Does God Change His Mind? — Doctrine Discussion

In this special theology discussion, Reasoning Through the Bible steps away from the normal verse-by-verse format to address an important question: Does God change His mind, emotions, or knowledge based on what people do?

This session looks at passages where Scripture says Israel provoked the Lord to anger, God tested people, God regretted making man, and God relented. How should these passages be understood alongside other Scriptures that say God does not change, does not grow weary, does not learn, and is not like man?

The discussion explains key theological terms such as immutability, impassibility, omniscience, and anthropomorphism. It also addresses open theism, word of faith teaching, prayer, God’s emotions, and why biblical language sometimes describes God in human terms so people can understand His actions.

Topics in this episode include:

•  Does God change His mind? 
•  God’s immutability 
•  God’s impassibility 
•  God’s emotions 
•  anthropomorphic language in Scripture 
•  omniscience and God’s knowledge 
•  open theism 
•  prayer and God’s will 
•  does God learn? 
•  can we make God more angry? 
•  does God regret? 
•  biblical theology and systematic theology 

Reasoning Through the Bible is a verse-by-verse Bible teaching ministry committed to careful exposition, biblical context, and faithful application.

 Questions from this session:

• Does God have human emotions? 
• Can humans change God’s emotions? 
• Can God change His mind? 
• Was Christian theology built upon Greek philosophy? 

Transcript

God's Actions and Emotions Reflections

Speaker 1 0:20

Here on Reasoning Through the Bible . What we're going to do today is take a little bit of a theological rabbit trail and if you're just listening to the theological podcast , then I would encourage you . You're really missing the meat and potatoes of what we do , which is a verse by verse through the Bible study , where we try to reason through the passages and explain them , but we occasionally slow down and answer some questions or some important theological topics that arise , and that's what we're going to do today . So , for those of you that are with our regular verse by verse study , just hang in there , because I think you'll find this to be important .

Speaker 2 1:03

And on our website we have these divided into three areas . One is the verse by verse , going through the different books . A second section that we have or what we call topical sections . And then we third and we have doctrines , and as you navigate through our website you can go and see those in the different sections on the website .

Speaker 1 1:25

And this is really more this pure theology kind of things what we're going to talk about today . Again , for those of you that may only be listening to just the topical or theological studies , we view this as a support for the real main body of what we do , which is chapter by chapter , verse by verse , through the Word of God , which is really the most beneficial thing . But people do have questions and there are things that arise . That's what we're going to talk about today , and today's topic is really going to talk a lot about the relationship between us and God in the sense of how God acts and reacts to people and how we can relate to God . This is important and it sometimes brings in some theological hair splitting . That has to happen . I think it's important simply because I've heard some wrong teachings on it over the years , and we'll touch on that as we go through . What triggered the immediate thought was in Judges , chapter two and judges chapter three . We encountered several verses there that say , for example , judges 2 12 says they , israel , provoked the Lord to anger , as if what they did made God more angry than he was before . And then , two verses later in the same chapter , judges 2 , the anger of the Lord burned against Israel is what it says . And then again , a few verses later , verse 22, . It says God to test Israel whether or not they will keep the way of the Lord . So it says if God needed to do something to test Israel , to find out something that he didn't know , is the way it's phrased . Again , it says in Judges 2 , 22 he did these things to test Israel whether or not they will keep the way of the Lord . And then again , just a few verses later , in Judges 3 , 4 , the Lord left the Canaanites in the land to see whether they would obey the Lord's commands . So we have passages like this that present God in a way that he has these emotions . That he can get more angry is what it seems like . That he does things to us in order to learn things .

Speaker 1 3:44

There's a good number of these in the Bible . These aren't the only , by all means . Genesis 6 , 6 says the Lord was sorry that he made man on the earth . So it just raises these questions Can God regret something that he did ? And if that's the case , did he not do it correctly in the first place ? Or another one Genesis 22 , 12 , when God first commanded Abraham to kill Isaac , but then he stopped him . Remember that first God commanded him to kill him , but before he did he stopped him . And it says in there that God says now I know that you fear God . So did God really have to test Abraham to find out whether he feared God ? Or is there something else going

Exploring God's Emotions and Immutability

Speaker 1 4:28

on here ?

