In this video, we're going to be talking about the communicable attributes of God. What are God's communicable attributes? In this age of the pandemic or the post-pandemic world in which we live, we all became a little bit more germaphobic. And, of course, I will never forget coming in with my grocery bags and spraying them down with lice. all before I open them up.
What a weird time to be alive. But we all know that communicable diseases are those which are contagious. Incommunicable diseases are those which are not contagious. So, by extension...
God's communicable attributes are the attributes God can share with his creatures so that we can be like him. Theologians typically refer to the moral characteristics of God, his goodness, though some, like Wayne Grudem, have also included attributes like his knowledge in this group. But basically, these are characteristics of God that we either share in part or that God wants us to possess.
The first is personality. God is personal, meaning he is an individual being. He possesses self-consciousness and a will. He is capable of feeling, choosing, and having a reciprocal relationship with personal and social beings.
And God's personality is indicated in Scripture in several ways, including the fact that God has a name, a personal name, that he assigns himself and by which he reveals himself. He is not an abstract, unknowable force. This name is not just to describe him, but to address him personally.
God also has personal activity. He is depicted in the Bible as knowing and communing with human persons. He displays... warmth and understanding.
And again, he can reciprocate a relationship with us. A relationship with God is not a means to an end, but an end in and of itself. God is personal.
We who are his creatures are also personal. So it is a communicable attribute. Then God is also holy. And for many theologians, this is the defining characteristic of God. The Bible talks about God's holiness in two distinct but interrelated ways.
Holiness can refer to the uniqueness of God. The uniqueness of God. Lord, who is like you among the gods?
Who is like you, glorious in holiness, revered with praises, performed wonders. There is no one like our God. Holiness also refers to the absolute moral purity of God.
It is impossible for God to do wrong and for the Almighty to act unjustly. Indeed, it is true that God does not act wickedly and the Almighty does not pervert justice. God is morally perfect in every single respect.
So God is distinct. God is unique. but he's also morally perfect.
Put into practice, we are called to be holy. God's people are repeatedly called to be holy as he is holy. So we're made holy in the same two ways that God himself is holy.
We are made holy. by being set apart. By the way, that was the primary reason Israel had the laws that they had. Some of them might sound very strange to us in our 21st century Western setting, but God's laws regarding food, God's laws regarding clothing, God's laws regarding rituals were really to distinguish Israel from their pagan ancient Near Eastern neighbors.
In fact, the way that they were called to be different was really to raise the question of their neighbors, why are you so different? Why are you so set apart? And their answer would be because the Lord is different, because the Lord is set apart, because our God is not like your gods. And in our own Christianity today, we We do things a lot differently than the culture, and we do so with the hope and expectation that people will ultimately see we serve a different kind of God.
We are also made holy by growing in the likeness of his moral goodness. We talk more about this in Systematic 2, but we call this sanctification. Sanctification is the process by which the Holy Spirit, over time, makes us more like Jesus.
Then we have to talk about God's righteousness. or justice or righteousness and justice. These are both the same term usually.
in the Hebrew and the Greek. Strictly speaking, the righteousness and justice of God is not a separate attribute, but the application of His holiness to His relationships with His creatures. In other words, God wouldn't execute justice if He didn't choose to create us.
God would just be holy. He would be right. He would be just. We would never have to execute justice. or exercise wrath if he didn't choose to create.
But because he did choose to create, he does execute justice in relationship to his creatures. Righteousness and justice are two sides of the same coin, as they share much of the same vocabulary in Hebrew and in Greek. While righteousness is often associated with goodness, justice is often associated with fairness. has to do with the good deeds of God.
Justice, again being the same word in Hebrew or Greek, is oftentimes associated with the fairness of God. The righteousness of God means that his law, his actions, and his interactions with us are rooted in who he is as a morally perfect being. The psalmist puts it this way, the Lord is righteous. He loves righteous deeds. The upright see his face.
The justice of God can be expressed as his wrath, his anger, his righteous anger that is directed towards sin. And scripture describes his wrath this way. The Lord is a jealous and avenging God. The Lord takes vengeance and is fierce in wrath. The Lord takes vengeance against his foes.
He is furious with his enemies. The Lord is slow to anger but great in power. The Lord will never leave the guilty unpunished.
Romans 2.5, the Apostle Paul says it this way, Because of your hardened and unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath for yourself in the day of wrath when God's righteous judgment is revealed. So, there's this pressing philosophical question that I alluded to in the last video, but I want to make explicit here. What makes something right or just?
Theologians and philosophers have long debated whether something is right because it is inherently right. or simply because God wills it to be right. And this sort of goes back to what we call the Euthyphro dilemma, which again was one of Plato's dialogues. By the way, if you've never read Plato's dialogues, usually in most of Plato's writings, he is writing as his teacher Socrates, and Socrates is having a back-and-forth exchange with somebody.
