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Podcast: 5 Attributes of God We Too Often Neglect (Mark Jones)

June 14, 2021 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

God’s Fullness

In today's interview, Mark Jones talks about how to bring the seemingly contradictory realities about God together in our own minds, namely, how we should understand God in his fullness—both near to us as our Father and yet above and beyond us as our Creator. Mark does this by discussing 5 specific attributes of God that we too often neglect in our thinking and theology.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:43 - A Preface to a Discussion of God’s Attributes

Matt Tully
Mark, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Mark Jones
It’s great to be with you.

Matt Tully
Something I’ve always wrestled with when thinking about theology—our attempts to not only understand but even speak about God rightly—is just how limited human language and the human mind are when it comes to knowing God, let alone describing who God is. I wonder if you could help us start there. We’re going to discuss God’s attributes, but I wonder if you could help us just back up a little bit: how do you think about our human ability to even think about God, given that we’re finite and created and God is transcendent and eternal?

Mark Jones
That’s a very good question, and I’m reminded of two things. The first thing is Herman Bavinck makes a statement about God’s word being anthropomorphic through and through—everything about how God communicates with us is a condescension on his part. Even the language he speaks to us is in baby language. It helps us to have a true knowledge of him—not exhaustive, of course—but just because he condescends and speaks in baby language to us doesn’t mean what we know about him isn’t true, it’s just not everything that’s true about him. That’s been helpful to me. The other thing is when you look at the attributes of God, that’s why a lot of theologians have insisted that, generally, when we speak of God’s attributes it’s by way of negation—what God isn’t. The title of my book is called God Is, but in the book I’ll refer to it time and time again that we learn about who God is by what God isn’t. Those are two ways that we deal with the fact that we’re humans trying to think about God.

Matt Tully
That form of theology that you referenced—apophatic theology, theology through negation—unpack that a little bit. What do you think about that? Maybe we don’t like all the connotations there, but is that, in essence, what we’re doing here? We’re just sort of defining God by things he is not?

Mark Jones
I think it’s helpful for us to do that so that we don’t make God in our image. Even God will say he’s “not a man [like] us that he should lie” (Num. 23:19). So God is not these things. It’s to rid us of any idea that would take away from his glory. We could have an almost infinite number of things that God is not, and then the point is it still falls short of establishing who he is. If we only ever spoke about who God is, we would never be able to do justice to him that way. So one way we try to do justice to who God is is by saying who he isn’t, or what he isn’t. That just helps us to not commit idolatry in our conception of God.

04:51 - Attribute #1: God Is Simple

Matt Tully
Let’s turn to a few different attributes of God that don’t often make the top 10 lists, let’s just put it that way. These are attributes that maybe often get neglected a little bit in our conversations about God, that might not be as well known to the person in the pew who is eager to understand God a little bit better than they currently do. We’ll start with the first one—the idea that God is simple. What does that mean?

Mark Jones
There’s books written on this and, in fact, there’s a few good books I’ve read in the last few years where it’s given entirely to just that topic of what does it mean for God to be simple, or without parts? If you go back to Irenaeus or Augustine, this isn’t a modern, post-Reformation, scholastic, dogmatizing thing where they’ve said, Okay, this is what we need to say about God based on Greek philosophy. I think Augustine will say for God to be is the same as to be strong or to be just or to be wise, or to be whatever else you may say of that simple multiplicity, or that multiple simplicity. It’s really important to understand that God is an undivided essence. That helps us not to say anything about his attributes that would either contradict another attribute, or not do justice to that attribute. When we say he is love, what do we even mean by that? Simplicity means that his love is his holiness, is his power, is his eternity, is his unchangeability, etc.

Matt Tully
Unpack that. We hear you say that, but that might just immediately sound incomprehensible to somebody listening. What does it mean to say that God’s love is his holiness? Are you just completely blowing out any distinction that would give any meaning to those words by saying that?