Speaker 1 4:28

The questions that I'd like to deal with today is when we look at passages like those and again there's there's more of them but it raises these questions such as can our actions make God angrier than he was yesterday ? Can I do something today that would make God more angry at my behavior than he was yesterday ? I think that's a valid question . And then another one is does God have to observe humans to learn what they're going to do , or does he already know them ? Again , those couple of passages I read if God looks to see whether or not they are going to obey , did he leave Canaan in there to test whether or not they're going to obey ? Did he not know or did he have to go find out ? We ask questions like how do God's emotions work ?

Speaker 2 5:20

As you're going through this , Glenn , one thing that maybe you can also address Scripture uses anthropomorphic language . In other words , God is incomprehensible to us as far as who he actually is , and so anthropomorphic language language in relation to man is used to help describe and give descriptions . As you go through this , maybe , where does the anthropomorphic language fit into this description ? Well , that's a big part of it , and that's really a huge part of the answer .

Speaker 1 5:54

So you've kind of cut to the chase on the answer to a lot of these things . And just for the listeners , anthropomorphic is just a big word . That means attributing human actions or human characteristics to things that aren't human . For example , if somebody were to say , well , the walls have ears , Well , that's an anthropomorphism , because walls don't have ears , or things like that . If we attribute human characteristics to God , then we're doing an anthropomorphism , because God is not a human . But the question then arises what do you do with these ? Because here's these passages . It says they provoked the Lord to anger . It says he was testing them whether or not they would keep the way of the Lord . He left the Canaanites in to see whether they would obey . So we have these kind of passages . What do we do with these ? How does God's knowledge work ? How do we explain these things ? Now ? By contrast , if you go to the library and you find systematic theology textbooks , then the theologians are as theologians are want to do . They use a lot of big words . That's why they get paid for things Like .

Speaker 1 7:08

One of the terms they use in these theological words that get thrown around is immutability . Immutability , and that just means that God doesn't change . Think of mutable or mutations . God doesn't mutate , he doesn't change . And that's what immutable means God does not change . God's the same yesterday , today and tomorrow .

Speaker 1 7:30

Another word that the theologians use is impassibility , and the root word there is passions . If you just look up just a pure definition , God doesn't have passions . Well , that's where people start saying timeout . We know God has passions . He cares about people , he has wrath against sin .

Speaker 1 7:50

The actual definition of the theological term impassibility means that people cannot change God's passions or emotions . That's what the doctrine and I'll spend a little more time here today explaining why the theologians hold to this . But immutability just means God doesn't change in his person and impassibility just means that you or I cannot do anything to make God any more angry than he already is , or make God any more happy than he already is , or loving or loving . So the question , of course , those verses I just read how does that reconcile and are these theologians wrong ? There are people that are . One of the reasons having this conversation is because people have questioned that . People have claimed that these theologians are wrong and these theologies are wrong . Another one that gets thrown around is omniscience . Omniscience , it just means God is all knowing , he knows everything .

Speaker 1 8:47

And what we're going to find before we are done today is that these doctrines interrelate and you can't really take one of them out without all of them being affected . They're interrelated in that sense . So let's look at impassibility , and again , the impassibility just literally means without passions or without emotions . But that's not really the definition . The definition means we can't do anything to change God's emotions . I can hear the audience say well , how could that be ? Well , let's look at the claims from the people that deny God's impassibility . Some people have made the following claims . They would say that if God is impassable , he doesn't have emotions . If his emotions can't change , then if God doesn't have emotions , he does not and could not care about human suffering .

Speaker 1 9:36

And I remember in the town I live in there was a pastor . I was in his church , he was giving a talk and he was specifically denying impassibility . His reasoning was like this If God were to come in and realize that I had a family member that had a horrible disease or there was some bad tragedy that had happened to me , then God would care . And the people that came up with this doctrine of impassibility have this cold , distant God that doesn't care . So God does care and we can , in our actions , elicit God's empathy and that God can care he really does care about you . That was the message of this pastor . I'm going to submit that he didn't really understand what the doctrine's claiming and that he doesn't really understand the implications of what he's trying to say , because the implications of that are far worse than what he realizes and we'll explore why that's the case .

