If asked to give some adjectives to describe God, most people go straight for the “omnis.” Omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent – all encompassing, all-knowing, all powerful. Some go the route of describing God by what He is not – immortal, timeless, sinless. (The fun theology word for this is “apophatic theology” – give yourself five points for using that in a sentence today). One of the negative descriptions sometimes given to God is “impassible.” That means God is incapable of suffering, and unaffected by whims and moods. Really, it means God is emotionless, at least as we mere humans understand emotion. That perception of God comes as a logical outgrowth of what it would mean for God to be perfect and complete within Himself. It is the Christian version of Greek philosophy’s vision of the divine Unmoved Mover.
Here’s the problem though. The impassible God is the exact opposite of the picture of God we get from Scripture. In the experience of the people of Israel, and the first Christian communities, God is all over the place emotionally. We’ll just look at the Old Testament for now:
A sample:
·The most common refrain about God’s emotions in the Old Testament is: “The LORD is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in lovingkindness” – this is all over the place – Exodus 34:6, Numbers 14:18, Deuteronomy 4:31, Nehemiah 9:17, Psalm 86:15, 103:8, 108:4, 145:8, and Joel 2:13
·“The LORD was moved to pity by their groaning of those who oppressed them.” – Judges 2:18
·“The LORD your God is in your midst, a victorious warrior. He will exult over you with joy, He will quiet you in His love, He will rejoice over you with shouts of joy.” – Zephaniah 3:17
·“In an outburst of anger I hid my face from you for a moment; but with everlasting kindness I will have compassion on you.” – Isaiah 54:8
·“As a bridegroom rejoices over a the bride, so your God will rejoice over you.” – Isaiah 62:5
·“In all their affliction He was afflicted” – Isaiah 63:9
·“Therefore I (God) shall wail for Moab…I will moan for the men of Kir-heres.” – Jeremiah 48:31
·“How can I give you up oh Ephraim? How can I surrender you oh Israel?…My heart is turned over within Me, all My compassions are kindled.” – Hosea 11:8
The God of the Old Testament, ladies and gentlemen. Compassionate, slow to get angry, moved by pity, rejoicing, afflicted and distressed, wailing and moaning, His heart all turned over within Him. This is by no means an exhaustive list. Now, you can find explanations for all of these verses that try to distance God from the sheer humanness of the feelings here expressed. Maybe it makes you nervous to think of God being wildly happy, or wildly upset, or wildly anything. But I propose to you that if the first part of that Zephaniah verse means anything – “The LORD your God is in your midst” – it means that God is WITH US, not just in space or time or in a philosophical/theological/intellectual way, but WITH US in the same way we mean when we say to another person “I’m with you.” We mean we are standing alongside them, feeling along with them, rejoicing along with them, hurting along with them, on their side. It is what we mean when we most authentically, honestly say, “I know how you feel.”
Perhaps you noticed an omission in the list above. Where is the anger of God? Well, it’s there, too. That’s the emotion that most people associate with God in the Old Testament. There are more negative emotions attributed to God in the Old Testament as well – jealousy, blatant favoritism, etc. All I can say to that is that love is messy, and perhaps we shouldn’t expect the love of God to be less so. As a line from the latest Switchfoot album says, “If it doesn’t break your heart it isn’t love.” And the anger of God? Here’s a question for you – a difficult question: How do you feel when another person has hurt someone you love? An even more difficult question: How do you feel when someone you love has hurt someone else that you love? I propose to you that that is the kind of anger that God feels.
Maybe it bothers you to think about God as emotional. Sometimes we equate “emotional” with “out of control,” as if we gain more power by being emotionless and detached. I heard the world-class Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann say recently, only partially tongue-in-cheek, “Let’s be honest – Yahweh is out of control. But if He wasn’t, He probably couldn’t save us.”
Maybe it bothers you to think of God as changeable in any way – even emotionally. Let me venture an analogy. Before the age of GPS and even of compasses, people navigated by the stars. And one the best for navigation was the North Star. “I am constant as the Northern star!” – Shakespeare’s Caesar says. But the North Star isn’t constant. It is not outside the universe, a fixed point in a fixed sky. It is part of our spinning galaxy, wheeling through space along with everything else. But from our perspective, from the place where we spin, it is constant enough to faithfully steer by.
God is not impassible. He is not outside the universe, an Unmoved Mover in a changeless heaven. He is a part of our world, feeling, rejoicing and hurting along with all the rest of us. But from our perspective, the place where we feel, He is consistent enough to faithfully find and deliver us. From where we stand, He is consistent enough to steer by.
I think it comes down to whether we are seeking a God who is ultimately beyond us in every way, or a God who can say honestly, “I know how you feel.” Are we looking for our God to be perfectly respectable, or deeply, emotionally involved with us to the point where some might say “He’s out of control!” And now, the last question: Which of the two – perfectly respectable or deeply, emotionally involved – best describes the life of Jesus?
