Theology School

The wisdom of God is seen in His providence—the way He rules and governs His universe and accomplishes His purposes through it.

God can do all that He wills. But His will is determined by His nature. He is all-powerful and yet limited by His own inherent being.

“The will of God” has different meanings and we need to define them, for we will misunderstand what the Bible says concerning the will of God. Occasionally, the term “the will of God” refers to the whole moral nature of God.

God’s knowledge is intuitive, not discursive; that is, it is not obtained by reflection or deduction. The Lord did not create this universe and then look out upon it and reason from His creation to the knowledge of it, or indeed of anything else. Intuition is knowledge that He possesses eternally as the Divine. He needs not reason conclusions because He knows all of the conclusions that there ever could be.

So, why can God not change? When we think of change (e.g. from immaturity to maturity), we know that God does not vary in this way, because he always is. We do mature, although there seems to be no motive for this change to occur. Therefore, God need not change, because He already has everything that is necessary for His own being and does not need to mature into something else. He is completely self-sufficient.

Our state of existence will be determined by whether God’s life is inside or not. The location of someone’s eternal existence is what separates the saints from the unbelievers. Nevertheless, both shall live forever because all will have an endless existence. However, this is not eternity, because when we say that God has eternity, it means He has no beginning or ending as humans possess. So, eternity is a reference to the fact that God is an infinite being with respect to time. Psalm 102 gives us a beautiful description of the eternity of God.

When Moses asked God His name, He responded by saying, “I AM THAT I AM”. There is no way in which God may define Himself other than from the standpoint of His essential and eternal being. If He were to define Himself from something that is part of our universe, that would limit Him to something humanly defined. So, all He can say is that He is the absolute being. There is also a relative name that is given in verse 15: “I am the Lord God of your Fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob”. Therefore, the absolute name of God is simply “I AM”.

There are two classes of attributes of God: communicable and incommunicable. The incommunicable attributes bear very little relation to human characteristics. For example, no human being is self-existing; no human receives life from himself and perpetuates his own existence.

God’s attributes of self-existence—unity, simplicity, goodness, and so on—were not added to His essence, but they have always been part of who and what God is. He always has been, is, and will be what He is—a pure and simple being.

If God were a person who could die, He could not be immutable. He could not make us promises, for He could not be sure of keeping them. Consequently, we know that since God is immutable, we can count on his promises because He does not change. He does not change because inherent to His being is the fact that He is a self-existing God who draws life from Himself.