Speaker 1 10:34

But back to their line of reasoning . What the critics would claim is if God's impassable , again , without passions , or we can't impact his passions , then he wouldn't care about human suffering . That's the claim . Therefore , god is not impassable , they say , and the doctrine's false . And more importantly than that , they would say all these doctrines , immutability and passability this came from Greek philosophy Early on , the theologians brought in this baggage from Greek philosophy that really has no place in Christian theology and they would even point to Jesus suffering on the cross . And there was even a movie named Passion of the Christ , and the movie title came from theologies and theologians from years ago of Christ's passion . So if Christ had passion , if he died on the cross , if he suffered and people did it to him , humans nailed him to a cross then therefore God suffers . Therefore the doctrine of impassability is false . It's what these people would say .

Speaker 2 11:35

They refer to those depictions of Christ's last hours on the cross as passion plays .

Speaker 1 11:43

Passion plays exactly , and so the word impassability has that same root word passions or emotions .

Speaker 2 11:50

And almost as you're describing that a psychopath or a sociopath is a person that doesn't have the ability to empathize with others . They don't have , so anything that the person does does not affect their passion whatsoever . It's kind of like they're trying to say that that God would have some sort of a sociopathic tendency , or something .

Speaker 1 12:15

The people that deny impassability are saying exactly that . They're saying God does indeed have these things . Therefore , that doctrine's wrong , Because the doctrine builds either a psychopath or a machine . Yeah , that's crazy A machine doesn't care one way or the other , whether it's helping somebody do something or mashing them in the gears . The machine is just a machine that has no emotions . That's the claim .

Speaker 2 12:38

That's crazy .

Speaker 1 12:39

I'm going to submit . That's not what the doctrine is claiming , nor is it what it means . It's a misinterpretation of what the doctrine means . So here would be the response the doctrine of impassability does not say that God has no emotions or passions . That's not what it's saying . The doctrine of impassability says that nothing in the created world can change God's passions or emotions . That's a very different claim . God does indeed have wrath . He has love . He has all these emotions . He hates sin . He loves repentance . God has these emotions . The doctrine says that there's nothing we do that can make God any more of that than he already is .

Speaker 2 13:24

That's a good thing in regards to our redemption to Him , because His love for us surpasses anything that we could do to make us unloving to Him . Meaning His promises to redeem us , he keeps them . We can't become so bad that he says I'm no longer gonna save them , I'm no longer gonna redeem them . We can't affect that love in a worse way than what he's given , sometimes trying to say is that's good for us , that's good that that's that way ?

Speaker 1 13:56

Yeah , exactly , you're realizing the value of this . And in the book of Judges there's a point where God says you've come and asked for this too many times , I'm not gonna help you . But what he's basically saying was you're not really repenting . But what you are talking about is a true repentance in the sense that , okay , is it really the case that I could mess up so much that God's actually gonna turn His back on me ? Well , god never turned His back on Israel . We get to Ezekiel . There's some places in there where all Israel did was mess up and he cast judgment on them and they still messed up and he said because of my name , you've done nothing that deserves this , but because of my name , I'm gonna bring you back to the land and I'm gonna bless you . What's a good thing ? So , in response to defend this doctrine of impassibility , it's related to God's omniscience .

Speaker 1 14:48

Again , all these doctrines interrelate to each other . God is all knowing , he knows everything . If my actions could make a change in God , then God would have to learn something . If something I did today made God any angrier or happier with me , then he would have learned something . Since yesterday , Yesterday , he would not have known what I was gonna do today . If I do something today that makes Him so angry that he throws up His hands and gets madder than he was yesterday . He had to have learned something , he had to have encountered something that he didn't know yesterday .

Speaker 1 15:28

Well , now you've got a God that doesn't know everything and he goes through life . Oh wow , look what he did . Oh , that's really , that's not God . God doesn't have to watch us to learn what we're gonna do Now . His knowledge is limited . That's crazy too . Okay , so now you'd have a God that doesn't know things and some people bite the bullet and say oh yeah , he doesn't know the future . They're called open theists . Just fix the say it Open theists . They now have a God that has to watch people to learn what they're gonna do .

