We are looking at the doctrine of God, and a wonderful text to have before us as we go through this territory would be the text in Daniel 11:32, “The people who know their God shall be strong, and do exploits.” And one of the great things about studying the doctrine of God is that it makes us strong. It builds us up; it grows us in grace. Tonight we are going to look at a number of issues: God’s incorporeality (He has no body), his immutability, his invisibility and his glory.

(Transcription of audio file from 02:04 to 02:42 omitted.)

God Is Incorporeal⤒🔗

God is incorporeal. That means to say that he has no body—a reference here to the fact that the Bible often speaks of God as Spirit. There are in the Bible several expressions of “the Spirit of God”—and sometimes that is a reference to the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, and perhaps generally that is true—but one thinks for example of particular texts that address the fact that God is spirit rather than body. He is not a part of the created order. He is not a part of the cosmos. He does not have atoms and molecules. Isaiah 31:3: “The Egyptians are man, and not God, and their horses are flesh, and not spirit.” And the allusion to spirit there is a back-reference to God. The Egyptians are corporeal, but God is not.

Or perhaps the most familiar one to us is Jesus’ conversation with the woman of Samaria in John 4. He begins to address her in an evangelistic manner. She has had several husbands. And then she asks—what some commentators think is a kind of deviating question—about the worship of the Jews and the worship of the Samaritans on different mountains. And it is sometimes viewed as though it is all getting a little too hot for her, and she is trying to deviate the conversation away from her own personal life to religious questions about Jews and Samaritans. And in the process of which, Jesus answers actually signal that this is not a deviation at all, because what evangelism does is to bring us to worship God. The main thing here is worship and not evangelism. But in the course of that Jesus says (a very familiar text, John 4:24), “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.”

God Is Spirit←↰⤒🔗

Post-apostolic church. Now, in the post-apostolic church in the second century or so—late first century, early second century—there were those who began to speak of God as being composed of rarified, purified matter. Which, of course, is incorrect.

Mormonism. But of more interest to you and me perhaps is Mormon belief. Mormons do teach—Joseph Smith taught—that God has a body. Joseph Smith’s translation of John 4:24: “For unto such hath God promised his Spirit. And they who worship him, must worship in spirit and in truth.” A rather different connotation there of spirit from the one that we are familiar with. From The Doctrine and Covenants I picked out this quotation from Joseph Smith: “The Father has a body of flesh and bones, as tangible as man’s; the Son also.” So just as the Son by incarnation has a body of flesh and bones, so in 1843 Joseph Smith was shown this revelation in which he wrote down these words: “The Father has a body of flesh and bones.” Christian orthodoxy has denied that and denied that very strongly. Creation—matter, molecules, atoms—are all part of creation, and God is the Creator. He is outside of creation.

Contemporary exegetes. Some contemporary exegetes. Raymond Brown (Roman Catholic)—a very famous and in some ways fascinating commentator on John’s Gospel—has also questioned the interpretation of John 4:24. I have also cited a contemporary Evangelical, Craig Blomberg: “It does not prove that God might not have a ‘spiritual body.’” No idea what he means by that, but there it is. Calvin is much clearer: “Christ simply declares here that his Father is of a spiritual nature.” And that is to say he is outside of creation.

Hebrew. Now, perhaps a little nuance here from Hebrew (and for that matter, Greek too): the Hebrew word here for spirit, “ruach,” is also the word for which we would translate wind. So the idea is not something static so much as something that perhaps is energetic. The idea is one of movement and animation.

But God is incorporeal. He does not have a body. Jesus has a body; the second person of the Trinity has a body. He always has a body, since the conception in the womb of the virgin Mary subsequent to his resurrection. He is in hypostatic union with a physical body. So the physical body of the Son of God resides somewhere in some place. But it also is part of creation; the body of Jesus is a created thing. But it is in hypostatic union with something that is incorporeal—that does not have a body. God does not have a body. God is spirit.

God Is Immutable←⤒🔗

Now, that leads us to consider another issue here. God is immutable. God cannot change. Immutability means he cannot change. “There is but one only, living, and true God, who is infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions; immutable”—there is the word in the Westminster Confession in the second chapter on its doctrine of God. God is immutable. God cannot change. Or the one that you are all familiar with, especially those of you who are Presbyterians and learned your catechism: the answer to question four, “What is God?” “God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth.” Unchangeable. The unchangeability of God. God does not change. He is not one thing today and another thing tomorrow. That is of very significant importance pastorally to us—that God does not change. He is the same yesterday, today and forever. His being does not change. His ways do not change. His promises do not change.

