Latest / Reformed Thinking / θειότης (Theiotēs): God’s Divine Nature Seen in Creation

Transcript

θειότης (Theiotēs): God’s Divine Nature Seen in Creation · Reformed Thinking

• 0:00
  Welcome to reformed thinking. We are here to take what can be
• 0:03
  some pretty dense source material and really distill it
• 0:07
  down to the essential knowledge you need.
• 0:09
  And today's deep dive is, I think, a really good example of
• 0:12
  that. We're getting into the nuts and
• 0:13
  bolts of the Greek New Testament.
• 0:15
  We are. We're going to be looking at a
• 0:16
  linguistic study specifically focusing on, well, 2 main areas.
• 0:20
  First, the Greek verbs for willing how they changed over
• 0:24
  time. And 2nd, and this is just
• 0:27
  fascinating, the very precise nouns that the apostle Paul uses
• 0:30
  to talk about God's own being. You know how he separates God's
• 0:34
  essence from His qualities that we can see.
• 0:37
  Right. And if you're interested in
• 0:38
  ideas like God's sovereignty or Christology, I mean really
• 0:41
  understanding them, you have to look at the words.
• 0:43
  So we're going to track the big shifts in words for Will, like
• 0:47
  the Lodge versus Boulemay. And then we'll get into Paul's
• 0:49
  distinction between Theotos and Theotos.
• 0:52
  They sound almost the same, but the theological weight behind
• 0:55
  that one little vowel change is immense.
• 0:58
  It really is. So our mission today is pretty
• 1:01
  straightforward. We want to see how these lexical
• 1:05
  details really support these huge theological concepts,
• 1:09
  things like God's total sovereignty and the nature of
• 1:12
  our salvation. And the key thing to remember is
• 1:14
  that Greek wasn't a static language.
• 1:16
  It was alive. It was changing.
• 1:18
  We're going to see it move from, say, Homeric poetry all the way
• 1:21
  to the common, everyday Quiny Greek of the New Testament.
• 1:26
  So we've broken this down into three parts. 1st, the history of
• 1:28
  that verb to will. Then we'll look at the noun
• 1:31
  form, the Loma, and what that means for theology, and finally,
• 1:35
  that amazing distinction Paul makes about God's nature.
• 1:38
  Sounds good. Let's get started.
• 1:39
  OK, let's start with that history, the vocabulary of
• 1:41
  volition. It's a great place to begin
• 1:43
  because it shows us how the New Testament writers ended up with
• 1:45
  the specific word they used. Most often.
• 1:48
  Greek didn't just have one word for to will.
• 1:50
  No, not at all. There were at least three main
• 1:53
  terms competing, you could say, and the oldest one, the one that
• 1:56
  really dominates early Greek literature, is Phil.
• 1:59
  Right. So if you pick up Homer or
• 2:00
  Hesiod from that archaic period, Ethel is basically all you'll
• 2:04
  find. It's virtually exclusive.
• 2:06
  Our sources point out that in all of the Homeric and hesiotic
• 2:10
  writings, the shorter form the loof is absent, except for maybe
• 2:14
  2 instances in the Iliad and the Odyssey that are a bit doubtful.
• 2:18
  And it wasn't just in poetry, right?
• 2:19
  It was on official things too. That's right, it also shows up
• 2:23
  in early attic inscriptions, which kind of solidifies its
• 2:26
  status as the original formal standard.
• 2:28
  The shortened form, the Bluto, it only starts to creep in, and
• 2:31
  even then just a little bit around the 6th century BC.
• 2:34
  But that dominance doesn't last forever.
• 2:37
  Things start to change in the classical period.
• 2:39
  They do. By the time you get to someone
• 2:41
  like Herodotus or the other big classical prose writers, Ethelo
• 2:45
  is pretty much faded from use. And this is the interesting
• 2:47
  part. The word that replaces it isn't
• 2:49
  immediately the Louvre. No, another word steps in first.
• 2:53
  The term that became the preference, at least in educated
• 2:56
  formal writing, was Bola my. And that choice seems to be
• 3:01
  deliberate. It's not random.
• 3:03
  Bulimi often had a sense of a reasoned choice, a decision that
• 3:07
  came from counsel or careful thought.
• 3:09
  Whereas the louf might have just been seen as a simpler wish or
• 3:12
  desire. That's the idea.
• 3:13
  So classical writers who are aiming for precision, for
• 3:16
  intellectual clarity, they tended to use bulimi.
• 3:20
  We can actually back this up with numbers, which is pretty
• 3:22
  revealing. OK, let's get into that data.
• 3:24
  I think it makes it really clear for you listening just how much
• 3:27
  Bulimi was preferred back then. Take the historian Polybius.
• 3:30
  A major figure, and in his work he uses Bulimi a staggering 450
• 3:36
  times. 450 and how many times does he use the will am I?