Speaker 2 16:02

That's the open part . It's open-ended and he's learning and making adjustments based upon what

God's Attributes and Impassibility

Speaker 2 16:09

happens .

Speaker 1 16:09

And God is very intelligent and he can predict , like we might predict , our child . We've been around our child a lot and we would know this child's gonna pick pizza and . He's gonna reject the vegetables . Therefore , I'm gonna predict when I serve vegetables he's gonna choose the pizza , but I don't really know that until he does , or if a doctor- . And so that's what an open theist would say God doesn't really know the future until you choose it .

Speaker 2 16:34

Or if a doctor gives a prognosis to a cancer patient you probably have six months to live . He doesn't know . Factually . He's making a guess . It might be five months , it might be seven months , but he's making a best guess based upon His experiences .

Speaker 1 16:52

So now God's prophecies are in question . Sometimes he misses . That's crazy . It snowballs into a horrible problem . People get angry because we become aware of circumstances or actions that we didn't expect . Somebody cuts us off on the freeway oh my goodness , I get mad or somebody disappoints me . I expected more of them and they disappointed me . If I was able to make God more angry or more sad or more happy than he was yesterday , then yesterday God would not have known what I was gonna do today . God would then be learning things based on what he discovers humans doing , and since God already knows everything , he can't be surprised at what I do . Think of it this way God is always angry at sin and he's always empathetic towards suffering , and he's always loving towards repentance . I can't make Him more loving than he already is towards repentance , and I can't make Him more angry at sin than he already is . It's not the case that , oh my goodness , I never dreamed that they would actually sin that much . Well , again , now you've got a God that's learning .

Speaker 2 18:07

As you go through this , Glenn , would you also say that when we're talking about the attributes of God or characteristics , but the attributes of God , that you have to look at them in a whole package . You can't just take one and look at it and study it and then go to the next one . They all interact together .

Speaker 1 18:26

You can look at them and study them individually , but they interact together .

Speaker 2 18:30

It's like the old saying , the little boy asking the preacher is God so strong that he can make a rock that he can't lift ? And the answer that the preacher gives is God is so wise that he would never make a rock so large that he couldn't lift . So it's a picture of the attributes working together , and you can't disassociate themselves from each other , correct ?

Speaker 1 18:55

They don't hang in space all by themselves . They are interrelated . So another one that comes to this is the idea of God being self-sufficient . God is self-sufficient . He doesn't need humans to exist or to get through His course of what he does . People need things . We are needy people . We need things , and when we don't get them , we get angry , frustrated . When we do get them , and we get more of them , then we get happy . If people could make God more happy or more sad or more angry than he already is , then God would be needy in some way . He would not be self-sufficient . We get angry or sad because some situation disappointed us . I didn't get what I needed . I'm hungry . I ordered a hamburger . They brought me soup . I get angry , so my needs weren't met . People get more happy because we encounter something that's better than what we had before . I had a job , I got a raise . Oh no , I'm happy .

Speaker 2 19:57

You know that's a description of all self-centered approaches . It's all self-centered around . It's all self-centered .

Speaker 1 20:03

God is completely self-sufficient , he doesn't have to need things . I mean , think of it If somebody was so rich and had so much power and influence that they could control all the circumstances , could anything ever happen to them that made them unexpectedly frustrated If they controlled all the things around them ? It's like if a boss was infinitely powerful and infinitely wealthy to where nothing ever went wrong in his company or her company , then how could ? Why would they ever get mad ? It only gets mad because something happens that , oh my goodness , I wanted this to happen . Then it didn't . I either couldn't control it and it spun out of control , or I needed somebody else to do something for me and they fell through on it .

