As we think about who God is and what He is like, we keep coming back to those two big lies we can end up believing: that either God is not good or God is not sovereign (and sometimes both). In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were presented with this twin temptation and they fell for it. When they chose to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge, they were falling into line with the two lies.
The Serpent told them that God did not really care about them; that when He forbade them from eating the fruit, He did so because He wanted to keep them in their place. By eating the fruit, Adam and Eve declared that they did not believe in God’s goodness. They believed the lie that God had made a rule for selfish, cruel reasons. Despite the fact that God had provided them with everything they could ask for, despite God’s obvious love for them, they chose to believe that He was not loving and not good.
They also believed the lie that God was not sovereign. We see this in the way that they accepted the serpent’s version of events. Was God really so weak that he was vulnerable to the challenge of his creation? Could they really rival Him? We see it in their decision to make their own rules. They did not want to submit to God as though His law was not wise. They wanted to be in charge. Finally, we see it in the way that they hid and the excuses they made as though they could escape from God’s presence: as though He would not find them and see through their excuses.
And so in place of those lies, it is vital that we discover the truth about God’s goodness and His sovereignty.
The Independent God
If God is sovereign and without rivals, then nothing can influence, control, overrule or overpower Him. God is invincible and without rival. There is nothing and no-one greater than Him. That is why we are not to worship other gods. It is not that they are real rivals to his power and could usurp Him: it is that they are not Gods at all.
This is sometimes described as God’s “aseity.” It comes from a Latin term “A-Se” “meaning from or by himself.”[1] In other words, God is unique; there is no other being comparable to Him. He is in a class of His own. Specifically, only God is self-existent. This is the point Jesus makes in John 5. He says that both the Father and the Son have “life in themselves.” All other creatures live and breathe because God breathed life into them.
No-one made God. There wasn’t a time when he began and there won’t be a time when he ceases to exist. This is important because once again it reminds us that in no way does God depend on us. The God who is eternal is also eternally “love” because He is the eternal Trinity.
“Scripture defines God’s love, therefore by the relationships among the Father, the Son and the Spirit, not by his relationships with the world. Trinitarianism, therefore guards God’s aseity, his independence from the world. ..God does not need the world in order to love. He is not relative to the world. Thus his love is fully sovereign. He loves as the Lord.”[2]
God is independent in every sense of the word.
“God is not only self-existent, but self-attesting and self-justifying. He not only exists without receiving existence from something else, but also gains his knowledge only from himself (his nature and his plan) and serves as his own criterion of truth. And his righteousness is self-justifying, based on the righteousness of his own nature and on his status as the ultimate criterion of righteousness.”[3]
In other words, it is not just that He is uncreated but because He is the Creator, because He is the source of goodness, then he is the one who defines what righteousness and goodness is. This is important because sometimes we can view worship as something that God needs as though he needs our affirmation. God is not dependent on us for anything. He does not need our love or approval. Rather, we are completely dependent on God. As Bavinck puts it:
“Thus being all sufficient in himself and not receiving anything from outside of himself he is by contrast, the only source of all existence and life, of all light and love, the overflowing fountain of all good.”[4]
This takes us to the heart of the Gospel. Our entire relationship with God is dependent on grace. It was out of grace, not need, that God made us. This contrasts with ancient (and some modern) religions that see humans as servants of the gods, there to provide for them. It contrasts with atheistic evolution where humans are merely vehicles for genetic replication.[5]
Not only are we dependent on Him, but we can completely depend on Him. If He is without beginning, then he is also without end. He isn’t going away anywhere any time soon. God is eternal.
Lord of Time
Our understanding of what it means to say that God is “Lord of time” has probably been severely damaged by a Saturday evening TV show, Dr Who. The Doctor is a Time Lord, an alien with two special traits. He is able to time travel in his special space ship, The Tardis and he is able to regenerate meaning that when he is near death, he can renew his life and live for many hundreds of years. These are incredible powers but in the end, The Doctor is still limited and constrained. He grows old, eventually he will use up his last regeneration and die. There are fixed point events that he cannot change. In the end, The Doctor is not the Lord of Time and Space, he is just an ordinary alien.
