Theological term
Divine Simplicity
75 sermons · All terms
The Gospel Committed to the Apostle Paul
1 Timothy 1:15–17 contains one of five 'faithful sayings' in the Pastoral Epistles, and Paul deploys it here to contrast the life-giving gospel with the idle speculations of the false teachers troubling the church at Ephesus. The sermon works through three elements: the faithful saying as a standard confession received and guarded by the church; the glorious content of that saying — the incarnation of the Son and his effectual, definite work to save sinners; and the merciful application illustrated in Paul himself, who as the chief of sinners functions as a pattern of Christ's longsuffering for all who will believe. The doxology of verse 17 demonstrates that rightly understood soteriology issues in worship, and believers are called to keep this faithful saying at the centre of their hearts and to press it upon the unconverted.
CTF 2026: Q&A Panel Discussion
A panel of Reformed Baptist and Reformed theologians fields audience questions on some of the most demanding loci in Reformed theology: federal headship and the fall, God's effective and permissive will in the hardening of Pharaoh's heart, the mystery of the first sin, free will as acting according to nature, hyper-Calvinism, the infralapsarian and supralapsarian debate, and the legitimacy of the free offer of the gospel under God's exhaustive decree. The discussion is frank about the limits of creaturely knowledge on questions the secret will of God has not resolved, while insisting that doctrinal humility and ordinary means of grace—not cage-stage polemics or churchless social media—are the proper context for growth in these truths.
CTF 2026 - Session 1: God's Decree in the Puritan Confessions
The doctrine of God's eternal decree, as confessed in the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Savoy Declaration, and the Second London Baptist Confession of 1677/1689, is not a single isolated chapter but a thread woven through the entire fabric of Reformed confessional theology. Drawing on Isaiah 46:8–11, this study traces the decree from its grounding in the doctrine of divine simplicity through creation, providence, the fall, covenant, redemption, the ordo salutis, perseverance, the spread of the gospel, and final judgment. The three Puritan-era confessions are shown to form a deliberate family — Westminster as parent, Savoy as child, and the Second London as grandchild — sharing common language and structure while registering careful Baptist and Congregationalist revisions. The study calls hearers not to speculative curiosity but to humble worship before the sovereign God whose decree is simply God decreeing.
The Ascended King
Daniel 7:13–14 presents the Son of Man receiving everlasting dominion, glory, and a kingdom from the Ancient of Days — a vision that finds its fulfillment not in a yet-future event but in the ascension of Christ following the perfection of His mediatorial work. The passage is read as the restoration of the dominion forfeited by the first Adam, now conferred upon the last Adam who succeeded where the first failed. Four heads structure the exposition: the identity of the one who receives the kingdom, the identity of the one who grants it, the nature and scope of the kingdom conferred, and the unshakable confidence this reality affords kingdom citizens. The sermon closes with a call to praise the ascended King and to pray for the advance of His kingdom with confidence that it shall never pass away.
The Central Confession of Israel's Faith
The Shema of Deuteronomy 6:4 — 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one' — is examined as the central confession of Old Covenant Israel's faith, carrying both theological and polemical force for a people about to enter a land saturated with polytheism and syncretism. The sermon traces the purpose of God's commandments (obedience secured tenure in the land), the theological content of the Shema (divine unity of singularity and simplicity, and its compatibility with Trinitarian confession), and the fitting response of wholehearted love toward the one living and true God. The application presses New Covenant believers to the same totality of devotion — presenting themselves as living sacrifices — grounded in the redemption God has accomplished in Christ, the true Israel who kept the covenant His people perpetually broke.
The Third Commandment
The Third Commandment — 'You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain' (Deuteronomy 5:11) — carries far greater weight than mere avoidance of profanity, because the divine name is not an arbitrary label but a revelation of God's very being, perfections, works, and decree. The sermon examines three aspects: the theological significance of God's name, the breadth of the prohibition (spanning blasphemy, frivolous speech, euphemisms, unlawful oaths, magic and sorcery, misapplication of providence, and maintenance of false doctrine), and the positive duty to use God's name reverently in prayer, praise, theological discourse, and the keeping of solemn oaths. The closing application presses hearers toward an 'answerable conversation' — a profession of faith matched by a life that gives no occasion to the enemies of the Lord to blaspheme.