In this particular context, it's with this fellow named Euthyphro. And the question is asked, asked, is something right because it's right, or is it something right because the gods will it to be right? And we sort of translate that into our contemporary Christian discussion by asking, is something right simply because it's right in and of itself, which would make God bound to some sort of external law to himself, or is something right because God says it's right, meaning all righteous deeds are somehow arbitrary. If this is the case, then essentially God could declare murder to be right.
He could declare adultery to be right. He could declare any number of sins or vices to be right if something is right simply because God says it's right. And so this is the horns of the dilemma that they try to set us up on. If God has to obey something because it is the right thing to do, regardless of whether God wills it to be right or not, then... God's not truly free.
But on the other hand, if God can will any vice or any sin to be right, is God truly good? Christian theologians typically aren't happy with either one of those extremes. They tend to say that righteousness is neither arbitrary or external to God. Rather, righteous deeds and acts are grounded in the reality and the attributes of God. So something is right, not simply because God says it's right, and not simply because it is right, but because it's right because God himself is right.
God himself is just. And the righteous behavior... behaviors, attitudes, and actions that he commands us to do are reflective of who he is as God. So, in practice, creatures are frequently called to reflect the righteous character of God by following his righteous law and being fair and just in our actions. The prophet Micah says this, good and what the Lord does require of you, but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with God.
All right, let's talk about his truthfulness and his faithfulness. God is faithful and true in several senses. He is the one true God. He is authentic in his character.
He is exactly as he presents himself. God is faithful and true in his character. cannot lie and he is always reliable and dependable and he is always faithful to his word and to his promises again if we're to look across the biblical story, we see that God is true, that God is faithful in each and every circumstance. But let me just sort of highlight act two, the story of Israel. When we read the story of Israel, we again read about a people who are, let's just say, not consistently faithful to the Lord.
And many times they are unfaithful and disobedient to what God calls them to do. But notice the contrast that God has with Israel. God is not a man that he should lie, or a son of man that he should change his mind.
Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and he will not fulfill it? Paul says something similar. If we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself. So, in practice, we reflect the faithfulness and the truthfulness of God when we tell the truth.
when we keep our promises, when we are faithful friends and representatives of Christ. Now let's talk about God's love. God, as you all know, is love.
God's love may be thought of as his eternal giving or sharing of himself, as Millard Erickson defines it. Love is an essential attribute of the triune God. And... And he would be a perfectly loving God with or without his choice to create and bestow love on creatures.
That is to say, if God decided that he was never going to create the world, he would still be a perfectly loving God. Because the Father loves the Son, the Son loves the Spirit, the Spirit loves the Father and the Son. These attributes that we spoke about when we talked about the doctrine of the Trinity. God is essentially loving.
But God did choose to love. to create us and he did choose to bestow his love on us. And his love is manifest in several different ways. The unselfish love that he gives to his creatures. The undeserved grace that he extends to sinners.
The mercy and compassion he shows to those who are in need, those who need something from God. And the long-suffering patience that he extends to those whom he loves. He's patient.
with us. He gives us mercy. He gives us grace.
And he's always unselfish in what he does. The cross of Jesus clearly shows us that the love of God and the justice of God are not not intention. In fact, we would never really understand how much God loves us if we didn't understand how seriously took sin, how serious his justice, how serious his judgment really is. But the love of God is demonstrated for us like this, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
While we were still his enemies, God gave his only Son to take the punishment of sin on our place. you If that's not love, I can't define what love is. We are called to love as God loved us.
We are called to give unselfishly to meet the needs of others, whether this means giving from our time, our money, or our other resources. We are called to extend grace and mercy. And we are called to be patient with those who wrong us. We are called to be... loving as God has loved us.
Now let's talk about God's omniscience, his wisdom. Omni meaning all and skintia meaning knowledge. Omniscience means that God knows everything and scripture repeatedly testifies to this. For wherever our heart condemns us, God is great. than our heart and he knows everything.
For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. Who knows a person's thoughts except the spirit of that person which is in him? So also, no one comprehends the thought of God except for the Spirit of God.
David says, you know when I sit down and when I rise up. You discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down. You're acquainted with all my ways. No creature is hidden from his sight, but we are all naked and exposed to the eyes of the one to whom we must give an account.
account. But as evangelicals, we want to say more than God knows everything, God knows everything past, present, and future alike. God knows the future. God does not guess about the future, like some have suggested.
God knows the future. God also has all wisdom. He not only knows all propositional truth that can be known, he also knows every wise course of action that can be taken. So it's not just enough for God to know every fact that can be known about everything. God knows every wise course of action a person can take.
And that concludes this unit's discussion of the attributes of God. In the next video, we're going to be talking about creation, the doctrine of creation.