When we say that God is eternal, we are not just saying that he has been around for ever and ever. Some people do describe God as everlasting, but temporal. This would mean that he had existed for an infinite period of time, but that he also experiences progression of minutes, hours, days, weeks, years and so on.[1]
Now whilst they would also insist that God is not subject to the ravages of time and does not age, I would suggest that when we think in those terms, then we do end up imaging a God who ages, the old man in the sky with the long white beard. In a day and age where the aging process is feared, eternal youth is an idol and novelty trumps experience every time, then The Ancient of Days is seen as dated, frail and weary. This is not how we are meant to think of the eternal God.
Back to Dr Who. In the episode, “The Woman Who Lived” a vivid picture is painted of how this type of longevity becomes seen as a curse. The Doctor saves a young girl’s life but in the process turns her into a hybrid human-alien who will live for ever. Hundreds of years later, he meets her again. She is not grateful at all. Life has dragged on. She has seen loved ones die. Her finite mind means that she forgets her past. She is bored, always looking for a new adventure. Life has grown stale.
We need to get a different grasp on what it means to say that God is eternal or we will end up with a similar stale view of time and eternity. If we have the wrong idea of what it means to say that God is eternal, it may even corrupt our understanding of what it means to have eternal life.
When we say that God is eternal, we are saying He is the one who created time. In Genesis 1, God separates darkness from light and calls one night and the other day. At this point, God creates time. We then see the progression of day followed by night through the first seven days. God creates the sun and the moon. The earth rotates around the sun and the moon around the earth so that we are able to measure months, seasons and years. It was only when God created that time started. This is why Jesus was able to declare Himself “Lord of the Sabbath.” As the one who created all the days of the week, it was for him to decide what should be done on one of those days!
God is over and above time so that he is not subject to time. Peter puts it this way:
“But you must not forget this one thing, dear friends: A day is like a thousand years to the Lord, and a thousand years is like a day.” [6]
Theologians sometimes say that he has all of his existence at once.[7] This means that he is not waiting for an experience to happen to discover something new. God is eternal and so he knows everything. He is omniscient. God’s ability to know everything because he is outside of time has sometimes been compared to an observer sat up in the mountains with an elevated view of a long road. The observer can see the beginning and the end of the route. He can see the traffic jams, the road works and the accident blackspots.
Now, this can be useful in helping us to grasp how God’s eternal existence results in his omniscience. He knows everything, past, present, future, because he sees everything. There is nothing hidden from Him. However, it could also leave us picturing God as distant and remote. What is the use of seeing all the traffic problems if you cannot do anything about it, if you are too far away to act, too far away even to shout out a warning before it’s too late? Timelessness becomes lifelessness.
Again, we are not meant to see God like this. It is not that God is outside of time and unable to get involved. We do better to say that God transcends time. He is greater than time, but he is also present in every part of time. Think of how God relates to space.
The Lord of Space
God created space and time. He is the one who made the Universe. He formed the planets; he put the stars into space. This massive Universe with its many galaxies that stretch far beyond the reach of the most powerful telescopes was made by Him.
This means that God is greater than the Universe. He is infinite. Now, when we say that He is infinite, we are not just saying that He is a bit bigger than the Universe. There’s not a way of getting to God’s outer limits. That’s mind blowing. God is over and above space.
But is God outside of space, distant, not present? No. He is omnipresent. He fills space with his presence. The Psalmist says that there isn’t a place in the Universe where we could run to and God would not be there.
God transcends space and time. The Lord of Time is not a double hearted alien flying backwards and forwards to different planets at different points of history. If The Doctor existed in real life instead of fiction, wherever and whenever his Tardis landed, he would discover that God was already there before him. And that means that when we think about prayer, we should not see that urgent desperate plea as an attempt to summon God from a distance space, persuading him to come and act. God is already present with us.