Mark Jones
I think what we’re trying to say is that his love doesn’t need to be compromised in any way. When he loves us, let’s say unto salvation—there’s different types of love that we speak about, but let me just talk about his love unto salvation. He doesn’t love us in a way that compromises his holiness or his goodness or his mercy or his wrath when you focus his love in and through Christ, because then you see that he is the justifier of the wicked. And yet he’s just, as Paul tells us in Romans: to be both just and justifier of the wicked. That’s an act of love and mercy, but he’s just in that. He’s holy in that. God doesn’t save us at the expense of his attributes, but as a result of his attributes he saves us.

Matt Tully
As a result of all of his attributes.

Mark Jones
Yes.

Matt Tully
You also speak of God’s simplicity as another way to say that he cannot be divided. He’s not the sum of his parts. How does that fit with the doctrine of the Trinity, which would seem to suggest that there is a sense in which God can be divided? And yet, there is unity there. How do we understand simplicity and Trinity together?

Mark Jones
The short answer that I think has really helped me over the years is to distinguish between person-appropriate language and essence-appropriate language. There are certain phrases and terms we use that reflect the persons and that are proper to the persons, like begetting, begottenness, and inspiration. And then there’s essence-appropriate language that is appropriate to each of the three persons in exactly the same way. Once you make that distinction between persons-appropriate language and essence-appropriate language, it helps, but it also tells you things, like Augustine’s dictum, that the external works of the Trinity are undivided. That’s a result of simplicity. We don’t just say that the Father created. There is a fancy Latin phrase terminus omnia paratus, which is the terminal work. Sometimes it focuses on a specific person—it terminates on that person—but really, it’s never at the expense of the other two. Again, we’re using language for babies—us—to understand God’s work of redemption and it does terminate on certain persons, but it’s never that person in the abstract from the other two.

Matt Tully
One of the fascinating quotes from the book was, “There is technically no such thing as attributes (plural) but only God’s simple, undivided essence.” Why would you say that matters, that particular nuance that there are actually not multiple attributes in God but really it’s just God’s essence? Why would you emphasize that as something important for Christians to understand?

Mark Jones
When we talk about God’s simplicity, it’s not like I have an idea of holiness. Let’s think of a pizza that’s been sliced up into eight or twelve pieces and each of those pieces represents an attribute. It’s not like I get to have an idea of holiness and then I have an idea of justice and then an idea of goodness and I sort of piece all those things together. That’s where you get into trouble because our idea of holiness must be governed by our idea of justice and goodness and vice versa. So it just keeps us from coming up with an attribute on its own and giving human ideas to that that may not be actually true of who God is. I think love is the obvious one. People talk about about God’s love today, and they have for ages, where it’s their own conception of love, and then they will piece the other attributes together to fit this idea of love so that holiness suffers—and justice, wrath, etc. all suffer—because love is this sort of governing attribute. So that’s one of the reasons why we can’t speak of attributes plural, technically, because you can never extract one from the other.

Matt Tully
I wonder if you could answer this question both for this attribute and also for the others that we are going to discuss today: Why is this attribute—God’s simplicity—good news for the Christian?

Mark Jones
It means that everything that God is towards us, he is. It’s not like, Oh, God is loving towards us. He is loving towards us, but he’s everything that he is towards us, and you can rely upon the entire God to be good news to you. You can end up loving his power as much as his love. You can end up loving his unchangeability as much as his power. What do I love most about God when I’m suffering? Is it his goodness, knowing that he’s good in my suffering? Or is it his wisdom, knowing that I can’t figure this out but I trust his wisdom in this? Or is it his power to make sure it all turns out well? I don’t have to stress myself out with that question. I can say that God’s wisdom, his power, and his goodness is everything to me because all of those three attributes are really God to me rather than Maybe God’s power is not going to sort this out in the end. I don’t have to worry. I can rest secure that every attribute is operative, let’s say, towards me and others.

Matt Tully
So when you say that, how should we understand something like God’s wrath? We read in Scripture that there is a sense in which God’s wrath was owed towards us; we were the recipients—the rightful recipients—of his wrath. We would experience that attribute, but we’ve been saved from that. We have instead received grace rather than wrath. In what sense is God’s wrath directed towards us as a function of his essence when I thought that’s what we were saved from?