2LCF Chapter 4 - Of Creation
2LCF Chapter 4 expounds the doctrine of creation across three paragraphs, addressing what creation is, the triune God who creates, the nature and dignity of man as image-bearer, and the covenantal framework that gives creation its redemptive telos. The sermon argues that creation ex nihilo (qualified as God bringing forth all that is not God) and creation ex materia are distinct but complementary categories, and that divine immutability is preserved because no change or new perfection accrues to God through the act of creating. Ultimately, creation serves as the theatre within which God executes His eternal decree of redemption, bringing a multitude of elect sinners to glory through the perfect work of Jesus Christ.
2LBC - Chapter 2 - Of God and the Holy Trinity
What does it mean that God is one, simple, immutable, immense, and triune — and why does any of it matter for Christian worship? This confession study works through the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith Chapter 2 ("Of God and the Holy Trinity"), tracing the three movements of the chapter: God's essential glory in paragraph 1, God's transcendent relations in paragraph 2, and God's triune majesty in paragraph 3. Along the way, foundational interpretive principles for speaking rightly about God are established — the legitimate use of logical consequences from Scripture, the necessity of extra-biblical vocabulary to guard biblical truth, and the reading of anthropomorphic language according to the meaning rather than the letter. The session closes with a direct application: the doctrine of God is not speculative labor but the very foundation of communion with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and of the creature's comfortable dependence upon him.
CLIP: The Trinity in 2 Minutes
The doctrine of the Trinity is not a division of the divine essence into three parts, but one infinite and undivided substance eternally subsisting as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The confession's language moves deliberately between the oneness and the threeness of God — the Father unbegotten, the Son eternally begotten, the Holy Spirit proceeding from both — holding the unity and the distinction together without confusion. This doctrine is not speculative theology but the very foundation of the Christian's communion with God and the ground of confident, joyful worship.
CTF 2025 - Session 8 – Q&A Panel
A Q&A panel from a theology conference on the doctrine of God addresses questions arising from the preceding lectures on classical theism. Three theologians field questions on divine impassibility (including whether God can be grieved), the eternal decree and the covenant of redemption, divine aseity and the Son's relationship to the Father, the nature of time in the eternal state, the role of philosophy and natural theology in arriving at the classical doctrine of God, and whether genuine evil exists within God's sovereign economy. The discussion throughout presses for formulations of doctrine that protect divine simplicity, immutability, and impassibility while preserving the integrity of biblical language and confessional categories.
CTF 2025 - Session 4 – The Depth of God’s Eternal and Incomprehensible Nature
What does it mean for God to be eternal, and can finite creatures truly know an incomprehensible God? This conference session works through the classical doctrine of divine eternity — arguing from divine simplicity, immutability, and infinity that God's eternity is not endless temporal succession but the timeless, simultaneous, and perfect possession of boundless life — before turning to divine incomprehensibility, which is not a confession of ignorance but the recognition that the knowledge God has revealed of himself in nature and Scripture far surpasses the creature's capacity to measure or contain it. The session draws on Boethius, Augustine, Turretin, Charnock, Owen, and Bavinck to show that the two doctrines are inseparable, and closes with Solomon's prayer in 1 Kings 8 as a doxological meditation: if heaven itself cannot contain God, no created mind can comprehend him, and that inexhaustibility is the very ground of endless worship.
