“God does not have love; God is love (1 John 4:8).
God does not have mercy; God is merciful (Eph. 2:4).
God does not have joy; God is eternally blessed (1 Tim. 6:15).
You see, for creatures, these things are qualities; they can be added or subtracted, increased or decreased, provoked or extinguished.
But not so in God. Thomas Adams said, ‘They are perfections in him what are affections in us.'[1]
My dear reader, this is what makes impassibility such a wonderful doctrine. It causes us to recognize our creaturely frame, so changeable and weak. And it causes us to see the essential unchanging perfection of our God.
You can wake up and not feel very loving towards others. You have bad days. You have mood swings. You have temper tantrums. You have depression. You have fear, worry, anxiety, stress, bitterness, resentment, and more. You are constantly being overcome by all sorts of things, outside of you.
But it is not so with God. He is all that he is. He is ‘I AM WHO I AM.” He is the one who does not change.
He is not a man, nor a son of man. Love in God, therefore, is not a passion or affection, but an unchanging perfection.
Mercy in God is not like human mercy. Our mercy is heart-misery towards another. We are more prone to be moved by a picture of puppies and kittens than we are to help our neighbor.
God, on the other hand, without the passion of mercy, without the heart-misery of human feeling, is the God who helps the helpless.
He is the one who helps those who can give absolutely nothing back to him, and who do not deserve his help. He is truly merciful.
I hope that this helps you to see how wonderful a doctrine this is.
Rather than giving us a picture of an apathetic uncaring God of whom we know nothing, and cannot possibly relate to, we see divine unchanging perfections, which become the very foundation for our running to God.
I can wake up every day, and go to sleep every night, knowing that when I cry out to God, I am crying out to the God who is love, who is merciful, who is kind.
He is all that He is. We should praise Him that He is not like us.
We should rejoice that God is without passions.
God does not have a stomach that grumbles, or arms that tire, or legs that tremble, or a mind that needs caffeine, or a head that aches, or a heart that races.
He does not have lust, or violent rage, or depression, or fear, or anxiety.
God is love. God is mercy. God is holiness.
He is a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions.
Let us love God, with rightly ordered affections, and let us praise our God who is love. Amen.”
–Samuel Renihan, God Without Passions: The Majesty of God’s Unshakeable Perfection (Middletown, DE: Broken Wharfe, 2024), 24-25.
- Thomas Adams, The Workes of Tho: Adams (London: Tho. Harper, 1629), 258.
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