Mark Jones
The thing about God’s anger, wrath, fury, or we even call it his hatred, it’s not what we would call an essential attribute but a relative attribute. It’s an act of his will in relation to sin. So how can I love God’s wrath the way I love his love? Well, I love his wrath, that his wrath was exercised in terms of his love towards me, upon his Son. He was under the wrath of God. Of course, that gets into questions about Christ’s relationship with the Father at the cross and so on, but how can I love God’s wrath? I can love God’s wrath a) in terms of that wrath is what saves me. Is it his love that saves me or his wrath? When you see that his wrath unfolds upon, or is exercised towards, his Son, that’s an act of love towards me. I can also love his wrath (b) in that his wrath will sort out all of the misdeeds that have ever happened in this world, and if that wasn’t the case, that would lead me to despair. Like people getting away with murder, we hate that intuitively. Nobody gets away with murder because God is who he is and he will punish the wicked. There’s interesting questions about how we will feel in heaven about God exercising his wrath upon maybe even loved ones, but I’m persuaded that I will love his wrath. If I can love his wrath now as a sinner, I’m going to love his wrath so much more as one who sees with God’s eyes, in a sense, much better than I see now.

13:26 - Attribute #2: God’s Anger

Matt Tully
This is a good segue. Let’s jump into that issue of God’s anger, which is another one of the attributes that I think is often not one that we would probably jump to immediately. In common parlance and just the way that we often think about this issue it can be easy to assume that God’s anger and wrath is over on one side of the spectrum and on the other side of that same line is his love and his grace. So there’s a little bit of a give and take there. If you go closer to his love, you’re obviously getting further away from his anger and his wrath. You seem to be suggesting that’s not the right way to think about it, so is that the wrong way to think about it? If so, what would be the right way to view those two attributes in relation to one another?

Mark Jones
It’s a tricky question because on the one hand I don’t want to soften his wrath by saying he’s just a big, loving God. I see his wrath as an outward act of his will whereby he hates sin. You could even talk about how God loves the sinner but hates the sin. People kind of mock that, but historically it’s the true, Reformed idea that the only thing that God properly hates is sin. Even with the devil, if you remove sin from the devil, he would love the devil. God hates nothing that he has made. He hates sin only. I don’t want to make God into a big teddy bear by saying his wrath is his love, but at the same time, it is true that God will punish according to his wrath and his view of sin, which is based upon his holiness, his justice, and so on. It’s a balancing act, and the only way to balance it is to either look at God’s wrath in Christ, which satisfies our sin; or in us, which we can’t satisfy. Take away Christ, and yeah, it’s scary stuff. And it will be scary stuff. There are passages in Scripture where he really does wreak destruction upon the world: in Noah’s time, in Nineveh there was a threat of punishment, Sodom and Gomorrah—it’s there. But you always see redemption very closely tied to his wrath. Lot and his family are saved (apart from his wife), or fear comes upon the whole church when Ananias and Sapphira fall down dead. So, very closely to his wrath is his love and mercy.

Matt Tully
Unpack that a little bit more in answer to our question, Why is God’s anger and his wrath good news for Christians?

Mark Jones
His anger and his wrath is good news for Christians in the sense that God doesn’t exercise his anger and his wrath in the abstract. God is simple; he’s not exercising his wrath and anger as a guy without love, like some person without love. He’s exercising his wrath and his anger as unchangeable and omniscient—he has all knowledge. Sometimes we exercise our own wrath, but we don’t have full knowledge of the situation, which means our wrath can be misplaced or it can be too much or too little. When he exercises his wrath it’s always with complete knowledge of the facts. It’s always as one who is infinitely loving and always as one who is in complete control of himself, so to speak. So that’s the good news, that his wrath is not unjust. To Christ it wasn’t unjust because the Son was as agreeable in receiving the wrath of God as God was in displaying his wrath to the Son.

17:26 - Attribute #3: God Is Infinite

Matt Tully
Let’s move on to neglected attribute number three: God is infinite. I think we’re all pretty familiar with the idea that God is eternal, that term is used more often. But how is eternal different from infinite?

