This will be the 5th message discussing how God is different from us. Here again are the previous 4 attributes:
The first attribute was God’s independence. This was defined as: God does not need us or the rest of creation for anything, yet we and the rest of creation can glory him and bring him joy.
The second attribute is God’s unchangeableness. We can define the unchangeableness of God as follows: God is unchanging in his being, perfections, purposes and promises, yet God does act and feel emotions, and he acts and feels differently in response to different situations.
The third attribute is God’s eternity. God’s eternity may be defined as follows: God has no beginning, end, or succession of moments in his own being, and he sees all time equally vividly, yet God sees events in time and acts in time.
The fourth attribute is God’s omnipresence. God’s omnipresence may be defined as follows: God does not have a size or spatial dimensions and is present at every point of space with his whole being, yet God acts differently in different places.
The final attribute we will discuss is God’s unity. The unity of God may be defined as follows: God is not divided into parts, yet we see different attributes of God emphasized at different time. This attribute of God has been called God’s simplicity, using simple in the less common sense of “not complex” or “not composed of parts.” The word simple today has the more common sense of “easy to understand” so it is more helpful to speak of God’s “unity” instead of his “simplicity.”
Then the Lord passed by in front of him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth; who keeps lovingkindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression and sin; yet He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations.” Exodus 34:6-7 NASB
We would not want to say that these attributes are only characteristic of some part of God, but rather that they are characteristic of God himself and therefore characteristic of all of God.
We must remember that God’s whole being includes all of his attributes: he is entirely loving, entirely merciful, entirely just, and so forth. Every attribute of God that we find in Scripture is true of all God’s being, and we therefore can say that every attribute of God also qualifies every other attribute. God himself is a unity, a unified and completely integrated whole person who is infinitely perfect in all of these attributes.
Why then does Scripture speak of these different attributes of God? It is probably because we are unable to grasp all of God’s character at one time, and we need to learn of it from different perspectives over a period of time. Yet these perspectives should never be set in opposition to one another, for they are just different ways of looking at the totality of God’s character.
In terms of practical application, this means that we should never think, for example, that God is a loving God at one point in history and a just or wrathful God at another point in history. He is the same God always, and everything he says or does is fully consistent with all his attributes. It is not accurate to say, as some have said, that God is a God of justice in the Old Testament and a God of love in the New Testament. God is and always has been infinitely just and infinitely loving as well, and everything he does in the Old Testament as well as the New Testament is completely consistent with both of these attributes.
It is true that some actions of God show certain of his attributes more prominently. Creation demonstrates his power and wisdom, the atonement demonstrates his love and justice, and the radiance of heaven demonstrates his glory and beauty. All of these in some way or other also demonstrate his knowledge and holiness and mercy and truthfulness and patience and sovereignty, and so forth. It would be difficult to find some attribute of God that is not reflected at least to some degree in any one of his acts of redemption. This is due to the fact mentioned above: God is a unity and everything he does is an act of the whole person of God.
The doctrine of the unity of God should caution us against attempting to single out any one attribute of God as more important than all the others. At various times people have attempted to see God’s holiness, or his love, or his self-existence, or his righteousness, or some other attribute as the most important attribute of his being. All such attempts seem to misconceive of God as a combination of various parts, with some parts being somehow larger or more influential than others. It is hard to understand exactly what “most important” might mean. Does it mean there are some actions of God that are not fully consistent with some of his other attributes? That there is some attributes that God somehow sets aside at times in order to act in ways slightly contrary to those attributes? Certainly we cannot maintain either of these views, for that would mean that God is inconsistent with his own character or that he changes and becomes something different from what he was previously. When we see all the attributes as merely various aspects of the total character of God, then such a question becomes unnecessary and we discover that there is no attribute that can be singled out as more important. It is God himself in his whole being who is supremely important, and it is God himself in his whole being whom we are to seek to know and to love.