Incommunicable Attributes

Coming up next on Renewing Your Mind, Dr. R.C. Sproul explains the attributes of God. We are dependent beings. We are created beings, but God is not dependent, not created, not finite, but He has the power of being in and of Himself. He doesn't derive it from something else. Welcome to Renewing Your Mind.

On this Thursday, I'm Lee Webb, and thank you for being with us. You and I are made in God's image. There are things that make us unique from other creatures, God-like qualities that we have to some degree. Yet there are attributes of God that only He possesses.

We just heard Dr. R.C. Sproul refer to one of them, God's omnipotence, the fact that He's all-powerful. But there are others, and understanding them gives us a greater appreciation for who God is and why He declares in His Word, I am the Lord, and there is no other. Sometimes when I go into a store and want to make a purchase or into the bank and want to cash a check, people will request some form of identification, and I usually open up my wallet and show them my picture on my Florida driver's license. And on the side of that license, it tells what color my eyes are, what color my hair is and all that sort of thing, how old I am. In other words, what is being done here in trying to identify me as a person is that a list of particular characteristics or traits are listed there. And we call these characteristics or traits or idiosyncrasies that define a human being their attributes. Now when we study the doctrine of God, one of the most important things we're concerned with is an understanding of His attributes. And so we seek to look at the specific characteristics of God such as His holiness, His immutability, His infinity, and so on, all these different things that we say about God in order to gain a coherent understanding of who He is. Now at the beginning of such an endeavor, we recognize a couple of important things. One distinction that is made in theology with respect to the nature of God is the distinction between the communicable and the incommunicable attributes of God.

On Atlanta, Georgia, we have a communicable disease center where the focus of attention there is to study those diseases that are easily transmitted from one person to another that we might say are contagious. And when we talk about that which is communicable, we mean that which is able to be transferred from one to another. Now in our next session, we will look at some of the communicable attributes of God. That refers to those attributes that God possesses that we to some degree can possess as well. But today we're going to look at the incommunicable attributes in brief, and this term incommunicable attributes defines those attributes of God that cannot be transferred to a creature. I mean, even God cannot communicate these characteristics of His own being to those things that He made. In simple terms, we ask the question frequently, is it possible for God to create another God?

Well, of course not unless we change the definition of the term God, because the problem God would have in creating another God is that the creaturely God by definition would be created, would be a creature and not independent, not eternal, not immutable. He would lack the necessary attributes that describe God. So there are certain attributes so there are certain attributes that even God couldn't transfer from Himself to a creature. Now a second introductory idea that we have to have besides this distinction between the incommunicable and communicable attributes of God is the important principle of understanding that God is a simple being, not simple to understand, not simple in the sense of being simplistic or easy. But what is meant by that is that God is not made up of parts. I have distinctive body parts, toes and feet and legs and the knee bone connected to the ankle bone and all of that, and we can talk about my liver and my pancreas and kidneys and heart and lungs and so on, and I'm made up of so many parts of bone and so much flesh.

All of this put together makes me a single creature made up of distinctive parts. But God is a simple being in the sense that He is not a complex being made up of five pounds of immutability, five pounds of eternality, five pounds of infinity, five pounds of sovereignty and so on. He's not a little bit of this and a little bit of that all mixed together or built together like we would construct a house. But rather we say in theology, it's not so much that God has attributes as that He is His attributes and that He has His attributes or He is His attributes in an undivided, simple simple way.

Now, again, what are the practical ramifications of that? Well, we might say that, for example, that God is holy, and we might also say that God is just, and we might also say that He is immutable, and we might also say that He is omnipotent. But here's what that means, that His omnipotence is always a holy omnipotence, an immutable omnipotence, an eternal omnipotence, and an infinite omnipotence. That is, all of the other character traits that we use to describe God also would define what we mean by His omnipotence. And by the same token, God's eternality is an omnipotent eternality, and His holiness is an all-powerful, omnipotent holiness.

Do you see what I mean? That it's not like He's made up of one square of omnipotence, another square of holiness. He is altogether holy, altogether omnipotent, altogether immutable.

He is His attributes. Nevertheless, we make this distinction between the incommunicable and the communicable attributes. Now, some people don't even think that this is a very helpful distinction, and tend to shy away from it. But I think it's very important, because one of the most critical things we can do as Christians is to come to a clear understanding about the difference between God and any creature.