Mark Jones
Infinite is one of my favorites. There’s this phrase that the early Reformers—well, it’s not just a Reformed commonplace; it’s a Christian commonplace. Some have called it a meta attribute. Like his simplicity, it qualifies every other attribute. It’s a strange language to use qualify because you can’t qualify God’s infinity, but it means there are no limits to his perfections. Whatever God is, he is infinitely so. His love doesn’t have boundaries. His wrath doesn’t have boundaries. His holiness—there’s no limit to it. So that’s what keeps us from ever fully conceiving of God as we ought, or can, because we are finite. He is infinite. There is no end to his being. He is eternal. There’s no end to his attributes; they are infinite. And that’s one of the most exciting things about even going to heaven is that we’re never going to be in a place where we’ve learned everything. There will be a constant growth of our knowledge of God and we’ll be there ten billion years and will still have only scratched the surface on who he is. There’s no end point where we say, Okay, I’ve learned all there is to know. Even Christ in his human nature can’t conceive of God’s attributes because they are infinite. Even the God-man himself, according to his human nature, can never fully conceive of his divine nature.

Matt Tully
Speaking about his infinity, how is that doctrine in particular good news for us?

Mark Jones
There are probably a hundred applications, but the first thing that came to my mind was that Luther jokes (I don’t know if he jokes; maybe he was serious) that you can go commit adultery eighty times in one day, or one thousand lies, but Christ’s death for us was an infinite death and he can cover and wash away an infinite amount of sins. So no sinner is ever too big of a sinner to be saved by an infinite sacrifice. Even in terms of redemption, that’s good news for us. There’s lots of others. I look forward to what I’m going to be able to learn in heaven. I enjoy reading here on earth, but it pales in comparison to what I’m going to learn in heaven about God. So that’s another lesson of the infinite god that we serve.

20:33 - Attribute #4: God’s Independence

Matt Tully
Another attribute that seems connected to all of this—as we’ve already established, they’re all interconnected in different ways—would have to be God’s independence, also known as his aseity. What does that mean when we say that God is wholly independent?

Mark Jones
I wrote an article for Desiring God on God’s independence, and I remember really enjoying that article because as I re-looked at the doctrine and tried to re-understand it, it’s that God is completely satisfied (there’s the Desiring God language) in who he is because he is truly independent. There’s nothing he needs, there’s nothing that makes him happier, there’s nothing that can harm him, there’s nothing actually that can bless God (properly speaking), which makes his salvation of us all the more remarkable. It’s not like he needed to save us. It’s not like he needed to create us. He doesn’t need me, and yet he’s chosen, as a truly independent person, to bless me. When I bless someone, and when human beings do anything, we do it as dependent beings. Often, sometimes rightfully so, because we are looking for something back because we need it. But God doesn’t actually need it, which makes his love towards us all the more remarkable because it’s truly free. Whereas our love can never be truly free because any love we have is derived from God himself, and whatever love we offer we’re looking for a return on that love because he who loves his brother loves himself, or “he who loves his wife loves himself” (Eph. 5:28). So that’s one of the aspects of independence I quite enjoy thinking about.

Matt Tully
You made a comment earlier about how nothing we can do can give anything to God—it can’t make him happy, it can’t give him a sense of pleasure beyond what he already has in himself. Does that mean, then, that as believers—as redeemed sinners—us obeying God’s will and seeking to glorify him in our lives doesn’t actually make him happy in any meaningful sense?

Mark Jones
It doesn’t. Here’s the tricky part, of course, because in the Scriptures it does talk about how we please God and how the thing that David did (after he committed adultery and killed Uriah) did displease the Lord. Then we look at the fact that God is without passions, and so how do we understand that? Firstly, God would not be God if everything I did throughout the course of the day changed his inward disposition. As if God wakes up one day and is like, Alright, I hope Mark behaves himself today because my happiness depends upon it. That’s crazy. But then as an outward act of his will, when we say that God is pleased it’s anthropomorphic language to say that what we have done is agreeable to God’s nature and that when we displease the Lord, it’s disagreeable to his nature and very often an outward act of his will will manifest itself in relation to whether we please God or displease him. So when we please God, there’s a sense in which we’re living in obedience to his will, but we’re also going to be rewarded by that pleasure. It’s a language for reward and punishment—being pleased and displeased. That manifests itself primarily, I think, in the doctrine of Christ where, as God-man, he is able to be pleased and displeased. You see in his life on earth with his disciples his displeasure as well as his pleasure. Those are proper human emotions that God himself is not capable of. John Owen talks about how God, properly speaking, cannot sympathize with us as God because he can’t suffer and he can’t undergo any of the experiences that we undergo. But in Christ, he can. Things like sympathy and happiness, as we understand it, are true of God in Christ, but not God proper.

