Introduction
Have you ever wondered if it’s truly possible to grieve the Holy Spirit? If God is unchanging and without human emotions, how do we understand scriptures that speak of His grief? Join Pastor Cam Porter, Dr. Sam Renihan, and Pastor Jim Butler as they gently guide us through the depth of divine impassibility, revealing comforting truths about God’s steadfast love and unwavering character.
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Transcript
Summary Keywords: Holy Spirit, grieve, impassible, Lancelot Andrews, anthropopathy, anthropomorphism, divine impassibility, divine immutability, emotional language, chastisement, sin, comfort, love, steadfastness.
Speakers: Pastor Cam Porter, Dr. Sam Renihan, Pastor Jim Butler
Pastor Cam Porter 00:08
Can we really grieve the Holy Spirit? If God is impassible and doesn’t have emotions the way we do, how do we make sense of scriptures that speak of grieving the Holy Spirit? Ephesians 4:30—what does it mean to grieve a God who doesn’t change?
Dr. Sam Renihan 00:25
It’s a great question because the scriptures use this very language. It’s not just a question that someone’s come up with. Paul says, “Do not grieve the Holy Spirit.” And the scriptures elsewhere say that God was grieved in a number of places. So how are we to understand this language?
And the best answer comes from a theologian named Lancelot Andrews from the early 17th century. And he says it this way, and I’m just repeating what he said, because I think he’s completely right. He said the questions are actually two. There are two questions we have to ask. The first question is, can we? And the second question is, can he? So: Can we grieve? Yes. Can he be grieved? No.
Let me explain that. But even just initially, we’ve already solved the apparent problem. Can we do that which is grievous against another? We absolutely can. We can disobey the Holy Spirit. We can fail to properly adore and give honor and glory to the Holy Spirit. We can ignore. We can do all the things that would grieve someone else. You can grieve your wife by being negligent or unkind. Humans grieve each other all the time by mistreating them by neglect or by actively doing something. And so we can grieve the Holy Spirit. We can do that which is grievous against the Holy Spirit in many different ways.
But can he be grieved? Or is he grieved thereby? And the answer is no. The Holy Spirit is not grieved when we grieve Him, or we do that which is grievous against him, because God is impassible.
And I’m going to quote from Lancelot Andrews now, who said, in the same discussion of this, he said, “God forbid that it should lie in the power of flesh to work any grief in God, or that we should, or if we should once admit this idea that the deity is subject to this or the like passions that we be.” He’s saying, God forbid that we should ever let that flow of water through the crack, because it will become—it will break the dam.
If God were subject to us grieving him, then would he not be grieved by the billions of wicked creatures and disobedient children that he has in this world? Would not the Divine Being be subject to constant and endless grief all throughout the history of mankind, from the fall to this day? If we allow that premise, that God is subject to grief because we have grieved him, then what a miserable life of grief God would live. And we rather say that God is eternally blessed. Blessed forever. Paul says the felicity of God, the happiness of God—he is not grieved thereby.
And Lancelot Andrews gives a really helpful illustration where, when Jesus says that by looking at a woman and lusting after her in your heart, you commit adultery with her. So you do that which in your heart—you do that which is adulterous to her, but is she adulterated? She remains entirely chaste and hopefully has no idea that someone has looked at her in that way and thought those things. She is completely untouched by the sin that you have sinned against her, or that one has sinned against her, which is just an illustration of how you can do something evil towards another, and yet they remain entirely unaffected by it. And so also we can do that which is grievous to God, and yet he is not grieved thereby.
But there’s more that we have to say, because why then, if God cannot be grieved, why would it describe God as being grieved? And one of the—there’s basically two, maybe more, but I have two in my mind.
The first one is that, what do people do when they have been grieved? They usually don’t want to talk to you for a time. There’s some kind of distance or separation that takes place because of grieving another person, and when we grieve the Holy Spirit, God according to His eternal decree, not because he has been changed, but because he has foreordained these things. God is pleased to chastise us, and at times to hide his face from us, not because he has changed, but because changes our experience of him. So when we do that which is grievous to the Holy Spirit, we very well may experience a season of chastisement from God, but not because we’ve changed him, but because it is His eternal decree to chastise us and discipline us for doing such things. He—the sun above the clouds remains unchanged, but we are beneath the clouds now. The confession says that the sensible sight and light of God’s face may be hidden from us for a time, yet he remains the same. So we’re told not to grieve the Holy Spirit, because we will suffer consequences. Things will change for us, but God has not changed.
And then the other reason why we are told that God is grieved, or the language of grief is attributed to God, is that God wants us to know how serious of a matter our sin is, as well as how resolved he is to act because of it. So when the more emotionally upset someone is, for better or worse, usually they act with more force after that. You know, the more upset you are, the stronger you react, or the more in love you are, the stronger you act, and so on. So greater emotional language indicates greater action that follows from it.
And so, for example, in Genesis, when it says, because of the multiplication of man and the multiplication of sin in man, that God was grieved in his heart that He made man, that intense language of human emotion that’s attributed to God is going to be matched by an equally intense action on God’s part. Why is God going to destroy the world with a flood and exterminate the race of man, apart from the family of Noah and their wives and so on? That language of “grieved to his heart” is there to tell you how serious this is, not to say that God’s heart is now a sea that’s been mixed up and swirling and boiling—he is a calm and glassy sea, but that language is used to tell us what he’s going to do. And so when we’re told not to grieve the Holy Spirit, or that God was grieved, that intensity of language attributed to God is to show us how sure and certainly he will act as a result of our actions.
