Understanding Grieving the Holy Spirit: God's Sovereignty and Emotions

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The reason I say this is so important is because there's a doctrine, and I'll mention it, you may not even run into it anywhere, but it's called impassibility. The impassibility of God. Impassable means not able to experience passions. Now, it's a very controversial doctrine not because it's false because it's hard to understand. [00:01:11]

God can never be the victim of his own emotions. They can't sneak up on him like they do on us, right? Tears will come to our eyes sometimes and we don't know where did they come from, and we get angry when something happens not because we decided to get angry, it just happened to us. [00:02:25]

God does not get knocked around, overcome, victimized, controlled by his emotions. That's the fundamental thing we are denying, and that also implies God is not at the beck and call of evil, provoking him to anger or provoking him to grief as though he could be controlled from outside. [00:02:53]

To be grieved is what I've been thinking of. I would say it's something like you're grieved if something you loved, something that was precious to you, goes away, is taken away. A loved one is taken away, or something you hoped in was taken away. So there's a sense in which God shares our experience of loss. [00:04:05]

God is able, the Holy Spirit is able to look at any act, our sins, say, through two lenses: one, a narrow lens, and two, a wide-angle lens. When God looks at our sin through the narrow lens, say bitterness, wrath, anger, which he has permitted, in and of itself this bitterness, this wrath, this anger, this clamor, this slander, is contrary to his command. [00:11:03]

In this narrow lens, it is grievous to him. God is able to experience, similar to us though not identical, because he's never victimized by his emotions. He's able to experience things like us, like grievous here, if he looks at it. So if the lens opens and he takes this into consideration with the entire scope of redemptive history. [00:11:50]

When Joseph's brothers in the Old Testament sold him into slavery, they were doing evil, and they were grieving God. But it says here in Genesis 45:5 and 8, "Now do not be distressed," Joseph is talking to his brothers who had sold him into slavery years later, he's saying, "or angry with yourselves because you sold me here, for God sent me." [00:12:41]

God sent me before you to preserve life. That's wisdom. I said when God's permissions are his wisdom, he sent me here so it was not you who sent me here but God, and therefore you get this famous statement in Genesis 50, "As for you, you brothers, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good." [00:13:25]

If God were stone, and nothing that happened to him moved him in any way like this, he would be glorious in one sense but not another. He'd have, he would be rising above all those emotions and not controlled by them, but if he were a leaf, and only experience things like this the way we do, blown around. [00:14:55]

He wouldn't be as glorious as he is because he experiences both. He's stone-like in that he's not the victim of his emotions or of our control of his emotions, and he's not leaf-like in that he gets blown about. He can experience grief-like emotions and yet not in such a way that he's turned into a leaf. [00:15:34]

The greater glory is that God does experience things like this and yet the doctrine of impassability, namely that he can't be the victim of others or of his emotions, is crucial. [00:16:10]

God's ability to view our actions through both a narrow and wide lens illustrates His complex nature. Through the narrow lens, our sins are grievous and contrary to His commands. Yet, through the wide lens, God sees how these actions fit into His eternal plan, often bringing about a greater good. [00:11:09]

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