CTF 2025 - Session 3 - Exploring God’s Impassibility
God's immutability and impassibility, confessed in 1689 LBCF 2.1 as foundational divine attributes, are not cold abstractions but the very ground of the gospel's freeness and the perfection of God's love. This session from a Reformed theology conference works through the classical theistic framework: because God is pure act, wholly self-sufficient in being, he cannot undergo change or be moved to new states of affection by creatures. Counterintuitively, this means God's love is not diminished but infinitely surpassed by passionate human love — for an impassible love is uncaused, unbounded, and purely beneficent, making sola gratia coherent and certain.
CTF 2025 - Session 2 - Divine Simplicity
Divine simplicity — the doctrine that God is without parts of any kind, physical or metaphysical — is the necessary precondition for God to be the absolute first cause of all things confessed in Romans 11:36. This lecture, drawn from 2LCF Chapter 2 Paragraph 1, works through the logic of composition and dependence to show that any being composed of parts is doubly dependent: upon those parts and upon whatever unifies them, and is therefore disqualified from being the uncreated Creator. Divine infinity is then treated as a corollary of simplicity: because God has no compositional structure of finitude, his being is actual, unbounded, and without lack, which is the only reliable ground for absolute trust and worship.
The Dedication of the Temple
Solomon's prayer at the dedication of the temple in 1 Kings 8:22–53 is grounded not in Israel's merit but in the character of God — his incomparability, faithfulness, and transcendence held together with his immanence. The petitions that follow address every covenant curse Moses had warned of: civil injustice, military defeat, drought, famine, and exile, each met with Solomon's recurring plea that God hear from heaven and forgive. The prayer reaches beyond Israel to encompass the nations, anticipating the Gentile inclusion Paul expounds in Ephesians 3 and finding its ultimate fulfilment in the Lord Jesus Christ, the true Son of God who builds the eternal house of God. Believers are exhorted to imitate Solomon's theology-saturated prayer, to receive affliction as God's appointed means of conformity to Christ, and to rest in the faithfulness of a God who has always kept his covenant promises.
CTF 2025: Conference Details
A brief logistical announcement for the 2025 Confessing the Faith conference, covering the two-day schedule, dinner arrangements, Q&A format, and available resources. The conference centers on the attributes and perfections of God, culminating in a Friday evening keynote lecture.
CTF 2025 - Key Theological Concepts
This conference preview discussion addresses three interconnected concepts in classical Trinitarian theology: inseparable operations, appropriations, and missions. The speaker argues that a basic grasp of six to ten theological concepts drawn from creedal and confessional tradition — concepts the church developed through careful exegesis, not speculative innovation — is sufficient to give a reasoned defense of Trinitarian doctrine against modern deniers, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Arians. The practical exhortation is that every believer, not only the academically trained, owes a coherent account of the Trinity to anyone who asks.
CTF 2025 - Conference details
A brief logistics announcement for a two-day Reformed theology conference (CTF 2025) focused on the divine attributes and perfections of God, featuring lectures by Dr. Dolezal and others. The announcement covers schedule, location, dinner, worship elements, and a live Q&A panel. No Scripture passage is expounded; this is a conference preview, not a sermon.
CTF 2025 - Who are the 2025 Speakers? Dolezal, Renihan
This preview conversation introduces two speakers for a confessional Reformed Baptist theology conference: James Dolezal, whose scholarly work on divine simplicity and classical theism has centered on the 1689 LBCF's confession that God is 'without body, parts, and passions,' and Samuel Renihan, whose accessible treatments of divine impassibility grew out of a significant doctrinal controversy within ARBCA beginning around 2014. The discussion traces how that controversy, though disruptive, proved a providential catalyst for deeper engagement with theology proper — the doctrine of God in His nature, perfections, and triunity — and how both speakers represent a recovery of classical theism within the broader Reformed Baptist world.
CTF 2025 10 - Optional Pre-Read Materials
A brief informal exchange offering pre-reading recommendations for a conference on the doctrine of God, focusing on 1689 LBCF Chapter 2. The discussion orients listeners toward classical theism, the historical consensus on the Trinity, and modern departures from that consensus in the 20th century. Recommended works address divine simplicity, the eternal relations of origin among the Trinitarian persons, and divine impassibility, providing theological grounding before the conference sessions begin.
