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2 Samuel 22:31
“This God—his way is perfect; the word of the Lord proves true; he is a shield for all those who take refuge in him.”
Our God is simple, meaning not that He is easy to understand but that He is not composed of parts or attributes (Ex. 3:13–14; Deut. 6:4). In other words, our Creator does not actually have attributes but He is His attributes because He is His essence. Thus, God cannot gain or lose an attribute like creatures can and He can never act against His own character.
Although God does not actually have attributes, at least not in the way that creatures do, it remains proper for us to distinguish between them. Scripture, after all, makes such distinctions as an accommodation to us. Because we are finite and God is infinite, we could never know God in His simple essence, but we can understand—to at least some degree—His attributes and therefore come to a true knowledge of Him that is proper for rational creatures. We should therefore study His attributes as given in Scripture, and we begin today with His attribute of perfection.
In today’s passage, we read about the perfection of God (2 Sam. 22:31), and indeed the perfection of God shines through on every page of the Bible. To say that God is perfect is to say that He is complete and sufficient. To put it another way, our Lord lacks nothing. He is not deficient in any way and is not looking for something other than Himself to complete Him or to fill up what He lacks. Because He is perfect, His attributes are also perfect and not subject to change. For example, His wisdom is perfect, and so His wisdom cannot grow or change. This is most unlike human beings, who must grow in wisdom through education, trial and error, and so forth. The seventeenth-century Dutch Reformed theologian Petrus van Mastricht, in his Theoretical-Practical Theology, describes God’s perfection as “a universal perfection and sufficiency which includes every good, in every kind, and is sufficient for all creatures in all things, all the way to infinite blessedness, and which accordingly also excludes negative imperfection.”
Van Mastricht goes on to write that God “has enough for himself, since he does not desire and cannot receive more than he has, because he is infinite . . . enough for all things different from himself, inasmuch as he gives to all life, and breath, and all things. . . . But especially he is sufficient for his covenanted people.” This is because He gives His people all the protection, salvation, and blessedness that they will ever need (2 Cor. 12:9).
Coram Deo Living before the face of God
God lacks no good thing but is perfect and all-sufficient in Himself. The good news for us is that His perfection means that He is able to give us all that we need, according to His riches in glory and sovereign plan. We should therefore not hesitate to ask the Lord to give to us out of His perfect bounty.
For further study
- Psalm 19:7
- Habakkuk 3:17–19
- Matthew 5:48
- James 1:17
The bible in a year
- Deuteronomy 1–2
- Mark 11:1–19