Divine Impassibility is defined by Samuel Renihan as “God does not experience emotional changes either from within or affected by His creation.” Webster defines it as “Incapable of pain, passion or suffering; that cannot be affected with pain or uneasiness. Whatever is destitute of sensation is impassible.”[22] This is a subject which I still have to read on, but the idea is basically that just like God uses physical and human things to describe Himself, so likewise He uses human emotions and feelings to describe Himself to us. In many ways, we humans, are controlled by our passions and feelings, but God is not like us. His “emotions” or “feelings” are nothing like ours, but since God wants to communicate with us, He uses the vocabulary of feelings and emotions which we are familiar with, just like He does that when speaking of His hand, eyes, mouth, feet, wings, Him being a husband, a father, etc. God is incapable of suffering since He is all-sufficient and all-glorious. This should not be confused, as it is often done, with the Lord Jesus Christ, Who is God and man. Since the Son became man in Jesus Christ, He also shared in “flesh and blood” (Heb. 2:14) and partook of our nature, including our feelings, passions, and emotions, not to mention other things which are excluded from God including hunger, tiredness, sleep, physical form, pain, blood, etc. There are some good resources on impassibility that have recently come from Samuel Renihan which I have not studied.
The Infinity of God
The infinity of God is asserted in the words “who is immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, every way infinite, most holy, most wise, most free, most absolute”. The attributes of God are to their utter perfection with God. Although we are holy, He is most holy; although we are wise, He is most wise; although we are free, he is most free; although we are finite, He is infinite and so on.
To say that God is immense is to declare that He fills heaven and earth as the Scriptures say (Jer. 23:24). There is not an inch in the Universe that the Lord of heaven and earth does not fill. He is immeasurable and unlimited not only in His being but also in His perfections. Solomon, after building the Temple of the LORD in Jerusalem, admits that even “heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, how much less this house that I have built” (2 Chron. 6:18). His greatness is immeasurable and unlimited. To say that God is immense is also to say that He is Omnipresent. Louis Berkhof defines the immensity of God as “that perfection of the Divine Being by which He transcends all spatial limitations, and yet is present in every point of space with His whole Being.”[23] Since He fills heaven and earth, this means that He is everywhere at ...