25:10 - Attribute #5: God Uses Anthropomorphic Language

Matt Tully
Last but not least, let’s talk about something that you’ve already referenced briefly, and it’s maybe not properly an attribute in the traditional sense, but still important and relevant to this. It’s the idea that God is anthropomorphic, that how he has chosen to reveal himself to us, especially in Scripture, is inherently anthropomorphic in so much of the ways it talks about him. What do you mean by that? Unpack that for us, and then explain why this is important.

Mark Jones
The important part is that we do have to deal with the Scriptures, and everything that pertains to human beings is actually in the Scriptures attributed to God: God’s face, his eyelids, his ear, his nostrils, lips, tongue, finger. God speaks to us in a certain way that helps us to understand. The arm of the Lord is not too short to save. Even things like “he regretted making humanity”, or jealousy and anger, etc. are words that are used to help us understand why God does certain things. We also hold that God is without passions, so how do you balance the God being without passions vs. evidently displaying passions? So that’s where we get the idea of anthropomorphic language. Then we also talk about the difference between passions and affections. An affection is an inward, unalterable disposition of who God is—his will. God is love, but when you see God also being holy and a creature, obeying God like Christ on the cross, we could speak about God leaping for joy or rejoicing in that. Well, it’s not like God properly gets happier, but because he is love, it’s an outward manifestation, or explanation, of how God would respond to that situation. Grief and repentance—are we prepared to say that God gets depressed? No. It’s language to help us understand that God is holy. It does not approve of flagrant sinning. It has been one of the trickier questions because there is a lot in the Scripture on that and the question is how do we piece it all together. If God is immutable, how can we speak of him having passions? But yet the Scripture does speak about passions. So we distinguish between passions and affections.

Matt Tully
What would you say to the person who is listening to that explanation and they’re kind of thinking, I just want to read my Bible and take it seriously—take it literally—and it sounds like what you’re doing is sort of explaining away all those biblical passages with this convenient loophole? The idea that I want to sort of protect this theoretical or abstract idea of God that isn’t actually what Scripture presents to us.

Mark Jones
I understand that. The question is do you stand to gain more or lose more from that mindset? The Socinians would say something similar: We just want to read our Bibles and let the Bible speak for itself. But what are you losing? John Owen said a mutable God is of the dung hill. Or, God inwardly upset is like what do you lose with that? The things you stand to lose in terms of what you think you’re gaining is far greater. I want to know that God’s love towards me, for example, is an unchangeable, powerful, immutable love because that gives me security and it makes sense of all of the passages that do speak of his unchangeable love. So when you call them out on things like, Do you know what that might do to God’s love? they go, Oh okay, we don’t want to mess with that. So, theology is tricky business. The Trinity doesn’t just fall off the pages to us. It requires some navigation and some complex terminology. And it’s the same with the doctrine of God. Imagine it was just that easy to say that God has bad days because of how creatures react—what would you lose from God as a result of that? His majesty and things like that. So I don’t think you win by just saying, I just want to read the Bible because you’re going to necessarily lose in other areas.

Matt Tully
So take us back to anthropomorphic language in particular—why is that good news for Christians?

Mark Jones
Again, this comes back to Christ. The anthropomorphic language, actually, is a sort of constant hint throughout the Old Testament, especially that there is going to be an incarnation and that everything that is said of God in the Old Testament is actually true of God in Christ. He has hands, he has emotions. The Scripture is not just anthropomorphic through and through, it’s Christ-centered (to use a phrase that no scholar likes anymore today, but I’ll keep using it). It’s still Christ-centered through and through so that even the passions of God that we see in the Old Testament are actually pointing us to God in Christ. And it is actually perfectly fulfilled in him with his anger, whether it’s in the Temple to the Pharisees or even to the churches in Revelation. It’s all there. So that’s the good news, that it’s fulfilled in Christ.

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