Recently I attended the Expositors’ Conference in Mobile, Alabama, with Drs. Steven Lawson and R. C. Sproul. What a blessing it was to sit under the preaching of the Word by these godly pastors for two full days! (Afterward I got to spend a couple of days with family in Tennessee, which was also nice.) While introducing one of his sermons, Dr. Sproul stated that one of the most neglected doctrines in the church today is the simplicity of God. By this we mean not that God is easy to figure out or comprehend, but that God is not composed of parts. Whereas humans are compounded creatures, such is not the case with our Creator. God is love (1 John 4:8), and God is light (1 John 1:5), but nothing in Scripture suggests that God is part love and part light. Rather, God is Himself both love and light. The same is true in refer-ence to all of God’s other attributes. For instance, in Exodus 34:6-8 we read,
The LORD passed before [Moses] and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and fourth generation.” And Moses quickly bowed his head toward the earth and worshiped.
God is His attributes; He is entirely loving, entirely merciful, entirely just, and so forth. Thus when we emphasize some of God’s attributes to the exclusion of others, we misunderstand and misrepresent who God is and wind up with a god of our own choosing. This is idolatry.