• 3:39
  Only 29? I mean, that's not even close.
• 3:41
  It shows a clear preference by an educated author for a
• 3:44
  specific, more formal term. And he's not an outlier.
• 3:47
  Not at all. Diadora Sicula shows the exact
• 3:49
  same pattern. Our sources looked at seven of
• 3:52
  his books and uses Bulimi 88 times, compared to just 4 uses
• 3:55
  of the loo. So it's safe to say bulimi was
• 3:57
  the standard for polished intellectual classical Greek
• 4:00
  prose. For sure it was the respectable
• 4:02
  word to use when you were talking about the will.
• 4:04
  OK, so then what happens when you get to the Septuagint, the
• 4:07
  LXX, you know, the Bree translation of the Hebrew Bible?
• 4:10
  What path do the translators take?
• 4:13
  Do they stick with that formal standard?
• 4:16
  For the most part, yes. They largely follow that
• 4:19
  classical prose standard. The relationship between the
• 4:21
  words and the LXX sort of mirrors what you see in the
• 4:25
  classical writers. They use both Bhulamai and the
• 4:27
  Wellex, but what's really telling is that the old archaic
• 4:30
  word effelet is completely gone. So the LXX is sort of a bridge.
• 4:35
  It shows that classical preference was still holding on
• 4:38
  even among Hellenistic Jews writing a sacred text.
• 4:41
  Hmm, yes. But then the pendulum just
• 4:44
  swings completely back. And this is what's so critical
• 4:46
  for us, the New Testament writers.
• 4:48
  They don't follow the formal classical standard.
• 4:50
  They align with the language of the street, the common coin
• 4:52
  dialect. We see a total reversal.
• 4:54
  A total reversal by the Hellenistic and coin periods.
• 4:59
  Let's say from the 2nd century BC onward, the term filo, the
• 5:04
  loo, becomes the runaway winner. It's the normal, everyday
• 5:08
  general word for to. Will you see it everywhere?
• 5:11
  Inscriptions. Personal letters on papyri.
• 5:14
  It became the vernacular. And that change was so complete
• 5:17
  that like you said with the LXX, when we open the New Testament,
• 5:20
  that old word ethelo is nowhere to be found.
• 5:23
  Not a single time. The victory of the LILO is
• 5:25
  total. And again, we see this outside
• 5:27
  the Bible, right? And other writers in the same.
• 5:29
  Period. Absolutely.
• 5:30
  The Stoic philosopher Epictetus is a perfect example.
• 5:33
  His writing is from the same time as the New Testament, and
• 5:35
  in his work he uses the LO 433 times and boy only 42 times.
• 5:40
  The classical preference is completely flipped on its head
• 5:43
  in the common language of that era.
• 5:44
  So when Paul or Matthew or John uses Thiel, they're not digging
• 5:48
  up some obscure archaic word to make a subtle theological point.
• 5:52
  They're just using the word that everyone on the street
• 5:54
  understood for to will. That's the insight they're
• 5:57
  using, the language of the people.
• 5:59
  Now there is one little leftover of the older root, the epsilon.
• 6:02
  The E sound still shows up in some past tense forms like AUSA
• 6:06
  Lisa, but for the present tense, the New Testament is built on
• 6:10
  the victory of the loo. OK, so this whole linguistic
• 6:13
  history is the setup. We now understand why this
• 6:16
  particular verb was chosen. So the next question is what
• 6:19
  happens when you take that verb and turn it into a noun feeling
• 6:23
  Philomena, especially when you apply it to God?
• 6:26
  Right. And this is where the theology
• 6:28
  really starts to come into focus.
• 6:29
  When the New Testament wants to talk about God's will, the word
• 6:32
  it uses overwhelmingly is the lime, the Lima.
• 6:35
  And the sources highlight something that's easy to miss.
• 6:38
  But it's so important about how it's used.
• 6:40
  When it refers to God's will, the Lima is almost always in the
• 6:44
  singular. Why is that one detail so
• 6:47
  significant? Well, using the singular points
• 6:49
  to a truth about God that I mean it resonates perfectly with our
• 6:53
  confessional standards. Like the Westminster Confession,
• 6:56
  God's will is a powerful unity. A powerful unity so he doesn't
• 7:00
  have a bunch of different competing wills or desires.
• 7:03
  Exactly. It's not like the Pagan gods who
• 7:05
  are always scheming and had contradictory plans.
• 7:09
  God's will is presented as a single, cohesive, sovereign
• 7:12
  force. This singular theoloma is his
• 7:16
  act of divine resolve. It's the supreme standard for
• 7:19
  everything, especially for salvation.
• 7:21
  So the singular form itself makes a theological statement.
• 7:25
  It implies there's no contradiction in God, no
• 7:27
  hesitation. It's not a list of suggestions,
• 7:30
  it's a decree. That's a good way to put it.