Speaker 1 20:52

So if God is self-sufficient and in total control of things , then he can never be angry or frustrated anymore than he already is because he's in control of all these things . He wouldn't be self-sufficient . It's also related to omnipotence , power , all power . Again , if he can control these situations , then he wouldn't get more angry or frustrated . So denying impassibility ends in one of the following problems Either God doesn't know about our sin , or he doesn't know about our repentance in advance and he learns of it , in which case now you've got a God that doesn't know things , or God can be made more angry at sin than he already is .

Speaker 1 21:34

Either he knows about it and he's just not as angry about it , not as upset about sin as he okay , so that kind of brings any question . Or God needs a relationship with us rather than he wants a relationship with us out of love , and all of those are problems , and they all end in heresy . We all end either a limited God . If God is limited , then there's some factor that's limiting him . If God is limited , he is not as angry at sin , and then he becomes more angry at sin than prior to . He's limited . Anything that's limited is finite and the problem's just snowball Open . Theism denies that God knows the future , saying that God can be made more angry , more happy . This is a reflection of human characteristics on God . God's not a human .

Speaker 2 22:21

It's the want of a human to describe God .

Speaker 1 22:24

It results in a false view of how God reacts to humans . Denying impassibility would mean that we can think of it . I can move God by . Well , if I fast more , I could get God to heal me . Or if I give more money to the church , I can get God's empathy and I could get him to act in this little problem . I got over here , so now I can move God by what I do . Really , that's what we really want is a God that's going to move because I paid more money to the church or I gave up mustard greens for two months . Really , that's a human .

Speaker 2 23:04

Where does this fit into the teaching that words have meaning and that through what you speak , you can bring about , because God is bound by whatever you speak ? Does this work into this Well ?

Speaker 1 23:16

that's a whole different problem that borders on occultism , that our words do not have power . That's a whole separate problem that has to do with the false view of what faith is . Faith is not a power in and of itself . We don't declare things into existence . Faith is having trust in the person of God , and he's the one with the power .

Speaker 2 23:39

Yeah , and I want to make it clear that is the word of faith teaching and I don't subscribe to it . I want to make that clear . I just open into question .

Speaker 1 23:47

So how do we respond to these passages that I read before about again ? It flat out says he provoked the Lord to anger judges 212 , or the Lord left the Canaanites in the land to see whether they would obey . So what do we do with passages like that ? What ?

Speaker 2 24:06

about whenever the Israelites had disobeyed , while Moses was on the mountain Sinai receiving the commandments , and that while they're up there , the Israelites are down there building a golden calf , worshiping a golden calf , and then he's so God this described as being mad that he's going to destroy them and start over again with Moses . And Moses pleads with them and says no , no , no , don't do that . You know what will that do to your name of bringing the people out of Egypt and things like that .

Speaker 1 24:39

It says that God relented , relented , repented , things like that . The first thing we do in response is we look at the verses that are opposing this , such as there's verses that tell us that we can't make God any more tired or weary Isaiah 40 , 28, . The creator of the ends of the earth is neither faint nor is weary . We can't make him tired . God is self-sufficient and we can give him nothing that he needs . Romans 11 , 35 , who is first given to God and God needs to repay him . There's nothing I can do that's going to make God obligated to me .

Speaker 1 25:19

Job 22 , verses two and three can man be profitable to God ? Is it any pleasure to the Almighty that you're righteous or is it gain to him that your ways are perfect ? And again , all I'm given is a few verses as examples of all of these . But so on one hand , we do have these verses that says you know , god became angry because of our actions , but then we have these other verses that say that there's nothing I can do that'll change him . Again , job 22 , we cannot do anything to move God . Is flat out what those verses say .

Speaker 1 25:54

So how do we reconcile these passages ? And we can line up verses on both sides . There's one answer is . That is what you pointed out . There's anthropomorphisms , there's passages that say they talk about God's arms , his nostrils , the breasts of his nostrils , his wings . There's even some people go they pull out all these anthropomorphisms and say God's a human . Now we did a session on the angel of the Lord where we pointed out the angel of the Lord was a man , but in that session we made careful to note that God as a being is fully spirit . That is not human as in his essence .

Speaker 2 26:37

Under those particular cases , he was just had that form of the man in order to interact with man .

