The old word is impassibility, and it is the reason His love for you is not a mood He happens to be in.
Two men pray on the same Tuesday night.
The first one prays like a lawyer working a jury. He builds a case. He adds detail he thinks will land. He rehearses the hard parts of his week because he suspects that if he can get the pathos right, God will be moved and the answer will change.
The second one does not pray at all, because of what happened on Saturday. He assumes God is in a mood about him. He will wait a few days, string together something respectable, and approach when the weather improves.
Those two men look like opposites. They are running on the identical error. Both of them believe God can be acted upon — that something outside of God can reach in and change how He is disposed toward them. One is trying to use that. The other is afraid of it. Neither one is dealing with the God who is actually there.
A Word the Church Used to Teach Every New Believer
The doctrine has a name, and it is a bad name in English: impassibility. It sounds like “impassive,” which sounds like a man staring through you with no expression. That is not what it means, and the confusion has cost the church a doctrine it badly needs.
Impassibility does not say God is cold. It does not say God has no love, no joy, no anger, no delight. It says something far more specific: God is never passive. Nothing outside of God causes a change in God. He is not worked on. He has no reactions in the way a creature has reactions, because a reaction is what happens to you when something stronger than your present state arrives from outside and rearranges you.
Nothing arrives from outside of God. There is no outside.
God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; neither is worshipped with men’s hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things. — Acts 17:24-25 (KJV)
Paul says that to a city full of people whose religion was entirely transactional. Their gods were moody, and the whole point of worship was weather management. Paul tells them the living God does not receive anything from men “as though he needed any thing.” He is the one giving, in every direction, always. A God who needs nothing cannot be bribed, and a God who cannot be bribed cannot be destabilized.
Job is told the same thing even more bluntly:
If thou sinnest, what doest thou against him? or if thy transgressions be multiplied, what doest thou unto him? If thou be righteous, what givest thou him? or what receiveth he of thine hand? — Job 35:6-7 (KJV)
That is not God shrugging at sin. The whole book is about God’s dealing with men. It is God refusing to let a man imagine that his behavior adds to or subtracts from God Himself. Your sin damages you and the people around you. It does not diminish Him. Your obedience blesses you and the people around you. It does not top Him up.
Then Why Does the Bible Say God Was Grieved?
This is the honest objection and it deserves a straight answer, because Scripture is full of this language. God is grieved at His heart. His anger is kindled. His bowels are moved with compassion. He repents that He made man. If you have ever felt that impassibility sounds like a doctrine imported from a philosophy lecture rather than read out of the text, that instinct is worth respecting.
Three things need saying.
First, that language is true. It is God’s own self-revelation, not a pious fiction we are allowed to delete. God really does hate sin. He really does delight in His people. The doctrine is not a license to flatten the Bible’s warmth into geometry.
Second, Scripture hands us its own interpretive key, and it does it right in the middle of the same kind of language:
God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good? — Numbers 23:19 (KJV)
The Bible itself tells you that when it speaks of God relenting or repenting, it is not describing what repenting is in a man. It is describing a real change in God’s dealings with a changed situation — the same unchanging holiness meeting repentance instead of rebellion. The sun does not change when you step out from under an awning. What changed was where you were standing.
Third, believers disagree here, and some of them disagree carefully. A good many sound Christians hold a modified position: that God, being sovereign and free, may choose to be genuinely affected by His creatures without being compelled by them. The concern underneath that view is a good one — they are guarding against a God made of marble, a God who does not actually care what happens to you. Take the concern seriously. But notice that the classical doctrine is guarding the same thing from the other side: a God who can be moved from outside is a God whose disposition toward you is, at least in part, in somebody else’s hands. Including yours, on your worst day.
The Cross Is Not the Exception. It Is the Hinge.
Somebody is already asking it: what about Calvary? God suffered there. That is the whole gospel.
Yes. And the way Scripture puts it is precise enough to answer the question. The Son of God did not become able to suffer by becoming less God. He became able to suffer by becoming man.
Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil. — Hebrews 2:14 (KJV)
“He also himself likewise took part of the same.” He took what He did not have. Flesh, blood, a body that could be broken, nerves that could register a nail. The suffering at Golgotha is utterly real and it belongs to the person of the Son — Paul can say the church of God was purchased “with his own blood” (Acts 20:28, KJV). But it is real in the nature He assumed, not in the nature He has eternally and never set aside.
This matters more than it sounds. If God were the sort of being that could be reached and wounded from outside, the cross would be something that happened to Him. It is not. It is something He did. “No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself” (John 10:18, KJV). The unmoved God moved toward you on purpose.
What This Does to Tuesday Night
Doctrine that stays in the book is not doctrine yet. Here is where this one puts its boots on.
- You cannot leverage Him — and that is mercy. Prayer is not pressure applied to a reluctant God. If God could be moved by pressure, then He could be moved by pressure applied against you, by someone with more of it. A God who cannot be worked is the only God who is safe to be loved by.
- His love did not start as a reaction, so it cannot end as one. “Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love” (Jeremiah 31:3, KJV). An everlasting love has no start date, which means there is nothing in your file that preceded it and nothing in your file that can outrank it.
- His compassion is not a mood. “It is of the LORD’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness” (Lamentations 3:22-23, KJV). Jeremiah wrote that sitting in the rubble of a city God had just judged. New every morning is not a weather report. It is a property of God.
- His wrath is not a temper. This is the hard edge of the same doctrine. God’s anger against sin is not a flare-up that burns off if you stay out of the room for a while. It is settled and judicial, which is exactly why it had to be answered at a cross rather than waited out.
Stop Reading the Weather
Here is the confrontation, and it is the same for both men praying on Tuesday.
When you ask “does God still love me after this week,” you are asking a weather question about a God who has no weather. The honest translation of that question is usually: has my performance moved Him? And the answer is no — not downward on Saturday, and not upward on the Sunday you got up early and felt sincere.
That answer only lands as good news if you let it take away the second half too. Most men want a God who cannot cool but can still be warmed. You do not get that God. You get something better: a God whose disposition toward His own in Christ was settled before the world was made, published at a cross, and sealed by a resurrection — and who therefore has nothing riding on your Tuesday except your good.
So three things change tomorrow. Pray like a son, not a litigator — you are not assembling a case, you are talking to your Father, and He is not on the fence. Date your assurance to the cross, not to your week — “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8, KJV); the love was proved at the precise moment there was nothing in us to produce it. And when it feels like God has gone cold, go check the thing that actually changed. It was not Him. It is never Him. “For I am the LORD, I change not” (Malachi 3:6, KJV).
The man who finally believes that stops managing God and starts walking with Him. There is no awning. The light has been on the whole time.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist