful. Still, we can recoil from the thought of impassibility – because it feels like an emotionless God. A stoic, aloof God. But this doctrine doesn’t deny that God has emotions such as love and joy. Let’s look at this way. Just as we wouldn’t say that an immutable God is immobile, so we see that an impassible God is not impassive either. God is invulnerable to suffering. Nothing can act upon Him, but He is also not passive. As Mike McGarry writes, “so the doctrine of impassibility is a statement about the perfection of God’s emotional life, His sovereignty over it, rather than its absence.” The ancient church Father, Tertullian tells us that divine impassibility does not mean that God is without emotion, rather it means that God possesses emotions in a divine manner. And God’s will is determined from within, not by being swayed from outside Himself.

The authors of the Bible were finite, limited, sinners like us. They wrote as inspired by the Holy Spirit so that we know the Bible is God’s infallible Word. But the language that God inspired them to write in was our own human language. Limited. The Bible describes God in the language of human experience and emotion, but denies that those experiences are necessarily in God.

So how do we understand what is written about God relenting or repenting even? Let’s look at 1 Samuel 15. This is where we read the story of God rejecting Saul as king.

Verse 10, 11: “Then the word of the Lord came to Samuel, ‘I regret that I made Saul king, for he has turned away from following me and has not carried out my instructions.” So Samuel became angry and cried out to the LORD all night.” (CSB). The Hebrew word for regret is “nacham” which means “to change one’s mind, regret, relent”. The Blue Letter Bible app explains it by using the Strong’s Definitions: properly, to sigh, i.e. breathe strongly; by implication to be sorry, to pity, console or rue…

So what do we make of this? If God is sovereign, then he knew from before the foundations of the world that this was going to happen. He ordained it! How can God change and regret His previous decisions and actions? Saul’s wrong moral choices pained God to see this disobedience come to pass.

If we read a little further, we get to vs 26-29. Samuel refuses to accompany Saul to worship the Lord (who half heartedly repents), because Saul rejected God and thus, God has rejected Saul as king. As Samuel was leaving, Saul grabbed Samuel’s robe and tore it. Samuel says, “The LORD has torn the kingship of Israel away from you today and has given it to your neighbour who is better than you. Furthermore, the Eternal One of Israel does not lie or change His mind, for He is not a man who changes His mind.” Samuel is telling Saul his reign is done. And that’s that. Numbers 23: 19, 20 records Balaam as saying (to Balak), “God is not a man, that He might lie. or a son of man, that He might change His mind. Does He speak and not act or promise and not fulfill?”

Okay, so that clears it up somewhat. But not all of it. But what about the emotions of God? How do we explain the different emotions that are ascribed to our unchanging God? How do we reconcile it?

In previous blog posts, we’ve seen that God is eternal and “a se” – of Himself . He is the great I AM THAT I AM. He is outside of time and space. He is perfect, independent, simple. He is unchanging. But we cannot EQUATE our words and language we use to describe God WITH God Himself. We cannot put God in a box and make Him more understandable than He has revealed Himself. Our limited knowledge and expressions can never truly and fully express who God is – no matter how hard we try!

Many authors and scholars have described God’s self revelation to us as through creaturely communication as God is ‘lisping’ to us- as parents or a nurse would speak to children. We speak to them using words that they can understand. And God does the same with us. If God spoke to us in a way that displays His power and strength and perfection, we would never understand it – we couldn’t understand it! It’d be too great for our limited capacities as humans. John Calvin spoke of accommodated language. The depiction of the divine Being is “accommodated to our capacity so that we may understand it. Now the mode of accommodation is for Him to represent Himself to us not as He is in Himself, but as He seems to us….whenever we hear that God is angered, we ought not to imagine any emotion (passion)in Him, but rather to consider that this expression has been taken from our own human experience.”

In Amos Winarto Oei’s essay “The Impassible God Who ‘Cried‘ (through the Gospel Coalition.org site, he writes: “While God is not affected by people’s sufferings, it does not mean that He has no emotion at all.” As stated above, John Calvin explained Biblical descriptions of God having emotions as examples of divine accommodation to our human limitations like “nurses are wont to do with little children.’

This “language of accommodation” is an expression of the act of divine condescension. As Oei says, “The direction is from God to mankind, and not vice-versa”. And we can also see that this act of accommodating language is an act of grace! Otherwise – how would we know Him?

As Samuel Renihan writes in his article, “Does God Experience Emotional Change?” from credomag.com , “when Scripture speaks of God repenting, regretting, or relenting, the point of connection is not between the emotional state of a human that repents and some emotional state in God, but in the action taken. God’s repentance is not an undergoing or a happening to God, but from the creature’s perspective in time it is a reversal of actions, all of which was decreed by God in eternity.” God in eternity decreed that He would make Saul king, and then remove him, that he would threaten Nineveh’s destruction and then would deliver it. If we tried to understand God’s actions as existing in time as we know it, well, the Creator would become the creature. And thankfully God is not a man!