Speaker 1 26:44

So in that sense , we have a God that is infinite , an infinite God is always infinitely angry at sin and he is always infinitely happy with repentance . The example that I gave at the first , the pastor that I met that denied these , saying you come in and your child is suffering , god cares for that . Well , yeah , but if my child being sick could make God more caring than he was , then it means before he encountered my child , he had to one learn about him and to grow in his empathy , which means he was limited in his empathy , which means he wasn't as empathetic with somebody else's problem that may have been worse than mine . We would hold that . God is always happy with repentance and he is infinitely happy with repentance . All the time . He doesn't change and he is happy to an infinite extent , more than we could ever dream . He's happy . He's so happy with repentance we can't imagine it .

God's Immutability and Response to Sin

Speaker 1 27:54

Likewise , he's always wrathful and angry at sin , more so than we realize . We're the ones that diminish the idea . Oh God might get a little frustrated at me .

Speaker 1 28:05

No he is infinitely angry and wrathful at your sin because of how horrible it is . We don't understand near how horrible our sin is .

Speaker 1 28:13

Then , if we suddenly get into a right relationship with God , then we realize , oh my goodness , how I've messed up . We're the ones that have this false view of how I am related to God . God has a true response to my sin , which is he is infinitely wrathful at sin and he's always infinitely happy and infinitely loving towards repentance . When I move from a state of lostness to a state of faith in Christ and I move from being under God's wrath to being under God's love . Who changed ? Yeah , we do . It was us . We change in relation to him . We move from being under God's wrath to being under God's love . But he didn't change . He didn't get more wrathful or less wrathful . I didn't through my puny little actions of I'm going to fast more and change the infinite God Really , no , I'm going to change in relation to God . So immutability says that God doesn't change . The claim is from the people that deny it . Aren't we told to pray ? James 5 , 16 , the prayer of a righteous man avails much . Genesis 6 , 6 , the Lord regretted that he made man on the earth . The people that deny immutability say that an unchangeable God is a , not a personal God . That's a God that can't respond to personal needs . He's cold and distant . And again started in Greek philosophy . Our response God knew from when he created us what we would do and how we would act and he ordained from eternity the answer to that prayer . He knew what we were going to do and he ordained from eternity the answer to my prayer . God ordained from eternity that we would freely pray to him and what he would do . He said that's the way it's going to be . And he knew us and he knew our needs and he was always loving towards that . He was always angry towards our sin . His actions play out over time , but they are originated in eternity .

Speaker 1 30:17

Norman Geisler said this quote prayer is not a means of getting our will done in heaven , but a means of God getting his will done on earth . So when we pray , it's really us aligning with God's will and us trying to determine what is God's will here . And God , please do your will in this . God's will is already God's will and I don't manipulate God through . Well , jesus , if I had more emotion in my prayer , maybe he'll move . God is already infinitely loving and wants to do good . It's just as we've seen , as we've done our verse by verse study . Sometimes the greater good comes through some pain you know and judges .

Speaker 2 30:57

several times they mentioned why is it that God has forsaken us with ? The circumstances are clear that they abandoned God and they did what was right in their own eyes . So it wasn't God abandoning them , it was them abandoning God . Yeah , it was their look as far as way , that way that they were looking at it . So what you're saying is it's a matter of us getting into God's will versus God being conformed to our will .

Speaker 1 31:27

The last few things here . If God is all knowing , then he can't change his mind . If God knows everything , then he can't change his mind . The only way you change your mind is if you either think something through and you come to a realization that what you thought before was incorrect , or you thought something through and you learned something and now you make up your mind , in the which case , again , your knowledge was limited before . God doesn't think things through like we think things through . He's already from eternity having all knowledge . He doesn't have to figure out the problem . He doesn't have to wait and see or read the news . When he gets up in the morning to find out what happened in the overnight markets , he's doesn't have to think well , I wonder what that guy's going to do next . Because if he did now , his knowledge is limited and he would be a limited God and all these other problems . Now he's finite , and so on . So again , the Bible tells us that God doesn't change .

