The Oberlin Evangelist

October 9, 1839

Lecture XVIII.

AFFECTIONS AND EMOTIONS OF GOD

by the Rev. Charles G. Finney

Modernized by Cliff Collins

“How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel? How can I make you like Admah? How can I set you like Zeboiim? My heart churns within Me; My sympathy is stirred.” (Hosea 11:8)

In my message today, I plan to show,

1. God is a moral agent.

II. God really exercises all the affections and emotions ascribed to Him in the Bible.

III. God is truly and greatly grieved when He must abandon sinners to death.

IV. Sinners really compel Him to do this.

I. God is a moral agent. In other words, God possesses and exercises the powers of moral agency. He has intelligence, a will, a conscience, and all those feelings that open his mind to the full force of emotions. That He is such an agent, I conclude,

1. From the fact that the human race was created in His image; and we are consciously aware that we possess and exercise the powers of moral agency. The image of God that we were created in, could not possibly have related to His moral character, for moral character is not a subject of creation. If by moral character, you mean anything that is praiseworthy or blameworthy, it is ridiculous to say that it can be the subject of creation. Moral character may be induced by moral means or moral considerations, as I suppose moral character is always produced in people whenever there is any holiness in them, and, in this sense, a person’s character may be the subject of creation. However, that a person’s character should be the subject of creation, in the same sense in which a person’s nature is created, is certainly impossible.

2. If God is not a moral agent, He can’t have a moral character. In other words, He couldn’t be either praiseworthy or blameworthy. Only a moral agent can have moral character. Only a moral agent can deserve praise or blame.

3. If God is not a moral agent, He cannot possess that happiness which comes from a virtuous character.

4. If God is not a moral agent, He cannot be a proper object of love, worship, or obedience. Certainly, a moral agent like man only has the right to obey or worship a moral being.

5. If God is not a moral agent, it is impossible that moral agents like us, could love, worship, or obey Him, once they come to know Him.

6. The works of creation presents unquestionable evidence that God not only possesses and exercises all the attributes of a moral agent, but that these attributes are infinite.

7. Both the moral and providential governments of God prove the same truth that He is a moral agent.

8. The Scriptures everywhere, in every way possible, represent God as a moral agent. Hardly one thing that is said about Him in the Scriptures could be true if He wasn’t a moral agent.

II. God really exercises all the affections and emotions ascribed to Him in the Bible.

1. This must be true from the very laws of His existence.

2. The Bible ascribes love, hatred, anger, repentance, grief, compassion, indignation, abhorrence, patience, long-suffering, joy and every other affection and emotion of a moral being to God. Let me say a few things about these Scriptures.

(1) God must feel, or He is not virtuous. Virtue cannot consist in abstract thought, ideas, and imaginations. Virtue belongs to the heart; and an intellect without moral feeling cannot be virtuous.

(2) God must feel towards everything according to its nature or character or He is not virtuous.

(3) God is able to consider, at the same time, the nature, and the character of every event, and because He is infinite, He is able to feel towards everything that exists, precisely according to its nature, character, and relations.

(4) It is His duty to exercise these feelings in the kind and degree that is `perfectly suited to everything that exists.

(5) His holiness consists only in regarding everything according to their real nature and character. If it were otherwise, instead of being holy, and an object of praise and love, He would be wicked and not worthy of our praise or love.

(6) All the states attributed to Him in the Bible must be real exercises of His mind, since they are only the natural and necessary modifications of love that must certainly exist under the circumstances that God is placed in. There really are, in the universe, objects that excite His mind, and if God is love, those objects must excite all the affections and emotions ascribed to Him.

III. It is a real and great grief to God to abandon sinners to death.

1. This is clear from the fact that it really should greatly grieve God to turn the wicked over to eternal death. Abandoning sinners is really a great evil. It is impossible that God’s unselfish love should not regard abandoning sinners as a great evil. And, if there really exists a need to abandon sinners, it must, in spite of that fact, be regarded as a great evil.