What we are seeing here is that God is both Transcendent and imminent. He is great and infinite beyond our understanding, beyond defining beyond analysing but he is near, close. We can know Him and we can have a relationship with Him.
The God who knows all things
If God made and rules over everything in Time and Space, then it flows from this that He knows everything, past, present and future. This is sometimes referred to as omniscience.
Theologians distinguish between God’s knowledge of Himself and His knowledge of creation. Bavinck says:
“To be distinguished from God’s self-consciousness is his world consciousness. An earlier theology, accordingly divided ‘the knowledge of God’ into a natural or necessary knowledge (the knowledge of simple intelligence) and free or contingent knowledge (the knowledge of vision). The two are not identical as pantheism would have it, for the Absolute is only to be conceived as being logically and potentially prior to the world. It is totally insufficient to explain the existence of the world. God does not need the world to become personal and self-conscious.”[8]
You will see here that, once again, Bavinck emphasises God’s independence from his creation. He contrasts Christian theology with Pantheism which confuses God with His creation. Sometimes we use art and creativity to learn. Art therapy can be a helpful way of working through an issue or an emotion. The result is that as the person works on a painting, sculpture, dance, poem or song, they realise something about themselves, maybe something hidden deep in their subconscious which unlocks the solution to their problem. We are not meant to think about God like that. God does not need His creation in order to learn about himself. God was not unfulfilled before he spoke Light and Darkness into existence. This is why God’s knowledge of his creation is descried as “free” or “contingent.”
“Natural” or “necessary knowledge” is what God knows about Himself. It also describes the way in which the Father knows the Son and vice versa. It is necessary because God is a personal Being, not an impersonal force. God cannot stop knowing; otherwise, He would not be God. In other words, God is simple!
Turretin talks about how God knows things. He says:
“Concerning the intellect of God and the disquisition of his knowledge, two things above all others must be attended to: the mode and objective. The mode consists in his knowing all things perfectly, undividedly, distinctly and immutably. It is thus distinguished from human and angelic knowledge.”[9]
What does he mean by this? Well, helpfully, he goes on to break down and expand upon what he means into these categories – “perfectly, undividedly, distinctly and immutably”:
“perfectly because he knows all things by himself or by his essence (not by forms abstracted from things – as is the case with creatures – both because these are only in time with the things themselves, but the knowledge of God is eternal, and because he can have no cause outside of himself).”
This means that what God knows is complete and exhaustive. There isn’t a gap in his knowledge. He will not find out something new about the subject later on. He knows every detail that there is to know. His knowledge reflects his character. He is infinite and so his knowledge is infinite too.
“Undividedly because he knows all things intuitively and noetically, not discursively and dianoetically.” – i.e. he does not have to deduce one thing from another.”[10]
We probably need to look up a couple of words in the dictionary here! “Intuition” is to do with the ability to know things “immediately without conscious reasoning.”[11] “Noetically” simply means that something is known intellectually with the mind.”[12] “Discursive” is all to do with discourse or discussion and if something is known “dianoetically” then this is the opposite of intuition and relies on logical deduction. In other words, God does not need to acquire knowledge through learning, experience and reasoning. All of his knowledge is available to him, perfectly and at once.
“Distinctly, not that by a diverse conception he collects diverse predicates of things, but because he most distinctively sees through all things at one glance so that nothing g, even the most minute, can escape him.”[13]
We humans have a problem. Because we are finite, we have to choose how we are going to know about something. We can either gain broad knowledge or get the big picture or we can get stuck into the detail. The problem with the first is that a big picture view tells us the scope of the subject, but missing detail can lead to mistakes in decision making. “The Devil is in the detail.” The problem with the second is that we are so obsessed with the detail that we lose perspective on what it is telling us. We “cannot see the wood for the trees.”
God does not have the problem that we have. His vastness and greatness does not put him at a distance. He knows the detail; “the very hairs on your head are all numbered”[14] and he knows the big picture.
