Word of Encouragement (4/14/2020)
Today, let’s praise God for His impassibility.
Impassibility means inability to suffer. We can understand why God is impassible: He is almighty. An almighty God suffer in any way, can He? But what if the almighty God loves a weak being, vulnerable to all kinds of suffering? If God is also love, wouldn’t He suffer sorrow, seeing His loved one suffer? (Of course, some may think that an almighty God should be able to protect such a being from ever suffering. But it is obvious from our suffering that God in His infinite wisdom chose not to do that.) Doesn’t the doctrine of divine impassibility make God seem cold and impersonal?
It is helpful to know that the Romans understood suffering (passion) as a result of something bad that happens to us. Since the name of this doctrine is taken from a Latin word, it is important to understand what the word meant. When we say God is impassible, it means He does not suffer at the hands of anything outside of Him. (Of course, God doesn’t suffer from within because He is always in the state of perfect, divine shalom.) This is due not only to God’s omnipotence but also to His omniscience. As we saw, nothing happens in reality, which did not first exist in God’s eternal and omniscient mind. And as the one and only true God, who declares the end from the beginning, He knows that all things will work together to fulfill His purpose and will without fail and without exception. Nothing can surprise Him that He should be shocked and dismayed.
Does this mean that He feels no sympathy for us? What about all those passages in which God is said to be grieved and angry and sorry for us? We understand those to be anthropomorphic, anthropopathic expressions, which God uses to “speak our language,” as it were, to explain in human terms the truth about what we do and what its consequences are. If everything we do affects God as it affects us, God cannot be a happy Being; He must be in a constant state of sorrow and grief.
Vanhoozer provides a helpful insight here: “as Jesus feels the force of temptation without sinning, so God feels the force of the human experience without suffering change in his being, will or knowledge.” God is perfectly capable of this because He is an omniscient Being. But there is more to it. The Hebrews writer says, “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Heb. 4:15). God’s omniscient knowledge of our suffering is now accompanied by Jesus’ human experience.
The doctrine of divine impassibility may not be a very comforting doctrine at first sight. It confronts us with a question: do we want a friend to sympathize with us or do we want a God to worship and praise? Friends to sympathize with us, we have many. A Being who is great enough for our worship and awe and wonder, there is only One true God. But in Jesus Christ, we have the One and only true God, who sympathizes with us, too.