Simplicity of God

About this sermon

Clearly Reformed The Simplicity of God (Ep. 1) “We all believe in our hearts and confess with our mouths that there is one Being, simple and spiritual, whom we call God.” That is the first line of the Belgic Confession (1561), one of the oldest and most enduring confessions to emerge from the Reformation. I wonder if you noticed those three concepts about God. God is one being, meaning there is only one God. He is a spiritual being, that is, he is not a material substance; he has no body. And God is a simple being. That one is more difficult. What does this mean? The simplicity of God is a classic doctrine of the faith that most Christians have never heard of. By “simple,” we don’t mean that God is uncomplicated or slow. We don’t mean that God is easy to understand. Simple, as a divine attribute, is the opposite of composite. The simplicity of God means that God is not made up of other things. It has no parts, like a Lego tower. It's not a recipe with many ingredients. Simplicity means we shouldn't think of God as what you get when you combine goodness, mercy, justice, power, infinity, and immutability into a single divine being. This would make God the sum of His attributes, and each attribute a certain percentage of God. And that would lead us to classify some attributes as higher and more essential than others. Have you ever heard people think, "God may have justice or holiness, but God is love"? The implication being that love is God's very nature, while those other attributes are merely incidental qualities of God. But God isn't like that. The statement “God is love” (1 John 4:8) is wonderful, good news, but it carries no more metaphysical weight than “God is light” (1 John 1:5), “God is spirit” (John 4:24), “God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:29), or indeed, anything the Bible has to say about any other attribute. God doesn’t just possess a few attributes. God is what He possesses. Every attribute of God is identical to His essence. No attribute clings to God like barnacles on a boat. He is not a jigsaw puzzle of divine properties. Nor is He a ball of tape with various attributes stuck to Him. The doctrine of God’s simplicity is important because it helps us think about God in the right way. We shouldn’t first conceive of a class of beings called “Gods” and then relate certain attributes to this particular God. God is in a class by Himself. God is not a type of divine being, any more than a giraffe is a type of mammal. The Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck once remarked that if God were composed of parts like a body, or composed of genus and species, or composed of potential and actual realities, “then the perfection, unity, independence, and immutability [of God] [could not] be maintained” (Reformed Dogmatics 2:176). In other words, there is only one God. There is only one way to be God. And everything about this one God is absolutely essential to being God. That is why we must believe in our hearts and confess with our mouths that God is simple.