The doctrine of divine simplicity — and the quiet damage of treating God like a committee
Most men pray as if they were working an angle.
Not consciously. But listen to the shape of it. You come in hoping to catch the merciful side of God before the holy side notices what you did. You lean on His love the way a defendant leans on a sympathetic juror, hoping that part of Him outvotes the rest. On a good day you assume He is pleased with you and therefore lenient. On a bad day you assume He is disappointed and therefore strict, and you keep your distance until the weather changes.
That is not prayer to the God of the Bible. That is lobbying a committee.
And the doctrine that dismantles it is one most believers have never heard named.
The sentence under everything
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD. (Deuteronomy 6:4, KJV)
Israel recited that line morning and evening, and we usually read it as a headcount: one God, not many. That is true, and it is not the whole of it. The confession is also about what God is in Himself. He is not one God assembled out of several things. He is one, whole, undivided — all the way down.
Theologians have a name for that: the simplicity of God. It is an unfortunate label, because “simple” now means easy, and nothing about God is easy. In the older usage it means the opposite of composite. Not made of parts. Not assembled.
What the doctrine actually claims
Here it is in one line. God does not have attributes the way a man has traits. He is His attributes, and each of them is identical with the whole of what He is.
Think about how unlike you that is. You are assembled. Body and soul. A set of virtues held in wildly uneven amounts. You are patient on Tuesday and short-tempered by Thursday. Your kindness and your honesty are two different things in you, and they fight — which is why you sometimes have to choose between being gentle and being truthful. Your character has seams, and you can feel them.
God has no seams. His mercy is not a softer region of Him located at some distance from His justice. His holiness is not a department that has to be consulted before grace can be released. There is no part of God that is more loving than another part, no corner of Him where His wrath is kept.
Scripture does not say God has love
Watch the grammar John uses. He does not write that God is loving, or that God possesses a great quantity of love. He writes something far more radical.
He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. (1 John 4:8, KJV)
And in the same letter, about light:
This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. (1 John 1:5, KJV)
“No darkness at all.” Not mostly light. Not light with shaded areas on the far side. There is no mixture in Him, which means there is nothing in God that has to be managed or worked around.
Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. (James 1:17, KJV)
Two KJV phrases worth slowing down for. Variableness simply means change. Shadow of turning is an astronomical picture — the sun and moon turn in their courses and throw shade as they go; the light you get from them depends on where they happen to be standing. James says the Father of lights has no such orbit. He never rotates into a position where less of Him reaches you.
Why this is not a word game
Because composite thinking about God does real damage, and you can watch it happen in four ordinary ways.
- Playing one attribute against another. “God is love, so He will not really mind.” You are appealing to one piece of God against another piece. There is no such piece to appeal to.
- Living braced for the verdict. Men who think of God as composite always suspect His justice may be winning today — that mercy was available last month and the window may have closed.
- Mistaking patience for a lowered standard. If nothing has happened yet, you assume His holiness has gone soft. It has not. His longsuffering is His holiness being patient.
- Shopping among the attributes. You keep sovereignty and love, quietly shelve wrath and jealousy, and build a god out of your favorite parts. A god assembled from selected pieces is not an abridged version of the true God. It is an idol.
That last one is the heart of it. An assembled god can be lobbied, because wherever there are parts there are seams to work. A simple God cannot be lobbied at all. He can only be trusted or resisted.
Exodus 34, and the verse men stop reading
When God describes Himself at length, He does it in one breath.
And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty. (Exodus 34:6–7, KJV)
Read it as one sentence, because that is what it is. The same self-disclosure that says merciful and gracious says will by no means clear the guilty. No seam. No shift in tone. God is not being warm for a clause and then stern for a clause; He is telling you what He is, and it is all one thing.
Men quote the first half and treat the second half as a different deity in a worse mood. It is the same God in the same sentence, and if you will not have Him whole you do not have Him.
Where the parts appear to collide
Which brings up the honest objection. If God is simple, how do mercy and justice both land on the same guilty man? Something has to give.
Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other. (Psalm 85:10, KJV)
Notice the psalmist does not say they negotiated a truce. He says they met, and he says they kissed — the language of reunion, not compromise. Two things that your experience tells you must be traded off against each other turn out, in God, to embrace.
But he does not tell us where. For that you have to wait for a hill outside Jerusalem.
The cross is where you see it
Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus. (Romans 3:25–26, KJV)
Just, and the justifier. Four words that answer the whole question.
At the cross God did not set His justice aside in order to be merciful. He did not suspend one attribute to make room for another, because there was nothing there to suspend — no parts to shuffle. Your sin was not waived. It was paid, in full, by a substitute of His own providing. Justice got everything it was owed. Mercy got everything it wanted. And God never once stopped being what He is.
That is why Calvary is not God at His softest. It is God at His most entirely Himself.
What this changes tomorrow morning
- Stop working angles. There is no sympathetic faction in God to recruit. Come straight in.
- When you confess, plead the blood — not His leniency. You are not asking God to be less holy about it. You are asking Him to apply what He already accepted as full payment.
- When you feel He has cooled toward you, test the feeling against James 1:17. No variableness. No shadow of turning. He has not moved. Something in you has.
- Read whole paragraphs about God, not favorite verses. If your picture of Him never makes you uncomfortable, you have been editing.
- Expect the same God on your worst day. The One who met you in mercy at the beginning is not a different One now, and the standard He held then He holds still.
There is a kind of rest in this that no assembled god can give. If God were composite, every day with Him would be a weather report — which side of Him is up, which attribute is in the ascendant, whether today is a mercy day or a justice day. You would spend your life reading His mood.
He is not like that. He is one. All of what He is, is behind everything He says to you. When He says He has forgiven you in Christ, that sentence carries the full weight of His holiness, His justice, His truth and His love at once — because those are not four things in Him.
You are not managing a committee. You are dealing with God, and He is all the way through what He appears to be at the cross.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times. — SmithForChrist