Does God Have Feelings?

“And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption” (Eph 4:30).

Responding to this query involves a complicated discussion, one that has, in fact, engaged the finest minds of Christendom for 2000 years. What might your answer be?

By way of introduction, there are a number of principles to keep front and center in our minds. The first is the Creator/creature distinction. God belongs in a class all by Himself. He is not just a much bigger and better version of ourselves, or even the best that we can imagine. He is not the end of a long line of being, beginning with mud, and progressing through viruses, bacteria, fungi, plants, nematodes, molluscs, fish, reptiles, mammals, human beings, and angels with God occupying pride of place at the end of a very long continuum. No. God is God and everything else is not. A gulf of infinite proportions separates Him from us and us from Him. There is no line. He is infinitely, eternally, and unchangeably beyond us and all other created things. He alone has within Himself the cause of His own existence, He is both absolute and completely self-sufficient. He is the Holy One of Israel, the wholly Other. When we meet Him, our linguistic and comparative categories collapse. We are completely out of our depth. And yet, by an act of stupendous grace, this God stoops to call us His very own. Amazing grace!
Secondly, God is sovereign. Everything else that exists outside of God exists because of Him. Even evil exists only because He permits it, and as our Confession informs us, not by a bare permission but in such a way that He governs, binds, and orders the emergence and operations of evil in His universe, and does so according to His almighty power, infinite goodness, and unsearchable wisdom. Yet, that sinfulness proceeds only from the creature and not from the Creator who is most holy and righteous in all His ways. He is neither the Author nor the Approver of sin.
Thirdly, God is eternal and unchangeable in His being, perfections, and blessedness. His omnipresence permeates all time as well as every inch of space. He is simultaneously present at every moment of history. He is present at the moment of your birth, is present where you are today and each day following, and is present now at the moment of your death at some as yet future moment in your own experience. This has important ramifications for our discussion. In human beings, emotions, passions, and affections rise and fall with each new experience. They also have a biological element as hormones and other chemicals squirt their influence into our brain and blood stream. In God, they do not. James Dolezal put it well, when he said, “God does not derive any aspect of His being from outside Himself and is not in any way caused to be.” In other words, none of His creatures affect Him (affect change in Him).
And, yet, if we are not very careful here, we can fall foul to an unbiblical Platonic abstraction--as if God were simply the unmoved Mover. This would also be a colossal mistake, and equally pernicious to that of “humanizing” God--which is probably the besetting sin of our age, besotted as we all are with selfies!
Fourthly, God is simple. He does not consist of a body with parts. That is to say, God is all of His attributes. His holiness is His love. His love is His justice. His justice is His mercy. His mercy is His goodness. His goodness is His wrath, etc. His attributes are words that we use to describe His perfection. So, for example, bring sin into contact with His perfection and you see that perfection expressed in perfect patience, justice, and wrath. So in that sense, it’s not so much that wrath flares up in God’s nature when sin emerges. But rather, sin (and the one committing it) experience God’s perfections as justice and wrath the moment we bring evil into the sphere of God’s all-pervading existence. Imagine, if you will, an everywhere present, eternally active, spinning buzz saw. Such a saw only threatens those who bring an errant member too close. So it is with God; we only experience His perfection as wrath if we sin before His face--which, I might add, we all do, every moment. FULL DISCLOSURE: As with all analogies of the Godhead, the buzz saw only has a sliver of relevance (when it comes to experiencing the perfections of God, we are the ones who change, and not God). Buzz saws are of course inanimate, and impersonal, and in that regard the analogy falls completely flat on its face.
Fifthly, we are made by God’s design in God’s image. This means that without denying the Creator/creature distinction, a certain analogy exists between Him and us. This analogy is the basis of the incarnation. God could not have become a cockroach, a dog, or a whale. He could only have become human flesh. This fact explains the reality of Jesus’ famous statement, “He that has seen me has seen the Father.” Look at Jesus: His tenderness with children, His patience with his slow-witted, dull-hearted disciples, His fierce intolerance of pharisaical hypocrisy, His tears at the tomb of His friend, Lazarus, and a thousand other examples. At every moment during His earthly existence, one angel could say to another (and with a knowing smile), “Isn’t He just like His Father--a perfect man-sized representation of God Himself!”
As such, through His Word, and supremely in Christ, we are capable of understanding something about Him, and are commanded to imitate Him in daily godliness. We are to think with the mind of Christ, to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect, and to imitate Him as beloved children.
To enlighten our darkened minds, furthermore, God has revealed Himself with words like wrath, fury, grief, regret, and vengeance. Such words display a God who “feels” neither cold nor indifferent to evil. His nature is fiercely favorable to goodness, beauty, and truth; not to mention aggressively hostile to evil in all its forms. Doug Powlson puts it so well: “He is fiercely fair minded. Wrath and fury don’t describe a mere irritable mood or a momentary tantrum. They express God’s whole hearted decision to destroy things he finds utterly despicable.”
Such terms describe how the perfections of God interdict a fallen world governed by His decree. In such a world, in a way far beyond my ability to even begin to begin to understand, God is the way He ought to be, and He “feels” the way He ought to “feel” - if I may use (and with much trembling) such humanly emotive words to speak of God.
But, and here is the kicker, God uses such words to describe Himself. Surely, therefore, while we dare not say more than God has said about Himself, we surely cannot afford to say less. Calvin helps us here, reminding us that such words are somewhat akin to baby language, like a father prattling with “Goo Goos and Gah Gahs” to an infant nestling in his arms. To be sure, as God stoops to help us understand, such words are but accommodations of His unspeakable glory. Through them, we experience only the most fleeting glimpses of an always and altogether unsearchable majesty. However, while such accommodations are not exhaustive, they are surely not deceptive either. So, for example, when God speaks of a husband’s bitter words to his wife as grievous to His Spirit (Ephesians 4:30), the word grief (coming as it does from God’s Spirit of Truth) has to be true both for God and for us. The reality is not completely lost in translation. God means us to learn something about Him from such language.
And when God describes a professing Christian forsaking the Church as trampling the Son of God underfoot. He tells us such a sin outrages God’s Spirit of holiness. Whatever outrage means in this verse, when you are dealing with the most powerful creative Force in existence, I would humbly suggest “outraging Him” is clearly something you probably don’t want to do.
As we conclude this brief devotional, I am reminded of a piece of advice that Professor Donald Macleod likes to give each of his students, “Preach all the theology you know!” Our Theology must always be put to use. True theology is never meant to be a mere abstraction. True theology should make us want to sing. In fact, I would go so far as to say, never trust a theology that doesn’t make you want to sing!
These thoughts, therefore, should not leave us puffed in pride, as if we have somehow gotten our minds around God; they should leave us lost in wonder, love and praise, and forever hungry to know more of this boundlessly immense God. With Augustine, we look into the bright abyss of His glory and say, “I can see the depths; I just cannot see the bottom.” Falling prostrate in humble adoration, the true theologian should collapse from his contemplation, rejoicing with fear and trembling, and declaring, “Who is a God like Thee: Majestic in holiness, awesome in praise, and doing wonders!”