God is a God of love, but...

No. God isn't made of parts.

“God is a God of love, but he is also a God of wrath.”

That is one of those “preacher lines” that I’m sure I’ve heard dozens of times whenever the preacher wants to redirect the congregation away from the modern expectation that God is all “warm and fuzzies.”

Or at least, it is a line that I know you could find somewhere back in my sermon archives!

But it is also a line that is wrong, at least in the way it is framed. Yes, God is a God of love, and yes, God is a God of justice, which necessarily expresses itself in wrath against sinners. The problem with the statement, however, is the three-letter word “but.”

The contrasting conjunction “but” signifies that we think of the attributes of love and justice as opposites, as two sides of God’s character that are opposed to each other. As two parts of God competing with one another. That framing is a theological miscalculation.

Photo by Cullan Smith on Unsplash

God is not made of parts.

The doctrine of divine simplicity, in accordance with its name, is a rather simple doctrine to understand. Divine simplicity teaches us that God is not made up of parts. He is a simple—whole, complete—being.

There are three major aspects to this doctrine: uncreatedness, indestructibility, and wholeness. The fact that God is not made of parts flows from the truth that God is not created. He has no beginning. If God was made of part this and part that, then there is something—the parts—that preexists God, and God in some sense would have been created from the parts that make him up.

The opposite of creation is destruction, and if God is uncreated and simple, then it is also true that he is indestructible. Whatever device you are reading this on was assembled from thousands of tiny parts in a factory on the other side of the world. What must you do to destroy it? Disassemble the parts. So too if God was assembled from various parts, then he could also be disassembled. God could be destroyed.

But for our purposes, it is the third aspect of this doctrine that is most relevant: wholeness. If God is simple and not made of parts, then he is whole, complete, or indivisible. God’s attributes are not various parts of God. They are descriptions of the whole and simple character of God. Therefore, when we talk about each individual attribute, we are talking about the same thing—the unified and simple character of God.

Let’s make this a little more concrete by going back to love and justice. These are not two parts of God’s character. They are two descriptions of the indivisible character of God. Far from competing, they complement one another. God’s love is a just love, and God’s justice is a loving justice. Love and justice, in God, are not two different things. They are two words for the same Reality, who is God himself.

Is this in the Bible?

I can already hear someone saying that this sounds like a lot of Greek philosophy imposed on the Bible. Where can we find this in the Bible?

You might think that we’d need to go to later eras in progressive revelation to find such a sophisticated understanding of God, but you would be wrong. Divine simplicity is so fundamental to the God of Israel that the Torah presents it as a matter of first importance.

First is the divine name itself: “I AM WHO I AM” (Exod 3:14). The divine name speaks to God’s self-existence. He is uncreated. It also speaks of his indestructibility, eternality, and immutability. When God chooses to identify himself to Moses, he chooses a name that communicates divine simplicity.

Second there is the Shema: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deut 6:4). The “one” in the Shema teaches Israel that Yahweh alone is their God. He is the only true God, and therefore, they must love him alone completely. But this is more than an expression of monotheism, since God’s singularity and simplicity go hand in hand. He is not like the gods of the nations who have their origin stories and who compete with one another. He alone is the true God, a God that is not made. He is utterly unique, uncreated, and unequaled. The LORD simply is God.

Finally, there is the great revelation of divine character in Exodus 34:

The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation (Exod 34:6-7).

At first glance, God’s revelation of himself as both merciful and just could undermine divine simplicity. Indeed, in the middle of the ESV translation is the word “but.” He is a God who forgives “but who will by no means clear the guilty.”

I won’t question here in detail whether the word “but” accurately translates the sense of the Hebrew conjunctive vav in Exodus 34:7, but I do think the NIV does better by translating it “yet.” Perhaps Eugene Peterson does it best in The Message with the word “still:” “…forgiving iniquity, rebellion, and sin. Still, he doesn’t ignore sin.”

But even apart from the translation issue, God’s revelation of himself to Moses speaks clearly to his simplicity. These are not two competing parts of God’s character as if we might get one or the other, never knowing which attribute he might express toward us.

Rather, God is saying that he is a justly merciful God, or a mercifully just God. He forgives sins while still punishing the guilty. God’s mercy will never express itself as injustice—merely sweeping sin under the rug. While to us this may seem at first glance like two different parts of God, in fact this is simply God.

God is a God of love and justice.

God does not have multiple personality disorder. His love does not compete with his justice. Or even more egregious of a misunderstanding: the wrath of the Father is not at war with the love of the Son, as if the members of the Trinity are at conflict with one another in the redemption of humanity.

God’s love is a just love, and his justice is a loving justice. How can God’s wrath be loving? David actually rejoices in the wrath of God:

And in your steadfast love you will cut off my enemies,
and you will destroy all the adversaries of my soul,
for I am your servant (Ps 143:12).

David recognizes the wrath of God against his enemies as an expression of God’s steadfast love toward him.

Likewise, Christ’s first coming and second coming do not oppose one another, as if he came first for love and will come again for justice. Both are expressions of the same unified character of the Godhead. In his first coming, Jesus displayed the love of God by becoming the sacrifice for our sins that satisfied God’s justice. In his second coming, Jesus will display the love of God by rescuing his people from a sinful world and satisfying God’s justice against every enemy.