You might put it in a different way: there is no becoming in God. He does not become something else. There is no evolution in God. He does not morph in accordance with the changeability of the cosmos, of the created order. That is a very significant pastoral statement. It might seem an arid piece of doctrine, but it is actually of immense pastoral significance. I wake up in the morning—God is the same as he was yesterday. I wake up twenty years from now—he is the same as he is tonight. He is the same God who spoke to Moses. He is the same God who spoke to David. He is the same God who appeared in incarnate form in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. He never changes. There is no becoming in God.

Repentance and God←↰⤒🔗

Now, that raises a significant problem, and that is the problem of repentance in God. We are familiar with passages of the Bible that seem to suggest that God changes his mind. Let’s cite a couple of texts here to ground this, first of all. Malachi 3:6: “For I the LORD do not change.” This is God speaking through his prophet, through his instrument, Malachi. “For I the LORD do not change.” And similar verses in Psalm 102 and James 1:17. “There is no shadow due to turning”—the familiar verse in James 1:17. God does not change and cast a shadow.

Does God “repent” or “relent”? But does God repent? Or perhaps a softer translation in perhaps more modern translations: relent. Does God relent? And yes, on the pages of Scripture God does seem to change his mind. “And also the Glory of Israel will not lie or have regret, for he is not a man, that he should have regret” (1 Samuel 15:29). And yet there are other examples. Abraham interceding for Lot in Sodom—for fifty, for forty, for thirty, for twenty and so on. Abraham intercedes and seems to enter into a sort of bargaining with God, and eventually God relents about the destruction of Sodom if there could be found ten righteous people. In fact, there weren’t ten righteous people in Sodom. Or Moses asking to spare Israel—similar circumstances—in Exodus 32. Or perhaps the book of Jonah, where God announces (Jonah 3:4) the destruction of Nineveh, only in the next chapter (much to the consternation of Jonah who says, “I told you so”) he relents of that purpose and spares Nineveh and actually sends a revival to Nineveh. So what do we make of those passages?

I think Dr. Ferguson was telling you a couple of weeks ago about rules of interpreting Scripture, how you read the Bible. And one of the rules for interpreting the Bible is that you don’t pit one Scripture against another. You apply what we call “the analogy of faith”—that since the Bible is God’s Word, it cannot lie. And therefore you adopt a view that you interpret passages that are less clear in the light of passages that are very, very clear. That is a very basic principle of understanding the Bible. We don’t come at it with the supposition that it is self-contradictory. We come to it with the supposition: “This is God’s Word, every jot and tittle is God’s Word. It cannot lie. And therefore, even if it does not appear to us to be coherent, it must be coherent in itself.” And therefore we interpret passages of the Bible that seem to be difficult to us in the light of passages that are very, very clear. Malachi 3:6 is very clear: “For I the LORD do not change.”

So let’s expound this. We can say, for sure: God changes in his relationship to individuals. He is angry with us before we are converted, and then we know his saving grace. There is a change of relationship. But that does not involve a change in the nature of God, in the being of God. And there are some specific things, I think, that we can say here about the immutability of God.

God’s attributes do not change. First of all, God’s attributes do not change. His attributes of invisibility, his attributes of incorporeality, his attributes of love or goodness or wrath or whatever attribute, whatever quality, whatever characteristic characterizes God—they do not change. You can’t say, “In the Old Testament God was the God of wrath, but in the New Testament he is a God of love.” That is bad in terms of understanding God as it is bad in terms of understanding the Bible. God’s attributes do not change.

God’s decretive will does not change. God’s will of decree does not change. Psalm 33:11: “The counsel of the LORD stands forever, the plans of his heart to all generations.” God has a plan. That is of immense comfort to me. God has a plan. When bad things happen to the Lord’s people, when terrible things happen. Today was like almost any other day. You get a message from a friend that you know from a distance, as I did today, and their little child is seriously ill. He fell from a ladder and is in hospital. And what was I going to say? It was a text message and he was expecting a text message back. I replied and I said, “God has a plan. God has a purpose.” I may not know what that purpose is, but he knows. God has a plan. He has a purpose. Nothing catches Him by surprise. He does not have “aha” moments. I never thought of that. God’s decretive will does not change.