And no creature can ever possess an incommunicable attribute of Almighty God. I was talking about some problems that some folks were having in relationships the other day, and the gentleman I was talking with looked at me and he says, well, you know what we have here? And I said, what's that? He says, well, we've got a bean problem.

I knew what he meant. He was speaking in colloquial manner. When he said, we have a bean problem, most people would think, you know, green beans, lime of beans, whatever.

But he was simply saying, what? We have human being problem. He said, well, this is a problem with, this is problems that human beings have with each other, because we're a fallen race of people.

And that's what he meant by a bean problem. He was making a play on the word human being. Now, when we talk about the difference between God and creatures, the most common distinction we make is that we are human beings and God is called the supreme being. This is our common way of speaking. God is the supreme being. We are human beings.

Now, what we're getting at here is the idea that there must be something I have in common with everything else that exists. I am. Roger is.

This piece of chalk is. God is. So that we all are to some extent beings. And yet there's something special about God with respect to His being. Now, when we think of this and we look, we see a common idea here of being and the difference in the qualifying adjectives that describe the being. You would think that the real difference between God and man would be out here.

But in reality, in reality, the real difference between God and everything that is made is this right here, as I was indicating earlier. We stand out of being. We're derived beings. We're conditional beings. We are dependent beings. We are created beings. But God is not dependent, not created, not finite. But He has the power of being in and of Himself.

He doesn't derive it from something else. I mean, we say in God we live and move and have our being. God doesn't say in man I live and move and have my being. He got along without us before He met us.

He can get along without us now. He never needed us to survive or to be, and yet we cannot survive for an instant without the power of His being upholding our being. Because the idea here is that when God creates us, not only does He create us, and by virtue of His being the maker of who we are means that we are dependent upon Him for our very existence from the beginning, but the idea biblically is that what God creates He sustains, He preserves, and I am as dependent upon God for my moment-to-moment being, for my continuing to exist as I was for my original existence.

And again, this is the this is the supreme difference between God and us, in that God has no such dependence upon anything outside of Himself. Now, I've mentioned already Bertram Russell's insight that he had when he was in his late teenage years, when he read an essay from John Stuart Mill in which Mill argued against the classical cosmological argument for the existence of God in which the thinkers reasoned this way, every effect must have a cause, and we would reason back from effects that we see now back to the ultimate cause, who was God. And Bertram Russell said when he was growing up he was very much persuaded by that rational argument until he read this essay by Mill in which Mill said, well, if everything has to have a cause, then obviously God has to have a cause. And so when we get back to God, you can't stop there. You've got to keep asking the question, who caused God?

And this was an epiphany for Bertram Russell. He uses it in his book, Why I'm Not a Christian, and for the rest of his life he rejected the existence of God on the basis of this insight from John Stuart Mill, which involved a false understanding of the law of causality. The law of cause and effect says that every effect must have a cause, not that everything that is must have a cause. The only thing that requires a cause is an effect, and it requires one by definition, because that's what an effect is, something that is caused by something else. And so the question is, does God require a cause?

Not if He has His being in and of Himself, not if He is eternal and self-existent. Now again, there were two little boys having a discussion, and one little boy said to the other little boy, where did that tree come from? And the other boy said, God made that tree. Oh, well, where did that lake come from? God made the lake. Where did those flowers come from?

God made those flowers. Well, where did you come from? God made me. All right, where did God come from? And the little boy said, God made Himself. And that's supposed to be profound, but it's profoundly wrong, because even God cannot make Himself. For God to make Himself, God would have to be before He was, and He can't do that. So it's not that God is self-created. That's what we don't want to say about God. Nothing can create itself. God is not self-created.

God is self-existent. This gets us, I think, to the most amazing and profound element or aspect or attribute of God Himself. My favorite attribute in God, if I can have one, is found in the word aseity. I mean, I realize that the vast majority of people who have not studied theology at a technical level have probably never in their lives heard that word before, aseity.

And this is where I think, you know, I just feel so fortunate to have had the opportunity to spend so many years studying theology and see the benefits therein. But when I see that word, I have chills go up and down my spine. We're just seeing that word communicates to me something about the character of God that makes me want to fall on my face right now in a posture of awe and reverence and adoration. Because the aseity of God refers to having His existence in and of Himself.