So but the initial splitting of the question into two is the real resolution. Can we and can he? Can we do that which is grievous? Can we grieve the Holy Spirit? Absolutely we can. Can he be grieved? Or is he grieved? Thereby he is not, and we ought to be thankful that God is not grieved by us. Because if he could be, he would be—if we could grieve Him, He would be grieved. And let’s thank the Lord that he is not subject to passions such as us.
Pastor Cam Porter 07:49
Excellent. Yeah. Thank you for that answer.
Pastor Jim Butler 07:53
And I preached on Ephesians not too long ago, and I, you know, at that particular point, John Gill says that this is anthropopathy. It’s the ascription of human emotion to God, what we might call an improper predication concerning God. In the text that Sam alluded to in Genesis 6:6 does something similar, but also uses an anthropomorphism. I think a lot of people in the church are more familiar with anthropomorphism—that’s the ascription of human attributes, or arms or legs to God. Physical features applied to God. Where Genesis 6:6 “and the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and he was grieved in his heart.” Well, God is a Spirit. He doesn’t have a heart. We’re using anthropomorphism there to teach us truth about God, just like we’re using anthropopathy to teach us truth about God, and that’s been a tactic employed by the church to make sure we respect and we understand immutability and divine impassibility so that we don’t have a situation where God is frantically grieved, changing from one state to another over the issues created by man.
And then the final observation with Ephesians four, just a real, practical emphasis. If we ask people, What is it to grieve the Holy Spirit? Not what we’ve just discussed, but what kind of sins? I think we go for the big ones—adultery, murder. In that context, it’s how we speak to each other and how we treat one another in the context of the local church. Those things grieve the Holy Spirit—again, not moving the spirit from one station to another, but the particular sins there. It’s not speaking to the bank robber, it’s not speaking to the mass murderer, it’s speaking to the churchmen, and the way that he or she talks to fellow churchmen.
Pastor Cam Porter 09:52
Yeah, excellent. Thank you. Just a follow up question on that note: what would you, as pastors, tell, you know, let’s say a broken church member who maybe has the idea that “a God who doesn’t feel is of no comfort to me”—that a God who doesn’t change, who doesn’t enter into my suffering, if you will, is not a god of comfort to me? How would you answer that struggle in the life of a church member?
Dr. Sam Renihan 10:25
With two things. The first is that Hebrews tells us that Jesus is a high priest who can sympathize with us. It’s a double negative: Who is not unable to sympathize with—he is able to sympathize with us. So Jesus, according to his human nature has been tempted in every way that we have been, and he has suffered in every way that we have and yet without sin. And so you do have a high priest who has entered into your suffering according to his human nature.
But with regard to God, we would say that you—and this illustration has been used by many people—you would want a doctor who will not catch your diseases when he’s treating you. You want a doctor who is impervious to your contagions and viruses. That would be the best doctor. And so God being impassible, not susceptible to motion and cause and effect and such, is good because he is therefore the more able and stable, the more able to help us, and stable to do so at all times. He, in Malachi: “I the LORD, change not, therefore you are not consumed.” So his immutability becomes stability for us—therefore we are not consumed.
But that’s just the negation. That’s just the negative side. And impassibility is a negation—God without passions. But once you negate passions in man, or the passions of man in God, you negate them, then we can move to the positive side and say, God does not have love as a passion, as a state of being that he’s been moved into and can be moved out of. God positively is love. It is his very being. He is good, and he does good. And so therefore, you know that God is always not loving, but love—that’s better.
So we’re not saying that God has no connection to love whatsoever. He’s just this cold, dead rock. We’re saying it’s actually so much better than you could possibly understand. He is love. You and I will never be love. We can only ever be loving, and that requires something or someone to move us into that state and so on. But God is love. He is mercy. He is his attributes. He is all that he is.
And so when people begin to learn about divine impassibility, sometimes it can be the fault of the teacher who so emphasizes the negations—what God is not—that we sometimes, perhaps disproportionately fail to swing it the other way and say, and therefore God is and how majestic and wonderful he is. So if they said, “I see God as so uncaring or inert and cold and such,” I would say, well, let’s consider what he is and the fullness of His love, everlasting love, you know, “give thanks to the Lord, for He is good, for his steadfast love endures forever.” Why does it endure forever? Because it is his very being. He can no more cease to be love than he can cease to be. And that’s a great comfort to our hearts.
Pastor Jim Butler 13:42
Yeah. I love that portion of the confession. You know, the doctrine of divine impassibility, as Sam mentions, means he doesn’t change. He’s not going to fluctuate. And I think it provides the context for the most loving, most gracious, most merciful, most long suffering—he can’t increase, because that would mean there was betterment that he could achieve. And he certainly can’t decrease, because God is his perfections.
And you know, if you come to me and you’re hurting, Cam, and I’m sympathizing with you, I know there’s some benefit there, right? There is, yeah, it’s nice. Misery does love company. But in the final analysis, I can’t deliver you. I can pray for you. I can encourage you. But God is the good one. God is the one able, omnipotently able, to minister in a way that we humans can’t, and that’s by virtue of His glory, His divinity and God as He is in himself.
Pastor Cam Porter 14:45
Terrific. Thank you, brothers.
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