2. Abandoning sinners to death really must be a great grief to God if He is love. It is impossible that this should not be true. In fact, it would be a contradiction to affirm that God is love, and say that He is not grieved with the need to take such a course with sinners.

3. The Bible declares this in many ways. “How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel? How can I make you like Admah? How can I set you like Zeboiim? My heart churns within me; My sympathy is stirred.” (Hosea 11:8) Here the language is the language of a father who finds that He must give up and expel from His family an undisciplined son as a less evil than to allow him to ruin all the rest by his bad example. In this passage, God expresses Himself as not only exercising the feelings of a father, but as exercising feelings of intense grief, as if He had said, “I have done all that I could possibly do to reclaim and save you, and oh, how shall I give you up? My heart churns within me, my sympathy is stirred”! It sounds as if God was standing in front of the sinner with the attitude of a father and really overcome with excessive grief. Many other passages of scripture clearly declare this same truth.

4. All God’s works imply that He grieves over sinners. Everything that God has done in the universe demonstrates His intense desire to promote the happiness of His creatures. And so much effort certainly could not be taken by anyone to promote the happiness of others without being grieved with the need to give them up to ruin.

5. His grace, manifested in the Atonement, is the highest possible demonstration that He has an infinite amount of all the feelings ascribed to Him in the Bible. If God didn’t really love sinners, could He make such a great sacrifice to save them? If God was not angry at sin, if He was not infinitely inflexible in maintaining the principles of His government, could He have given His Son to die as their substitute, rather than pardon them without an Atonement? We certainly should consider it the highest possible evidence of love in any human being to give himself or his son to die for us.

IV. Sinners really force God to give them up!

I know that this statement is different from what people commonly believe, because they simply argue that, because God is omnipotent, He can save them if He wanted to. But, they never ask the question whether, under all the circumstances of the situation, can God wisely save them. Let me respond.

1. Since God has created you to be a moral agent, placed you under a moral government, and made you responsible for the right exercise of your powers of moral agency, He has no right to set aside your liberty and treat you inconsistently with the nature He has given you.

2. If He had a right and should actually set aside your liberty, He would make your salvation naturally impossible by doing this. Why? Because salvation without virtue is absurd, and you can’t have virtue without free will. Therefore, you can’t possibly be saved unless you can be persuaded by the considerations of the gospel to love and serve God.

Here, some people may object, saying that, in the parable of the marriage, the king is represented as ordering his servants to go out and compel people to come in. True, but this is only a moral compulsion, it is using a certain amount of argument and persuasion to constrain the sinner to come without interfering with his freedom to choose.

3. There certainly is a point beyond which forbearance in God would no longer be virtue, and where further arguments and persuasions and efforts to save a soul would be completely inconsistent with the honor, dignity, and glory of God, and, as a result, with the rights and well-being of the universe. Beyond this point, God cannot and should not go. If He sacrifices His own character, He sacrifices with it the holiness and happiness of all other beings, since their holiness and happiness depends on their confidence in Him. Therefore, it is easy to see that the conduct of sinners imposes the need for God to give them up to damnation as the lesser of two evils. If sinners take such an attitude, and they often do, it makes it unwise for God to pursue them any further with offers of grace. Either He must give them up and save the universe of holy beings, or he must give up His character and thereby abandon the entire universe to ruin.

REMARKS.

1. It is a great and ruinous error to think that the scriptures show that the moral feelings of God are simply responses to human weaknesses.

(1) Saying that the moral feelings of God are simply responses to human weaknesses denies the nature of God.

(2) This also denies His moral character.

(3) And it represents God as a hypocrite.

God says that He has deep feelings, and shall we say that He does not possess these feelings? When God says that He loves His creatures, are we to understand that He doesn’t really love them, but that He merely acts in response to our love? But why does God act that way? How should we understand how He feels? If the language in scripture does not mean what it says, what does it mean? Does it mean that God really should exercise unselfish love, because He claims to exercise it? And, are we to be told that His claims are merely empty boasts, that they are only responses to human weakness?

