Theological term
Incomprehensibility
6 sermons · All terms
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.
2LCF Chapter 2 - Of God and of the Holy Trinity, Part 1
Eternal life consists in knowing the only true God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent (John 17:3), which means the knowledge of God is not optional for Christians but is the very substance of their salvation. This session opens a multi-week confession study of 2LCF Chapter 2 (Of God and of the Holy Trinity) by establishing what theology proper is — the study of the being, attributes, and works of the triune God — and why it is primary: it is grounded in God's creative purpose, commanded in Scripture, promised in the New Covenant (Jeremiah 31:31-34), and urgently needed in the face of false religion and bad theology. Six preliminary interpretive helps are then introduced to prepare the mind for rigorous and reverent engagement with the doctrine of God, including the necessity of recognising the ontological chasm between Creator and creature, God's revelatory condescension, and the joint propriety of affirmations and denials.
Divine Simplicity 2 - Of God and the Holy Trinity (2LCF 2.1-3)
What does it mean to say God is 'without parts,' and why does it matter for every other divine attribute? This second session on divine simplicity (2LCF 2.1–3) continues an expository study of the Second London Baptist Confession's opening chapter on God, working through the classical doctrine that God is not composed of physical, metaphysical, or logical parts — a doctrine historically attested from the church fathers through the Reformation and represented in every major Reformed confession. The session focuses especially on God's pure actuality (the denial of act-and-potency composition), the inseparability of God as knower, knowing, and things known, and the impossibility of God being both agent and patient — showing that divine simplicity is the ontological foundation for God's immutability, independence, absoluteness, unity, and infinite love.
Divine Simplicity - Of God and the Holy Trinity (2LCF 2.1-3)
Divine simplicity — the classical doctrine that God has no parts, no composition whatsoever, and that all that is in God is God — is examined through its confessional, definitional, historical, and doctrinal dimensions. The 1689 London Baptist Confession's phrase 'without body, parts, or passions' serves as the entry point, with 'without parts' identified as the direct expression of divine simplicity. The doctrine is shown to be the ontological foundation for God's aseity, infinity, immutability, and the unity of his attributes, and is traced through an unbroken stream of witnesses from Irenaeus and Augustine through Aquinas, the Reformers, and the Reformed scholastics. Hearers are pressed to resist any conception of God as a composite being whose attributes are properties inhering in a subject, and to affirm instead that God is identical with his own essence, being, and every perfection predicated of him.
Of God and the Holy Trinity (2LCF 2.1-2)
What does it mean that God is omnipresent, and how does his omniscience differ from all creaturely knowledge? Working through the second chapter of the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith, this study examines the divine attributes of omnipresence and omniscience with theological precision, drawing on Scripture, the church fathers, the Reformers, and the Reformed orthodox tradition. God's omnipresence is grounded not in his omnipotence or omniscience but in his infinity and immensity — he fills all of heaven and earth repletively, with his whole being, while remaining utterly transcendent and uncircumscribed by creation. God's omniscience is equally distinguished from creaturely knowing: he knows all things not discursively, derivatively, or by foreknowledge acquired through observation, but intuitively, independently, and eternally, in one simple act of self-knowledge.