Attributes of Will
God's communicable attributes refer to those attributes of the divine nature that can, in some way be communicated with us. His incommunicable attributes are those properties of God that belong to God and God alone. When we talk about the communicable attributes of God, sometimes we can list dozens of these attributes, but we can put them into three big buckets. We can think of them as attributes of intellect, attributes of will, attributes of power. In other words, God's thinking, God's choosing, and God's doing. We want to think here about that middle category, those attributes of will, sometimes referred to as his moral attributes.
These are some of the most familiar attributes of God: his patience, his goodness, his kindness, his mercy, his grace. In particular here, I want us to think on three of these attributes. First, The holiness of God. Famously, this is the only thrice-repeated attribute of God in the Bible. In Isaiah chapter six, when Isaiah sees the Lord high and lifted up, the angels call out to one another, "Holy, holy, holy." When we think of the holiness of God, we usually think of his moral perfection, his purity that there is no sin in God. And that's true. That's part of it. But even more than that, the holiness of God is the otherness of God. It's that God is set apart. You think that Israel was called to be a holy nation. The priests were a holy class of people. There was a holy temple and holy utensils and artifacts that are set apart. They're not common. They're not profane. They are holy. And so the holiness of God refers to his otherness—that wonderful, ineffable, mysterious quality of God that as the creator, he is not like his creatures. He is holy, holy, holy.
The second attribute we can talk about is the love of God. Now, if you were to talk to almost anyone, Christians or non-Christians, and ask them, "What is God like?" this may be the first thing that they mentioned that God is love. And rightfully so. This is talked about in hundreds of passages in the Bible. God so loved the world that he sent his only son, John 3:16. That may be the most famous verse in all the Bible. But what do we mean by the love of God? And theologians talk about three kinds of the love of God. So first, there is God's love of benevolence that refers to the good will that God has toward all of his creatures because he made them and in particular he made mankind in his image. That word benevolence, just break it apart, in its Latin roots means good, willing volition, his inclination to do good to his creatures. And then second, there is the love of beneficence. If benevolence is his good will toward his creation, then beneficence is the actual carrying out of that goodness that the sun shines upon the righteous and the unrighteous. The rain falls not just on the Christians, but on everybody, that the crops may grow and and God feeds his people. So if you were to ask the question, "Does God love everyone?" there is a sense in which it is true that love of benevolence, that love of beneficence. But then there's a third kind of love. And this is what Scripture talks about most often: the love of complacency. Now that's apt to trip us up because we use complacency to mean slothfulness or laziness, apathy. But we need to use that word in its older meaning to be complacent is to be satisfied. So God's love of complacency is the satisfaction he finds in himself. And having that satisfaction in his own nature and his own character, he then has a love of complacency in his own people because they are found in Christ, and in time then they are being renewed into the image of Christ. This is mainly what Scripture talks about with the love of God that he has this particular, powerful, covenantal love of complacency, satisfaction, and delight in his own people.
And then a third attribute under this broad category of willing or God's moral attributes, we can talk about his righteousness; that God does both right according to his own nature, and he does right according to his creatures. This is related to God's justice. Of course, sometimes those can translate the same Greek or Hebrew word. God's remunerative justice is giving a reward to the righteous, to the believing, and God's retributive justice is meeting out punishment upon the wicked. We've been looking at the holiness of God, the love of God, and the righteousness of God as three of the most significant of these moral attributes. It's important to understand that these attributes do not work in conflict with one another—that all of them are essential to the divine nature.
James tells us this wonderful good news that mercy triumphs over judgment, but we shouldn't think that this puts in competition, grace and mercy with justice and righteousness. But rather mercy triumphs over judgment because on the cross, justice is satisfied. It's not that on the cross God said, "I'm not a God of righteousness and justice anymore," but that on the cross God can be both the just and the justifier of the ungodly, in the satisfaction of God's righteousness. Therefore, by faith we can be counted righteous. So that 1 John 1:9 is good news for everyone who confesses their sins, that God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
Kevin DeYoung is the senior pastor at Christ Covenant Church (PCA) in Matthews, North Carolina and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary.