“Immutably because with him there is no shadow of change, and as he himself remaining immovable gives motion to all, so he sees the various turns and changes of things by an immutable cognition.”[15]
God is the constant reference point. His knowledge does not change. Things change around Him, but He knows about all of the changes. He knows when you will fall in and out of love, He knows you both as the young person now with a full head of dark brown hair and he knows the older you with balder, greying hair. And when you are old and grey, He will not know you or love you any less.
The God who does not change
If you want to impress people with your learning than you can always tell them that “A natural implication of God’s aseity is his immutability.”[16] That sounds impressive doesn’t it? If, however, you want to come across as a normal member of the human race and you want others to understand you then you can say that because God is sovereign, independent, without rivals and self-existent (aseity), this means that he will not change (immutability).
Here’s Bavinck using slightly more everyday language.
“Unchangeable in his existence and being, he is also, in his thought and will, in all his plans and decisions. He is not a human that he should lie or repent. What he says he will do (Num. 15:28; 1 Sam 15:29). His gifts (charismata) and calling are irrevocable (Rom 11:29). He does not reject His people (Rom 11:1). He completes what he has begun (Ps. 138:8; Phil 1:6). In a word, he YHWH, does not change (Mal 3:6). In him there is ‘no variation or shadow due to change.’ (James 1:17).”[17]
Indeed, the fact that God does not change is something that Bavinck says distinguishes the Creator God from the creature. “The difference between the Creator and the creature hinges on the contrast between being and becoming.”[18] And so he says:
“If God were not immutable he would not be God. His name is ‘being’ and this name is an ‘unalterable name.’ All that changes ceases to be what it was. But true being belongs to him who does not change.”[19]
In other words, God is trustworthy. It is not in his nature to change his mind. He is not fickle and because he is sovereign and independent, because there is no power in the Universe greater than Him, nothing to manipulate Him, nothing to force him to change course, we know that he won’t change His mind against His Will.
This means that we can trust God to keep His promises. He will not go back on His word. So the writer to the Hebrews says:
18 So God has given both his promise and his oath. These two things are unchangeable because it is impossible for God to lie. Therefore, we who have fled to him for refuge can have great confidence as we hold to the hope that lies before us. 19 This hope is a strong and trustworthy anchor for our souls. It leads us through the curtain into God’s inner sanctuary. 20 Jesus has already gone in there for us. He has become our eternal High Priest in the order of Melchizedek.”[20]
At this point, hopefully you will have picked up on something wonderful and vital. We have talked about the truths that God is sovereign/powerful and that God is good/loving, but we may still end up treating these things as polar opposites in tension. Again, the temptation in our day and age is to see all power and authority as bad, controlling, tyrannical and abusive. This is not so with God. It is not just that He is strong and that He is good. He is good because He is strong. His power and sovereignty is good. He exercises a loving rule. I guess this is another way of saying that God is Simple. These characteristics are inseparable. Sovereignty and goodness are different perspectives on the same God.
[1] Frame, The Doctrine of God, 600.
[2] Frame, The Doctrine of God, 417.
[3] Frame, The Doctrine of God, 602.
[4] H Bavinck, The Doctrine of God and Creation, 150.
[5] Remember Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford, OUP, 1976, revised 1989), 12-20.
[6] 2 Peter 3:8
[7] John M Frame, The Doctrine of God, 552.
[8] H Bavinck, The Doctrine of God and Creation, 195.
[9]Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, III.XII.ii. (Giger, 1:207).
[10] Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, III.XII.ii. (Giger, 1:207).
[11] Oxford English Dictionary, 587.
[12] Oxford English Dictionary, 763.
[13] Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, III.XII.ii. (Giger, 1:207).
[14] Matthew 10:30.
[15] Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, III.XII.ii. (Giger, 1:207).
[16] H Bavinck, The Doctrine of God and Creation, 153.
[17] H Bavinck, The Doctrine of God and Creation, 153.
[18] H Bavinck, The Doctrine of God and Creation, 156.
[19] H Bavinck, The Doctrine of God and Creation, 154.
[20] Hebrews 6:18-20.
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