Speaker 1 32:25

1 Samuel 1529, . God will not lie or change his mind flat out , for he is not a man that he should change his mind . Again , that was 1 Samuel 15 . Malachi 3.6, . I , the Lord , do not change . James 1.17 . God is not even a shadow of turning is what it says . So how do we explain these one passages that says I , the Lord , don't change I am not a man that I should change my mind but these other passages that says he relented or he had to figure things out ? I think of ?

Speaker 1 33:01

The other one I like to give is in the Garden of Eden , after Adam and Eve had eaten the fruit . There's a verse there where it says Adam and Eve heard the sound of God walking in the garden in the cool of the day . So one of my questions is what sound does God make when he walks ? Does he , does he make a lot of noise ? Or is this an anthropomorphism ? Or , and then he asked a question where are you ? Well , were they hiding behind a tree ? And you couldn't see him ? You know , come out from behind the bush . Did he not know ? Did he not know his own garden well enough to know where that ? No , he knew .

Speaker 2 33:36

And was the question for himself , or was the question really for Adam and Eve ? The question is for you .

Speaker 1 33:41

So the purposes of these things , when again , these passages that I read earlier , these things are for Abraham to prove his faith . When God tested Abraham , it wasn't so God could figure it out , it was so Abraham could prove God's faithful . That's where it says . And yes , it says that . But I don't have a problem with the language because , again , we have an infinite God that knows things without discursive language . There's not a before and an after in God's knowledge . So how are you going to describe what he knows ? It gets really awkward in living in a tensed language when God is tensless . That's where we have the problem .

Speaker 1 34:21

Lastly , answering this whole accusation of Greek philosophy , several responses here . First , these doctrines have a biblical and logical support . So it really doesn't matter what the Greeks said , because we just showed you there's a biblical and a logical support . Second , most Christian theology did not start with the Greeks . There's nothing in the Greeks about the Trinity , monotheism , dual natures of Christ , salvation by grace through faith . Omnipotence was not in the Greek , so there's all kinds of things that never started .

Speaker 1 34:51

Thirdly , if you go to what the actual Greek philosophers have taught and I would submit to you Philip Schaff's history of philosophy , it's a standard work . I counted 44 Greek philosophers or schools of philosophy prior to the time of Christ . 44 and they disagreed with each other or they wouldn't be different . I guess what I'm claiming is that there were all kinds of things taught . It's like saying modern philosophy Well , there's modern philosophers that teach contradictions , that disagree with each other . One of them will say one thing and one says just the opposite . So just because it says Greek philosophy , they taught all kinds of things . Again , 44 schools of philosophy , chances are . Anything you believe today was touched on by some Greek philosopher .

Speaker 1 35:38

Next , most people that say this have never read Greek philosophy . They just heard it somewhere and they really don't have a clue what Greek philosophy taught . They just heard somebody else say it and they're repeating it . I would take it a little more seriously if they'd give me a quotation . Which Greek philosopher ? Which work was it ? What book ? And they don't know because they never read it . They don't really know what the philosopher's taught , nor whether or not it's actually true . Lastly , just because even if they did teach , it doesn't make it true or false .

Speaker 1 36:08

Aristotle taught logic . Are we to throw out logical statements just because I mean the Bible's full of logic ? Are we to throw out logic just because it came from Aristotle , who was Greek . So that's just a red herring . We have these passages again Exodus 19.4 , god has wings . Numbers 11.23 as arms , hebrews 4.13 as eyes . So the real answer there's a lot of anthropomorphisms in there , there's some limitations of the language that we just can't fully describe what God wants and what he says , simply because his emotions are not human , they're very different and we have trouble describing these things . Our conclusions , just to kind of tie this up we conclude that God knows all things and that these passages are either anthropomorphisms or they're done to show us something rather than show God something

Theology Lesson With Verse Study

Speaker 1 36:59

. That's our theology lesson for today . I enjoyed it . Well , we'll be back to our regular verse by verse study . I thank everybody for staying with us . We just thought this was worth spending a little bit of time on . That's our lesson for today .

Speaker 2 37:11

Thank you for joining us today . If you like these sessions , share them with your friends . Send them the link from whatever podcast that you're listening to this from . We'll see you next time on reasoning through the Bible .