God Without Passions
Recently I read the very thoughtful Reformed Baptist pastor-scholar Sam Renihan's excellent short book God without Passions: A Primer (pronounced PRIM-ER not PRY-MER by the way and just means introduction). It is a "practical and pastoral study of divine impassibility."
That last word might make some of your eyes glaze over but it is absolutely vital for your life and mine. Divine impassibility as Renihan notes is defined as follows: "God does not experience emotional changes either from within or effected by his relationship to creation."
Our church's confession of faith in Chapter 2 paragraph 1 as Renihan rightly notes speaks to this because it is in the Bible. It does not mean God is not loving and in fact it gives even greater sense of appreciation at the depth and freeness of His great unchanging love and mercy for sinners like us. Renihan's book is excellent and I highly recommend it.
The following quote blessed me and I pray it does the same for you:
"Consider Malachi 3:6 with me: 'For I the Lord do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob are not consumed.' Think about this statement. It has two simple parts. It has a statement, and then a conclusion that follows from that statement. The statement? 'I the Lord do not change.' The conclusion? 'Therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed." God's love is not an affection or a passion. God cannot be moved from not loving to loving. He is love. And because he does not change, therefore you are not consumed.. The unchanging nature of God's love, God's impassibility, is not simply an idea to be written about and debated by scholars and theologians. It is the very reason you and I wake up each morning and we say to ourselves, 'My sins are forgiven.' Because he does not change, therefore I am not consumed.
When God promises us in the new covenant that he will remember our sins no more, that he will cover our transgressions, he means it. When you forgive your spouse or someone else, it is likely that you mean it, and that their sin toward you fades from memory quite a bit. But down the road, if the person repeats the offense or does something similar, depending on your emotional, mental, and physical state, you may drag up their past sins and parade them before the person. In other words, whatever your intentions and feelings may have been at one point in time, they can change drastically at another. Your love can be provoked, and it can be suppressed. We grow in our relationships as we learn to forgive and love, but even the strongest relationships have had to go through this process of growth and learning. If we enjoy a loving, trusting relationship, surely it has been cultivated and promoted, and rightly so. But with God, we are not dealing with a human being. We are not dealing with a creature. We are dealing with “I am who I am.” And because he does not change, therefore we are not consumed. When he declares to us that our sins are forgiven and forgotten, they are indeed. And no sinfulness on our part will cause God to have an emotional reaction against us in the future."
Amen! Soli Deo Gloria!