God’s covenant faithfulness does not change. God’s covenant faithfulness does not change. God keeps covenant. Those of us with errant children, one of the things that keeps us going from day to day is God has made a covenant with us and our children. That is a very precious thing. “I will be to you a God, and to your seed after you.” It is a very special promise that God has made, and God’s faithfulness to that covenant never changes. It never changes. God is the same.

What God has revealed as true in Scripture does not change. What God has revealed to be true in Scripture does not change. You can’t say that something was true at one point in redemptive history but not true at another point in redemptive history. What God has revealed about himself—what God has shown about his character, about his plan, about his purposes—it is always true. It is always going to be true.

What do we do then with the repentance of God? That God does seem to change his mind? We say something like this: It looks to us as though God changed his mind, but actually it was never contrary to his eternal plan and purpose.

Anthropomorphisms←↰⤒🔗

So we introduce the idea of anthropomorphisms—that is, the employment of human characteristics to describe God. God accommodates himself and he speaks to us in language that we can understand. Calvin says he talks to us in baby-talk. So you have all of these expressions in the Bible—that God has a nose and ears and hands and feet and wings and eyes—but understand, God does not really have wings or eyes or feet or a nose. He is talking to us in baby-talk. My six-year-old and three-year-old grandchildren speak to us from New Zealand almost every night. And you have to get down to a level of a three-year-old. If he says, “I am a pirate” because he has a pirate hat on, you better respond in kind. You better say some pirate jokes, because he is a pirate! Jim Packer says,

The reasons why God uses [anthropomorphisms] to speak to us about himself is that language drawn from our own personal life is the most accurate medium for communicating thoughts about him that we have. He is personal, and so are we, in a way that nothing else in the physical creation is. Only man, of all physical creatures, was made in God’s image. Since we are more like God than is any other being known to us, it is more illuminating, and less misleading, for God to picture himself to us in human terms than it would be if he used any other.

That is Packer’s explanation.

Anthropopathisms←↰⤒🔗

Here is another word used: anthropopathism. Anthropopathism: the employment of human affections to describe God. God is “sorry” that he made man (Genesis 6:7). God “regrets” that he made Saul king (1 Samuel 15:11). And this very graphic description in Isaiah 42, the first of the servant’s songs, God speaks of himself like a woman in labor: “For a long time I have held my peace; I have kept still and restrained myself; now I will cry out like a woman in labor; I will gasp and pant.” God (imagine that!) using first of all female language, and God using female language of birth pangs to describe the way he feels!

Impassibility←↰⤒🔗

Now, all of that leads to a very difficult issue: the doctrine of impassibility. “Passibilis” in Latin means “able to suffer” or “experience emotion.” And the Westminster Confession Doctrine of God, Chapter 2 Section 1: “without body, parts, or passions.” God is without passions. Now I imagine, if you are not familiar with the doctrine of the impassibility of God, this probably causes many of you to scratch your heads and wonder, “Really? God is passionless? God is without passion? What is this?” This is the Westminster Confession—this is something the elders here in the church subscribe to and the ministers entered into an oath about at a presbytery meeting one time—about the impassibility of God.

First of all, let me just say, this is a classical doctrine. This is not something peculiar to Presbyterians or those Puritan “killjoys,” as the thought sometimes is about Puritans of the seventeenth century. This is a classical doctrine. This is a doctrine held by the church fathers. Augustine would have maintained the doctrine of the impassibility. Roman Catholics would accept the doctrine of impassibility. There is nothing peculiarly Reformed or peculiarly Calvinistic about this doctrine. It’s very difficult for us in 2012 to get our minds, let alone our hearts, around the doctrine of impassibility. It has been vehemently denied by two huge theologians in the twentieth century. One is Karl Barth, and the other is a man by the name of Jurgen Moltmann. They have raged strongly and eloquently against the doctrine of impassibility.

Attempt to safeguard. Let us attempt, first of all, to defend the doctrine. There are good reasons why it is here. And I think if we are Postmodernists, we dismiss the past and it has no significance to us, but we really can’t do that. For 1500 years the Church has defended the doctrine of impassibility. So why? What possibly could have led them to defend this doctrine? Well, let’s have an attempt. It is an attempt to safeguard some very important truths.