Sons and Daughters of God
What does it mean that sinners dead in trespasses can be called children of God? Expounding 1 John 3:1, this sermon works through five elements of the verse: the imperative weight of 'behold,' the immeasurable and immutable love of God rooted in his own essential being, the unmerited bestowal of that love upon the undeserving, the Christian's status as adopted sons and daughters in union with Christ, and the world's consequent ignorance and enmity toward believers. The sermon grounds adoption in the eternal predestinating love of the Father, the incarnation and obedience of the Son, and the indwelling of the Spirit — and closes with a call to behold these realities with eyes of faith as the only ground of encouragement for a church opposed by the world.
The Closing Doxology of Jude
Jude closes his epistle not with a warning but with a doxology — an ascription of praise that draws the beleaguered saints away from contemplating false teachers and upward toward the triune God who alone can keep them. This sermon works through Jude 24–25 under three heads: the omnipotent, preserving God who keeps his people from apostasy; the faithful God who presents his people faultless before divine glory on the ground of Christ's imputed righteousness and substitutionary work; and the sole-wise God to whom glory, majesty, dominion, and power are due both now and forever. The doxology is shown to be not merely a liturgical flourish but a confession of triune preservation, definite atonement, and the utter sufficiency of Christ's active and passive obedience.
The Ministry in Lystra
Acts 14:8–18 presents Paul and Barnabas in Lystra, where the healing of a man crippled from birth provokes the surrounding pagans to identify the apostles as Zeus and Hermes come in human form. Paul's corrective address to the Lystrans teaches the non-divinity of creatures and, by implication, the sharp ontological distinction between the living God and all that he has made. The study moves from the healing account into a substantial exposition of divine impassibility and simplicity, grounding those doctrines in the phrase 'of like passions' and tracing them through the confession, Scripture, and the Reformed theological tradition.
2LCF Chapter 8 - Of Christ the Mediator, Part 3
The incarnation of the Son of God — that the eternal, divine Son took to himself a true and complete human nature without ceasing to be God — stands at the centre of the Christian religion and is inseparable from the doctrine of salvation. This confession study works through 2LCF Chapter 8, paragraphs 2 and 7, first clearing away eight historical errors about what the incarnation is not (mutation, docetism, a heavenly body, a bodyless appearance, an animal soul without a human soul, a mixing of natures, a divestiture of divine attributes, and a Nestorian conjunction of persons), then positively establishing the language of assumption, union, and incarnation as the church's consistent witness from the apostolic era forward. The Son did not subtract from nor add to himself; he took to himself that which he was not while remaining fully what he eternally is, and the Trinity — Father, Son, and Spirit — acts undividedly in this work, though it terminates on the Son alone.
2LCF Chapter 8 - Of Christ the Mediator, Part 2
The deity of Jesus Christ is not a late ecclesiastical imposition but the irreducible confession of Scripture, the early church, and the Reformed confessional tradition. This lesson, the second in a series through 2LCF Chapter 8, opens by reading paragraphs 1–2 of the confession before working through both what the orthodox doctrine of Christ's deity does NOT mean — rejecting polytheism, social trinitarianism, homoiousian subordinationism, modalism, and kenoticism — and what it positively asserts: that Christ is very and eternal God, of one substance with Father and Spirit, equal to the Father, personally distinct within the Godhead, and unchanging in deity through the incarnation. The biblical witness is then marshalled under five categories — explicit statements, Christ's self-witness, NT application of OT divine texts, divine perfections predicated of Christ, and divine works ascribed to Him — to demonstrate that the deity of Christ is axiomatic rather than argued in Scripture itself.
