Divine Simplicity

God without Parts

Divine simplicity is the teaching that God is without parts and passions. When we say that God is without parts, we mean that He is simple. That He isn’t complex like we humans are. By that, I don’t mean that God is naive, or that God isn’t great. Instead, I mean that God IS all of His attributes. Let me demonstrate that for you. *Use Levi. Have him hug you. Have him help you up. Have him shove you.* Notice that Levi behaved in ways that were loving, helpful, and mean and even though he displayed different attributes of his, he is still Levi. That’s what so complex about him! Even though he shoved me, it may have been mean, but it doesn’t change the essence of Levi-ness.

Now, that’s not how God is. God doesn’t act in accordance to love, or mercy, or justice, or grace as though they are attributes that He thinks He’s going to display today. Instead, God IS love, mercy, justice, grace because all of those things are His godness and because of that they are all really the same thing. Now, that can be a little confusing because we have to think, “How is God’s justice the same as His love?” Well, think about it like this. Let’s say it’s the middle of July and you leave the Mexican restaurant after lunch and while you’re walking to the car, you spill your drink. What is that sun going to do to the ice that’s out of the asphalt? Melt it! Now, let’s say you drive home, you’ve got your leftovers on the dash and when you pull in, you’ve got to run inside and you forget your leftovers in the car. What is the sun going to do to those refried beans? It’s going to dry them up. That is two totally different results, isn’t it? So, did the ice or beans change the nature of the sun? Of course not and that’s exactly how it is with God. When God acts, to some His justice is seen in a terrifying and damning way but to others who are in Christ, they see God act in a loving, gracious and merciful way. Did God magically change? No. What changed? Us. We are fundamentally changed when God saved us so that in all that God does, what was once condemning judgment is now, because of salvation, seen as for our good.

For instance, we have all been shocked by the news coming out of the mountains this week. And as a Christian, I’ve had to stand back and ask myself, “How do we think about this event as a believer? What about the lost people there? What about the saved people there?” You see, in the mountains, both believers and unbelievers lost everything. For the unbeliever, that action of God is judgment and may be used to bring them to God. For the believer, that action of God is sanctifying as He promised us in Romans 8. Now God didn’t send two different storms, It was one simple action, but the people who were hit are receiving it in a different sense.

That is what we mean when we say that God is without parts. Bishop Hilary of Poitier, France who lived in the 300’s said, “all that He is is life, a nature, that is, complete, absolute and infinite, not composed of dissimilar elements but with one life permeating the whole.” This leads me to our next point which is that God is without Passions

God without Passions

Now, if Levi stands up again and I tell him I love him and he hugs me as a response, or if I ask him for help and he picks me up, or if I push him first and he pushes me back, that might change how you thought of his behavior earlier, right? Why, because the passionate responses that you saw in Levi were REACTIONS to my behavior. But that isn’t how God is. For instance, God isn’t loving because we were cute and loving first. No, He’s loving because He is love. To put it simply, God doesn’t respond to anything

Now, we might think that makes God disconnected and disinterested because He isn’t aroused by us into love like we are when we see a cute baby cry or a little old lately needing help. But the thing we need to realize is that we were PROVOKED to love because of that cuteness, but God isn’t provoked to love because He is already always loving! That makes this a beautiful doctrine because in the life of a believer, Satan may tempt you to think that God is in a season of anger toward you or that He doesn’t love you, but that isn’t true. God is always loving and His actions, although sometimes we may not understand, are always good for His people.

Now, in the Bible you see language that says something like, “God repented, God regretted, or God was angered.” Does that defeat the meaning of what I’m teaching you? Does that mean that God actually does react and change based on our actions? No necessarily. When the Bible speaks of God acting in ways similar to a human, it is using what is called “anthropopathism.” That is just a big word to say, “Hey, we are applying human things to God to try and communicate something here.” It isn’t as though God is like a man, instead it is that men cannot comprehend God so God bends down on His knees and speaks baby talk to us so we can understand just a little bit about Him. Hilary of Poitier said, “God has spoken not for Himself but for us, and that He has so far tempered the language of His utterance as to enable the weakness of our nature to grasp and understand it."

So, whenever God seems to be sending adversity into our lives. We, as Christians, shouldn’t fall into thinking that God is mad at us. Instead we should be asking, “God, how are you trying to grow me through this?”

The next thing I want us to take from this is that simplicity reassures us of God’s faithful promise keeping. Malachi 3:6

Malachi 3:6 NKJV

6 “For I am the Lord, I do not change; Therefore you are not consumed, O sons of Jacob.