God is not a victim. He is not a victim of the world he created. God is not shaped by it; he is not changed by it. He does not have to adjust himself to it. In part, I suggest, it is a corollary of his independence and unchangeability. “I do not change.” He is not acted upon involuntarily or against his will. He does not suffer from mood swings. He does not have to go and see a counsellor. God is inviolable. He is invulnerable. He is not taken by surprise. He is not a helpless victim of circumstances. He does not fall into suffering.

Now, let me expand a little further. Sometimes that—what I have just been talking about—is referred to as external passibility. Theologians have gone a little further and have spoken of internal possibility—his own being, his own essence, cannot change. There is no becoming in God. He does not evolve. He does not suffer emotional stress. There is no unresolved mental conflict in God. He does not suffer from some kind of personality disorder. He does not suffer from neurosis. He never experiences anxiety or depression or discontentment. He never loses his temper or simply acts on impulse. There is a wonderful sermon on this issue by Thomas Chalmers, a very important Scotsman of the nineteenth century, called Fury Not in God.

God cannot have sensations caused by another. If God does experience feelings, they must be caused by himself and not by something outside of himself.

God does not suffer physically, because he does not have a body in which to suffer physically.

Now, that is my best attempt to defend the doctrine of impassibility.

But, serious modification is necessary to uphold impassibility. But let me suggest here a couple of things.

One is that when the Bible does express God yearning, longing, pleading, we have to take those very seriously. We can’t simply dismiss them and say, “Well, they are just anthropopathisms.” We have coined this word; we can now put it in a box and store it there and walk away. No. These have to mean something, and something very significant, and something that appeals to us at a very basic level.

And secondly, in the incarnation, Jesus in his humanity—and think of the sermons Dr. Ferguson has been preaching on the emotional life of our Lord, where we have been looking here at the fact that Jesus has a human body and a human mind and a human psychology and human emotions—and all of that is now in hypostatic union with God. So sitting at the right hand of the throne of God is the perfect humanity, but the vulnerable humanity and the vulnerable psychology and the vulnerable emotions of the second person of the Trinity who is in union with his humanness. And all of that, I think, has to be brought into the picture when we talk about the doctrine of impassibility.

The reason why classical theology has defended the doctrine of impassibility is firstly and primarily to defend the idea that God does not inherently change within his nature. That nothing from outside of himself can force Him to change so that he becomes something other than he was. And I think that is what has been at the heart of the defense of the doctrine of impassibility.

God Is Invisible←⤒🔗

God is invisible. Well of course, if he has no body, he is invisible. If God is spirit, he is invisible.

Confessional Statement←↰⤒🔗

“There is but one only, living, and true God, who is infinite in being and perfection, a most pure Spirit, invisible,” the Confession says.

Biblical Statements←↰⤒🔗

Lots of Biblical references. Jesus in the end of John’s prologue: “No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known,” or, “He has exegeted the Father to us.” “No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side”—that is the astonishing wonder of the incarnation, that in the incarnation you had One who had seen God, and he makes God known to us. And he makes God known to us in such a way that we said that there is no un-Jesus-likeness in God. God is like Jesus. That is the best answer that you can give a little child when they ask what God is like.

1 John 4:2: “No one has ever seen God.” Or Paul in Romans 1: “His invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived.” Or Colossians 1:15: “Christ is the image of the invisible God.” 1 Timothy 1:17: “To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.” And then 1 Timothy 6:16: (Christ) “He who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see.” So lots of texts here about the invisibility of God.

Explanation←↰⤒🔗

So that brings into sharp focus the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” Isn’t the Bible wonderful? And here again you have to employ rules to interpret the Bible. You can’t pit one verse of the Bible against another verse. Clearly the Bible says God is invisible. And yet in Matthew 5 in the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” What does that mean? Well, let’s explore this a little.

Theophany. In the Old Testament, for example, you have God appearing in what we call “theophanies.” Those appearances of God in the patriarchal times—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. These “Angels of the Lord.” These physical forms that are sometimes referred to as angels and sometimes they are referred to as the Lord himself. Theophanies. Think of Moses in Exodus 33 asking to see God’s glory: “Let me see your glory.” And God promises Moses an experience of his goodness and an explanation of his name, but then he adds, “You cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live.”