Probably no one will deny that God really loves. If we admit, that this is true, then all the other affections and emotions that are ascribed to Him, must also be exercised by Him. They are the very modifications that should and must exist in view of the objects presented to our mind about God. So that if God doesn’t really exercise these affections and emotions, then He is not only a hypocrite, but He is also infinitely far from doing what He is supposed to be doing. Therefore, if you maintain, that the moral feelings ascribed to God are mere responses to human weakness, you must also deny that God is love or unselfish. And, to deny that God is love is a destructive and damning error that needs no proof.

2. To maintain that the representations of the moral feelings of God in the Bible are only responses to human weakness, represents God as a mere intellect or an abstract concept, and, as a result, you make Him destitute of everything that should or can engage our love.

3. This belief cuts off all possible sympathy between us, as moral beings, and God. If God is not a moral being with moral attributes and feelings, we can’t have any sympathy with Him. We can’t know, love, nor worship him any more than we could Krishna.

4. This belief renders all true religion impossible. The man, who has an idea that these manifestations of God’s character are mere responses to human weakness, certainly has no true knowledge of God, and consequently no true religion. If God is not what the Bible represents Him to be, then what is He, and who knows Him? If these are not His real feelings then we are completely mistaken about His character. If these are not His feelings and this not His character, then we don’t know what they are.

5. If these aren’t the real feelings of God, then we have no true revelation of God. If these passages of Scripture don’t mean what they say, it is impossible for us to know what they really mean. And if God has not revealed to us the true state of His heart in these passages, then we know nothing about His heart. But the truth is, these passages speak the same language as His works. His works and word are one continuous and complete system of revelation. The same great gushing heart of love is everywhere manifested around us. To maintain that what the Bible declares, instead of meaning what they say, are mere responses to human weakness, amounts to saying that all God’s ways, works, and words, are a stupendous system of hypocrisy and deception.

6. Representing the scriptures as responses to human weakness, overlooks and denies a principal plan of the incarnation of Christ. One of the goals Christ had in view was to reveal to us the heart of God. What we see in Christ, are the very feelings of the mind of God. If Christ really exercises these feelings, then God exercises them, and so does every other holy mind that has knowledge of the same facts.

7. Some may object, saying that we shouldn’t ascribe human feelings to God. I answer, we must ascribe the same kind of feelings to God that holy men have. Wicked human feelings definitely can’t be ascribed to God; but holiness in men is the kind of holiness that is in God.

8. Some object that God is not man that He should repent. Let me respond by saying that repentance can mean feeling sorry, or it can mean a change of mind. God never changes His mind. Instead, he always exercises emotions of sorrow because objects that should and must excite emotions of sorrow in a holy mind are always present before Him.

9. Some may reply, saying that if these things are true, God can’t be happy. My answer is that all these feelings ascribed to God, when combined, are perfect happiness. I don’t know how to make this plainer than by borrowing an illustration from the prismatic colors produced by the sun’s rays. Let a pencil of the sun’s rays be thrown on a prism, and the rays will be so refracted that they exhibit all the colors that exist in nature. Now when these rays are separated, we discover that none of them are white, yet when combined their brightness is indescribable. The same is true with the feelings of God. Separate His moral feelings, and none of them would be unmingled happiness, yet when combined they are infinite happiness.

10. Some object that this view of the subject really implies a change in God. My answer is no. God has always known and felt what He now knows and feels. He has no new knowledge. All events have been eternally present to Him. He has always known, felt, and enjoyed just what He now knows, feels, and enjoys.

11. God enters fully into all the relations between Himself and His creatures. I mean that He enters into these relations with all His heart and all His soul. He is feelingly alive to them all. Always remember that God is not something abstract. He is not an intellect that doesn’t make conscious decisions, have emotions, or sympathize. But, His feelings are infinitely intense, so that every object in the universe, every creature, every need, every woe, every sorrow, and every joy, enkindle in His mind just that feeling in kind and degree, which the nature of that object is calculated to excite.

12. In Christ, He has perfect sympathy with us. From many parts of scripture, it is clear that one great purpose of the incarnation was to create sympathy between God and men. Having been in the flesh, Christ has been “tempted in all points like as we are”. He was made perfect by suffering and temptation, so He is able to provide assistance or relief to all those who suffer and are tempted.