So, what of emotional change? There are 4 things to consider about God’s impassibility according to Samuel Renihan: Love, Mercy, Anger, Justice.

LOVE. God is love. God is the true and faithful lover and chooses to have a loving relationship with us. He gives good gifts to His people out of His love and goodness. How we love and show love is not how the Creator loves; we see something good and are drawn to it, we love what we see and reciprocate that love, especially in our relationships. In Oei’s article he says, “To say that “God cries” is to say that God treats His people as someone responds to his precious one being lost.” God chooses to be in relationship with us so that we can understand what it means for God to love and feel sorrow for them. It demonstrates God’s care for us!

Our love can waver based on how we’re treated, or what happens to us. Even our love for God will waver depending on what is happening to us. He doesn’t love like we do….His love is an everlasting perfection, not an emotion! His love never wavers, His love isn’t affected by what we do or don’t do. And the only reason we can love at all, is because God loved us. We love Him because as He is love, He first loved us. God’s love – that attribute of perfection – does not change. (1 John 4:16)

MERCY. Samuel Renihan states, “Mercy, again, must be applied to creatures one way, and to God in another. Men are moved to mercy when they perceive a need in another like them. We are merciful because we suffer and feel alongside of another person.” Christians show love and mercy to others in compassion, in empathy, in sympathy. BUT, here’s the difference: GOD DOES NOT SUFFER. I think that is the all important point to take away from this. God does not suffer. Our immutable God cannot undergo change or be acted upon. Of course, God is merciful to us. He is mercy! He helps the helpless, even though “there is no connection between His nature and the helpless person.” Because He doesn’t suffer, because He’s not restricted, He is able to have mercy on whomever he wants to. God is perfectly merciful. God’s mercy is a perfection, not a passion or affection. “God is the most merciful because He helps those that are entirely unlike Him, and He helps those that no one else would help.”

We all have a distinction in our emotions between a “disposition” and the “exercise” of it. We could be disposed to fear, or anger, or frustration. And in certain circumstances, we end up exercising that emotion in one way or another. So, we *could* think of God’s emotions as dispositions – but – He is Pure Act. As Oei says, “God’s dispositions are maximally active and exercised without any limitation or conditionality. There is not unfulfilled potential in God! ” His compassion, His love, His mercy, His care is always fully available and functioning. If His emotions changed at a whim, He couldn’t be trusted to remain fully available and functioning in a divine, immutable way. He is always perfectly loving, perfectly just, perfectly everything, dependent on no one. God’s dispositions or emotions are far beyond and nowhere the same as human emotions. Just as I wrote above about God regretting making Saul king, when we read that God “repented” (Gen 6:6; Judges 2:18, 10:16) the passages are a means where God is relating to his created human beings in a human way.

ANGER. JUSTICE. This shows the problem of our human language limitations. We get angry and our anger can lead to all kinds of sin. So – like with love and mercy, is God then perfectly and eternally and infinitely angry? No. So why do we read of God’s anger in the Bible? Remove the passion from anger. When we’re angry – someone is the object of that anger. But in God, anger describes God’s perfect and unstoppable justice! God will punish sin. Because He’s God. John Calvin argues that “whenever we read that God is angered, we ought not to imagine any emotion (passion!) in Him, but rather to consider that this expression has been taken from our own human experience.” And we cannot make God angry. He isn’t burning with anger! We use the term angry to describe God’s unchanging justice. It’s hard for us to imagine anger without passion. Again, as Renihan writes. “God is angry in the sense that He will cause justice and vengeance to be poured out on the unrepentant and wicked. His anger is therefore an eternal perfection, not as emotion as it is in us.”

God is unchangeable. Full stop. God pours out his love, mercy and justice from the unchanging infinity of His perfect being. What we call emotions “are unchanging essential perfections in God.”

We need a God who doesn’t just suffer with us in our pain, what we need is a God who overcomes it all. He gets it and He deals with it. Or rather, Jesus dealt with it. He bore, in his human nature, all the pain, grief, trials that we do, he experienced all the emotions we know, and he is God’s compassion and solution for our suffering and pain! By his suffering, death and resurrection He conquered it all, and holds all emotions in perfection without changing, and yet completely understanding ours.

Final thought. Biblical accommodations – or anthropopathisms are based on analogy. There’s similarity, but not equal in nature or act. So, for God’s love, or compassion, or even anger or jealously, we must see it as an analogy of our emotions. We are God’s image bearers, and do share in some of His attributes. God indeed has those emotions, but we must remember that His emotion is far beyond and not even the same as ours! We have a Sovereign God who isn’t affected or subject to human emotions as we know them, but HE DOES understand it – even better than how we understand ourselves, and He overcomes it.

What a God we worship! May this lead you to “doxa” – praise!