Some do “see” God. Now, Moses was allowed to see God’s back from the cleft of the rock. “But my face shall not be seen.” No one can see God and live. For Moses, sinner as he was, to have seen God in his essence—in the essence of his nature, in his very being—it would have killed him. Some things are beyond our capacity to know and beyond our capacity to experience. He was allowed to see God’s back, but not his face.

Jacob, in the wrestling match, with a theophanic angel this time, a theophany. He wrestles all night and he calls the place Peniel, which means “the face of God.” “For I have seen God’s face, and yet my life has been delivered.” Now, that raises a very interesting question: Whether God revealed his face to Jacob but did not reveal his face to Moses. And why is that the case? And some have suggested that what you had with Jacob was more like a Christophany than a theophany. In other words, with Jacob it was an appearance, a pre-incarnate appearance, of the second person of the Trinity. A pre-incarnation. A Christophany rather than a theophany. And therefore, what Jacob saw was not the essence of God, but what he saw was what people saw when they saw Jesus—Jesus who reflected the face of God, who “exegeted” the face of God perhaps.

Or Hagar, when cast out of Abraham’s house by Sarah after the birth of Ishmael, meets God and responds. “So she called the name of the LORD who spoke to her, ‘You are a God of seeing,’ for she said, ‘Truly here I have seen him who looks after me.’” Or Manoah and his wife, the parents of Samson. They experience a theophany, and Manoah says, “We are going to die, because we have seen God.” And Mrs. Manoah explains to her husband that if God intended them to die, they would have been corpses already. Her theology is actually better than her husband’s. Or Isaiah, in the famous scene in Isaiah 6, “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts”: “In the year that king Uzziah died I saw the LORD…high and lifted up.”

What are these? God is invisible, but he makes himself visible. He is invisible in his essence, but he makes himself visible. Ultimately he makes himself visible in the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity. What we see, of course, is the physical body of Jesus—a perfect body and a glorious body! “We beheld his glory,” John says. It reflects something of the very glory of God himself. But it is the physical body of Jesus. And it sort of begs us to ask the question and perhaps speculate a little as to what we shall see in heaven. And somewhere on the next page I have put in the prayer of Jesus in the upper room, the so-called High Priestly prayer: “I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.” To see my glory. To see not the incarnation in what was (in the language of the Shorter Catechism) a “low condition,” but the splendor, the effulgence if you like, of the resurrected ascended body of Jesus.

Now, it is still a physical body. But it is a body that is replete with conditions that make it fit for the glory that it is now occupying. Jesus’ prayer for his disciples (but a prayer for us too—for those whom the Father will give to Him, that they will see his glory, that we might see the glory). And what is it that we will see when we get to heaven? We will see the resplendent glory of God that shines in the face of Jesus Christ. But God in and of himself in his essence remains invisible to us. He is spirit.

Prohibition of images of God. Now, this leads in part to a prohibition in the Old Testament in the Ten Commandments—the second commandment, the prohibition on images. And there’s interesting history here on the prohibition on images of God that led some to suggest that images of Jesus were also prohibited. Dr. Ferguson and I have a dear friend who publishes books, Christian Focus Publications. They have a couple of hundred children books, including some written by Dr. Ferguson, but there are never any pictures of Jesus in those books. All those books are written from the perspective of that which Jesus would see, so you are seeing out of the eyes of Jesus but you never actually see Him in the books. That is partly because historic Presbyterianism in the Larger Catechism in Q&A 109 also interpreted the prohibition of images to reflect prohibition of images of Jesus, even the incarnate Jesus. But certainly a prohibition of images of God.

Do look at that wonderful prayer of Rosemary Jensen.

Forgive me, Lord, for doubting your presence just because I cannot see you. I too often do what I want, not considering you, because you are invisible to my human eyes. I have not even appreciated that you are apparent in creation

And, especially, in your written Word. I repent and I will look for you in everything.

That is a beautiful prayer. Some of you might want to write that out and put it on the fridge or something. It is a beautiful prayer. It is actually Rosemary Jensen’s book Praying the Attributes of God, which I absolutely and thoroughly recommend.

God Is Glorious←⤒🔗

Now finally, God is glorious.