13. Some complain that if God really exercises anger, He must be wicked. No! His anger is an anger that stems from His unselfish love. It is not a selfish or malicious anger, or a disposition to inflict pain unjustly. But, it is the holy indignation of a good and gracious sovereign against those who would injure the interests, disturb the tranquility, and mar the happiness of His obedient subjects.

14. The scriptural view of God’s character makes God acceptable to creatures like us. We have the advantage of approaching Him knowing that He has the feelings and heart of a father. A guilty son knows that a father’s heart can be reached, when the heart of a stranger could not be approached or moved by his tale of woe. And, no matter how guilty this son may be, if he knows that his father is good, he is assured that in his father’s heart, he will find a powerful advocate to plead his cause. So a wandering rebellious sinner, may, like a returning prodigal, approach God with the certainty that a father’s heart, and a father’s love will yearn over him, and, if it is within the reach of possibilities, the father will save him from deserved destruction.

15. People who don’t see God as a moral being, who truly exercises those feelings mentioned in the Bible, don’t know Him. Indeed if they view God in any other way, they are as far as possible from knowing the true God, and they might as well worship Krishna as the being whom they call God. God is a moral agent to all intents and purposes, exercising perfectly in kind and infinitely in degree, all the affections and emotions of a moral being. As such, we can form rational, although inadequate conceptions of Him; we can approach Him with confidence, and we can sympathize with Him in His unselfish and loving efforts. Our minds can commune with His mind, and our hearts can beat in unison with His heart. We can enter into His desires, purposes, and efforts, and in short, we can be absorbed into Him. But, turn God into anything else and we do not, cannot, and should not love, worship, or obey Him.

16. Sin must appear infinitely horrible to induce Him with such feelings that He has to turn His own offspring over to eternal death. We can imagine a father banishing forever a beloved son, because his son’s depravity has become so great, that his banishment from the family becomes necessary. Yet, the conduct of that son must be very bad to induce a father to do this, and to justify, in the estimation of the other members of the family, such a response. So sin, in its tendency and in its contagious nature, must be an abominable thing to induce a God, who could give His own son to die for sinners, to finally give them up to go to hell.

17. The depravity that can wear out such love as this, and actually carry matters so far as to compel God to send the very sinners for whom Christ died to hell in order to preserve the universe of moral beings from destruction, must be horribly great. Sinners, think about what you are doing. God has made you voluntary agents, and made it an unalterable law of your being, that you shall be free and responsible for the use of your freedom. Now, in the exercise of this freedom, if you place God under circumstances where, with all His love, He is required to send you to hell as a lesser evil than to let you go unpunished, how horribly great your depravity must be.

18. The universe will wholeheartedly approve of the dealings of God in destroying sinners forever! When all that He has done and suffered for them will pass in full review at the solemn judgment before the assembled universe, His providential kindness, the giving of His Son, the influences of His Spirit, all His long suffering shall be subjects of careful consideration. A spirit of most deep and perfect agreement will be felt by all the holy, when the Judge pronounces the sentence: “Depart you cursed into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels”.

19. It will be a delightful consideration to God and all the saints, that God has done all that He could possibly do to save sinners, but they would not be saved.

20. From this and many other passages, it appears that God feels compelled to give sinners up, and actually does give sinners up. Now, remember that when God feels constrained to do this for you, your situation is as hopeless as if you were already in hell. And remember, that you are in danger of hell every moment that you persist in unrepentance. In fact, perhaps some of you have already been given up. If so, I have no expectation that either this or any other sermon that I could preach to you would do you any good.

Finally, let all who have sinned, and who are aware of their guilt, return immediately to God. Read the parable of the prodigal son, and seriously consider the thrilling truths in that parable.

Now, I summon you to view God as He really is, a being who not only knows but pities, and deeply yearns over you with all the feelings of a heart of infinite feelings. Go pour out your tears, your prayers, your confessions, your souls before Him; and His heart will rejoice over you, and His soul will be moved for you to do you infinite good.