This is what defines the supremacy of the Supreme Being, that God is not a creature. And this is unimaginable. It's unimaginable. If you choke off my oxygen supply for a few minutes, I die. If you take away water for a few days, I die. You take away food for a few more days, I die.

Or give me a disease that can kill me quickly. Our lives are fragile and susceptible to all kinds of dreadful things that can destroy them. God can't die. There's nothing that He's that He's dependent upon for His being. This is what I meant earlier when I said He has the very power of being in and of Himself, the very thing we don't have.

That's why we're so fragile. That's why we're so frightened because as human beings, we are creaturely beings, we're dependent beings, and we wish we had the power to keep ourselves alive forever, but we don't. But God has that power of His own being and the power of any other being in and of Himself. That's what Paul says, in Him we live and move and have our being. And God alone has aseity. God and God alone has self-existence, the power to be eternally on His self.

So let me just say very quickly, I think that reason alone compellingly demands that there be such a being who possesses this, or nothing could possibly exist in this world. If anything exists now, that tells us that there never could have been a time when nothing existed, because if there ever was a time when there was absolutely nothing, then what could be now? Nothing.

Let's not talk about a universe that came into being 17 billion years ago, unless you're going to talk in terms of the nonsense of self-creation, because nothing can create itself. And if there ever was a time that there was nothing, if it were 17 billion years and six months ago, there was nothing, what would there be now? Nothing. What could there possibly be now?

Nothing. The point is, there is something. And if anything exists now at all, this piece of chalk, my shoe, this room in which we are, then that means that somewhere, somehow, something must have the power of being independently. There always had to be being, where nothing could possibly be. That's what I'm saying, this piece of chalk screams of the aseity of God.

And you won't find that aseity in the chalk, and you won't find it in me. These are things that are not communicable. Just like God cannot communicate His eternality to a creature, because anything that has a beginning in time is, by definition, not eternal. We can be given eternal life going on forever in that direction, but we can't get it retroactively, because we all have birth dates, and we are not eternal creatures. Eternality, as such, is an incommunicable attribute. Immutability goes with aseity, because God is eternally what He is and who He is.

This is the basis of His being incapable of mutation. We, as creatures who are made in space and time, are mutable creatures. We are not immutable creatures, and we are finite creatures. We are not infinite creatures. God could not create another infinite being, because though there may be many infinite lines and so on, there can be only one infinite being.

It's a contradiction in terms of two infinite beings, if we're talking about being, being infinite. And so we see how these attributes of God point to the way in which God is other from us, the way in which He is different from us, and the way in which He transcends us, and the way in which He is greater than we, and why we owe Him glory and honor and praise for His greatness. You know, we cheer the Michael Jordans of this world. We stand up and give all kinds of accolades to people who excel for a moment and then are heard no more. And yet the One who has the very power of being in and of Himself and eternally, to whom every one of us is absolutely dependent and should owe our everlasting gratitude for every breath of air that we take in this world, doesn't receive the honor and glory of His creatures that He so richly deserves. The One who is supreme deserves the obedience and the worship of those whom He has made. Well, as we look ahead to next Lord's Day, that certainly provides us with great motivation to worship God with all that we have.

He is certainly worthy of it. You're listening to Renewing Your Mind and another message from Dr. R.C. Sproul's sweeping overview of systematic theology we call the series Foundations.

R.C. titled it Foundations because it provides a framework for understanding who God is and how He works and how He reveals Himself in His Word. There are 60 lessons in this series, more than 23 hours of teaching, and for your donation of any amount we will be glad to send you the 8-DVD set. You can call us with your gift at 800-435-4343 or you can go online to renewingyourmind.org. And just a reminder, Renewing Your Mind is easily accessible in a variety of places. You can find it in the Ligonier app or you can have it delivered to you by email every day. If you go to our website, you'll see a list of ways the program can be delivered directly to you. And again, that website is renewingyourmind.org. Well, tomorrow we will wrap up our highlights of Dr. Sproul's series and he will add to what we learned today with a lesson on those attributes that God has graciously shared with us, his communicable attributes. That's Friday here on Renewing Your Mind.