Moses went up on the mountain, and the cloud covered the mountain. The glory of the LORD dwelt on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it six days. And on the seventh day he called to Moses out of the midst of the cloud. Now the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the people of Israel. Moses entered the cloud and went up on the mountain. And Moses was on the mountain forty days and forty nights. Exodus 24:15-18

Now you remember what the consequences of this were for Moses. His actual face, his physical features, began to glow. He was in the presence of the glory of God. This word glory is a beautiful word. It is a small little word. “Kabod” in Hebrew; “doxa” in Greek. It is a very small little word, but its meaning is greater than you can ever imagine. It really means: weightiness, heaviness. Actually kabod means something like that God is beyond your ken; God is incomprehensible. God is in a category all by himself. There is the Creator and then there is creation. There is a splendor, there is significance to God. This word glory, this quality of God—God is glory. God is glorious, but he is the glory. He is weightiness. He is significance. He is what gives everything else significance. He is what defines everything else, and gives everything else its purpose.

“Dazzling heavenly fire which accompanied a theophany…sometimes it is the actual brilliance…from that other world, the heavenly robe of light in which holiness is clothed, which though fatal to mortal eyes, must with the triumph of the divine kingdom, fill the whole earth” (Walter Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament). Eichrodt is not to be trusted everywhere for sure, but he has a splendid attempt here to try and define something of the magnificence of the glory of God.

Definitions←↰⤒🔗

John Piper defines it in this way: “The glory of God is the infinite beauty and greatness of his manifold perfections.” Jim Packer defines it this way: his “excellence and praiseworthiness set forth in display.” We think of a peacock as proud. I don’t know why this creature that God has made has been so vilified in this way. But the beauty of those feathers. Who would ever have thought that God would create such an incredibly beautiful thing! If you have been around peacocks recently, try and put out of your mind for a minute the pride of peacocks, but just see its beauty. The effulgence of its beauty. And glory is a way of putting all of God’s attributes, as it was, on display before humankind. And its glory is something that takes your breath away. Because that is what God is! God is glorious.

Beauty←↰⤒🔗

There are some suggestions in the Bible that glory and beauty are interrelated. “The LORD takes pleasure in his people, he adorns the humble with salvation. Let the godly exult in glory; let them sing for joy on their beds” (Psalm 149). Pleasure, adorning, glory—the concatenation of those ideas. Or Psalm 27: “One thing have I asked of the LORD, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD.” Beauty! God is beautiful. What defines beauty? We say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But beauty is God. God defines what beauty is. And have a look also at Psalm 29.

But I want to read you Jonathan Edwards, a very famous passage from his personal narrative in a recent translation.

Not long after I first began to experience these things, I gave an account to my father of some things that had passed in my mind. I was pretty much affected by the discourse we had together; and when the discourse was ended, I walked abroad alone, in a solitary place in my father’s pasture, for contemplation. And as I was walking there, and looking up on the sky and clouds, there came into my mind so sweet a sense of the glorious majesty and grace of God as I know not how to express. I seemed to see them both in a sweet conjunction; majesty and meekness joined together; it was a sweet, and gentle, and holy majesty; and also a majestic meekness; an awful sweetness; a high, and great, and holy gentleness. After this my sense of divine things gradually increased, and became more and more lively, and had more of that inward sweetness. The appearance of everything was altered; there seemed to be, as it were a calm sweet cast, or appearance of divine glory, in almost everything. God’s excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to appear in everything; in the sun, moon, and stars; in the clouds, and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, trees; in the water, and all nature; which used greatly to fix my mind. I often used to sit and view the moon for continuance; and in the day, spent much time in viewing the clouds and sky, to behold the sweet glory of God in these things; in the meantime, singing forth, with a low voice my contemplations of the Creator and Redeemer. And scarce anything, among all the works of nature, was so sweet to me as thunder and lightning; formerly, nothing had been so terrible to me. Before, I used to be uncommonly terrified with thunder, and to be struck with terror when I saw a thunderstorm rising; but now, on the contrary, it rejoiced me. I felt God, so to speak, at the first appearance of a thunder storm; and used to take the opportunity, at such times, to fix myself in order to view the clouds, and see the lightnings play, and hear the majestic and awful voice of God’s thunder, which oftentimes was exceedingly entertaining, leading me to sweet contemplations of my great and glorious God. While thus engaged, it always seemed natural to me to sing, or chant for my mediations; or, to speak my thoughts in soliloquies with a singing voice.

Well, that is Jonathan Edwards reflecting on the glory of God as he saw it in creation. Remember the text at the very beginning: “The people that know their God shall be strong and do exploits.”