A Psalm of Thanksgiving
Psalm 103 calls God's people to bless the Lord with the whole soul and to forget none of His benefits — a command that presupposes the constant human tendency toward spiritual amnesia and ingratitude. The sermon works through David's threefold structure: a reminder to bless God (vv. 1–2), the reasons to bless God (vv. 3–18), and a reflection on God's universal kingdom (vv. 19–22). The reasons are organized around the gifts God gives (spiritual and physical), the recipients of those gifts (the oppressed and covenant people), and the character of the giver Himself — merciful, gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. Thanksgiving is not a seasonal sentiment but the daily reflex of those who know their guilt before a holy God and have received forgiveness through the blood of Christ.
2LCF Chapter 3 - Of God's Decree
God's eternal decree—that He has foreordained whatsoever comes to pass, freely and unchangeably, from the counsel of His own most wise and holy will—is the subject of 2LCF Chapter 3. This study works through all seven paragraphs of the confession, grounding the doctrine first in divine sovereignty (God is most absolute, most free, and all-sufficient), then examining the decree's scope over all things, its special application to the predestination of the elect through Jesus Christ, and the reprobation of the wicked to the praise of His glorious justice. The decree is shown to be identical with the divine essence itself—eternal and unchangeable—and the means ordained by God (the redemptive work of Christ, the preaching of the Word, and the effectual work of the Spirit) are likewise foreordained. The proper posture before this doctrine is not boasting but humility, reverence, and abundant consolation in the God who saves sinners by His sovereign grace alone.
2LCF Chapter 2 - Of God and of the Holy Trinity
The doctrine of the Trinity is the capstone of the confession's treatment of God, asserting that the one divine and infinite being eternally exists as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — three subsistences of one substance, power, and eternity, each possessing the whole divine essence undivided. This session works through six confessional affirmations: that Trinitarian monotheism excludes tritheism; that confessing one God in three persons is no contradiction; that the persons do not collectively comprise God in fractional parts; that the persons are distinguished solely by their eternal relations of origin; that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are fully co-equal, co-eternal, and consubstantial; and that the doctrine of the Trinity is not a cold academic exercise but the very foundation of all communion with God and comfortable dependence on Him.
The Vainglorious Quest, The Virtuous Path, and The Veracious Contemplation
Jeremiah 9:23–24 issues a threefold structure: a prohibitive warning against glorying in wisdom, might, or riches; a prescriptive call to glory in the understanding and knowledge of God; and a veracious contemplation of who God is and what He does. The sermon situates these commands within their covenantal context — the inevitable Babylonian judgment upon covenant-breaking Israel under the curses of Deuteronomy 28 — demonstrating that wisdom, strength, and riches will not avail in the face of irreversible divine justice. True glorying is exclusively God's due, and the knowledge of the one living and true God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — is the only wisdom, strength, and riches that profit eternally. Hearers are called to cast off vainglory, grow earnestly in the knowledge of God, and trust in Christ alone, in whom are found all true wisdom, strength, and riches.
Sunday School Confession Study - 2LCF 2.2
God's external relations to the created order — his independence, omniscience, holiness, and the creature's obligation to him — are the subject of 2LCF Chapter 2, Paragraph 2. The confession's insistence that God is entirely self-sufficient and derives no glory from creatures corrects any notion that God created the world out of need or incompleteness. The omniscience of God is infinite, infallible, and independent of the creature, so that nothing is contingent or uncertain to him. The study closes by grounding the creature's obligation of worship, service, and obedience in what God is — holy in all his counsels, works, and commands.
2LCF Chapter 2 - Of God and of the Holy Trinity, Part 2
What does it mean that God is one, infinite, simple, invisible, incorporeal, and without passions? This Sunday school session works through paragraph 1 of 2LCF Chapter 2, tracing the classical attributes — or perfections — of God through their biblical foundations and the theological vocabulary refined by the church across centuries. Divine simplicity, aseity, incomprehensibility, and impassibility are each examined with care, showing how these doctrines are not abstract curiosities but guard the God of Scripture from distortion and secure the stability of his love, justice, and grace toward his people. The session closes by connecting the doctrine of divine impassibility to the assurance of salvation: because God does not move from one state to another, his love for his people is always most.