God’s not unpredictable. He is simple, and He loves His blood-bought children. Therefore, we can trust the Lord even more!

Once in a while I will write a “thinking about theology” post where I take a doctrine of the faith and explain it in three parts: (1) with an academic quote from a trusted theologian, (2) explain that in my own words, and (3) explain some ways it’s practical to our lives as Christians. Hope you enjoy! This post is over divine simplicity.

From the scholar: “Divine simplicity means that God is not composed of parts, but is a simple, indivisible whole. In him there is no composition of substance and accident, essence and existence, or potential and actual.” (Herman Bavinck)

For the laymen: The doctrine of God’s divine simplicity does not get spoken of much, but it should. This leads to ignorance on the issue. For example, for God to be “simple” doesn’t mean He’s incompetent or dumb, as we perhaps would call someone simple. Just as Bavinck said, divine simplicity simply means God is one whole being. In other words, God is not half wrath, half love. For God to be simple, it means His wrath and love, for example, are His essence. He certainly has more attributes than those two, but the point is that his attributes are not things that are added to His essence, but are inherently part of Him.

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