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Originally Posted by a mere housewife  I was wondering where you would place the distinction between His truthfulness and His action in the sense that we can say He is truthful and this means He 'must not' lie?
[Also, do not many of the words we use to describe God in the catechism have no meaning apart from actions He must or must not do? Such His being immortal? Do we have very much approach to describing His Being apart from necessary action? Am I confusing two kinds of action?] |
If we take the apostle's statement -- "Let God be true and every man a liar" -- as establishing a genuine antithesis between truth and falsehood, then the proposition "God is true" necessarily includes within it the converse proposition that "God cannot lie."
This principle applies to all His perfections. The fact that God is just necessarily implies He is no respecter of persons. But we cannot then argue that because God is just He is not able to confer saving grace on one and pass by another. Likewise, we have no grounds for arguing that because God is just He is not able to forgive a sinner without satisfaction being made for sin. In both instances there is a grave mistake being made. Both types of argument could only be correct if God were ONLY just. But the very idea of salvation in the first instance and forgiveness in the second instance supposes that God is BOTH just AND gracious. Hence He cannot be bound to an external standard which consists ONLY of justice.
It should follow from the fact that God is not ONLY just, but is BOTH just AND gracious, that He does not act out of some necessity of nature when He manifests either justice or grace, but such manifestations are free acts of His own will. What God has determined to do in the salvation and forgiveness of sinners is what pleases Him and brings praise to His glory.
The fact that God's Being is "simple" should also lead us to the same conclusion. Thomas Boston explains, "God’s attributes are God himself. Neither are these attributes separable from one another; for though we, through weakness, must think and speak of them separately, yet they are truly but the one infinite perfection of the divine nature, which cannot be separated therefrom, without denying that he is an infinitely perfect being." (Works, 1:57.) Now if this is so, then we ought not to conceive of God's attributes as parts of the whole. "Justice" and "goodness" are expressions of God's essence accommodated to our state of being. As such they can only be free acts of His will.