• 7:32
  It shows us the resolute and fully effective nature of what
• 7:36
  God does. For God, His intention and His
• 7:39
  execution are one in the same. If the writers had used the
• 7:42
  plural, it might have implied that God changes his mind or has
• 7:45
  conflicting goals. The singular thealoma just shuts
• 7:48
  that door. Now there is another noun, a
• 7:50
  much rarer 1 felicis, the lasis. It's a late coin word and I
• 7:54
  think it only shows up once in the New Testament.
• 7:55
  Just once, Hebrews 2.4. And because it's only there
• 7:58
  once, we have to be careful. The New Testament itself doesn't
• 8:02
  stop to give us a technical definition of how the Lasis is
• 8:05
  different from the Lamoma. That distinction that we often
• 8:07
  hear about. It actually came much, much
• 8:09
  later. You're talking about the
• 8:10
  Monotheolite controversy. That was what, 7th century?
• 8:13
  They were debating whether Christ had one will or two.
• 8:16
  Precisely. And in those debates, they
• 8:18
  needed very technical terms to argue their case.
• 8:20
  So they created a distinction that wasn't really there.
• 8:23
  In Paul's mind. They defined the pharaohsis as
• 8:26
  the faculty of volition, the psychological ability to will
• 8:29
  something. The capacity to will, yes.
• 8:31
  And the salima they defined as the content of volition, the
• 8:34
  actual thing that is willed. OK, that distinction is helpful.
• 8:39
  Even if it's anachronistic, the sources give a good analogy for
• 8:42
  it. Yeah, the hunger analogy.
• 8:44
  Think of the Oasis is hunger. It's the internal drive, the
• 8:46
  capacity everyone has to want to eat.
• 8:49
  But the lama is the meal itself, the specific food that satisfies
• 8:52
  the hunger. So if the New Testament author
• 8:54
  is focused almost entirely on the meal, on the thalama, what
• 8:59
  does that tell us? Are they saying that the result,
• 9:01
  the decree of God, is what really matters more so than the
• 9:05
  internal mechanics of how he willed it?
• 9:07
  I think that's a very fair conclusion.
• 9:09
  The focus is on the objective reality of God's decree and his
• 9:13
  sovereign action in the world. That's what's most pressing for
• 9:16
  us when it comes to things like election and salvation.
• 9:20
  And this gets reinforced when we see how the plural form the LA
• 9:24
  motta is used. It does show up, but it's never
• 9:27
  used for God. Never.
• 9:29
  The New Testament reserves the plural form the llamada, to
• 9:32
  describe the fragmented, chaotic, and often hostile wills
• 9:35
  of human beings. Ephesians 2.3 is the classic
• 9:38
  example talking about fulfilling the wills of the flesh.
• 9:41
  Right, these sensual inclinations that are always
• 9:43
  pulling a person in different contradictory directions.
• 9:45
  So you have this stark contrast, a perfect unity of God's one
• 9:49
  dilemma versus the scattered, self-destructive dilemmada of
• 9:52
  the flesh. And that brings us right to this
• 9:54
  huge theological divide, the effectiveness of God's will
• 9:58
  versus the powerlessness of man's will.
• 10:00
  Let's unpack that. The sources are very clear here.
• 10:02
  God's will is described as resolute and complete.
• 10:06
  For God to have willed something and to have perfected it are
• 10:11
  basically the same thing. His intention automatically
• 10:14
  includes the power to bring it to pass it's efficacious action.
• 10:18
  But human will, especially the will of a person apart from
• 10:22
  grace, can't claim that. It's often described as
• 10:25
  arbitrary or just plain self willed, and it often just
• 10:28
  collapses into a mere wish because it has no power to
• 10:31
  actually do what it wants. It's the difference between a
• 10:33
  command from a king with an army behind him and a wish someone
• 10:36
  mutters to themselves. And this very powerlessness of
• 10:40
  the human will is what Paul takes apart so brilliantly in
• 10:43
  Romans 7. Romans Chapter 7, specifically
• 10:45
  verses 14 to 25. I mean, this is probably the
• 10:48
  most profound description of the human condition under the law
• 10:51
  anywhere in Scripture. Paul was describing the agony of
• 10:54
  the impotent will. He is, and the central theme of
• 10:56
  that whole passage is what the sources call a cleavage, an
• 10:59
  irreconcilable split, The person in Romans 7, he has this inner
• 11:03
  desire, a readiness to agree with God's law.
• 11:06
  That's the willing part the the Fen.
• 11:08
  But that inner purpose is completely disconnected from his
• 11:11
  ability to actually do it. The buoyant or the energy?
• 11:14
  Right. It's that heartbreaking paradox,
• 11:16
  he says. I do not do the good I want, but
• 11:18
  the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.
• 11:21
  The will is good, but the is evil.
• 11:24
  His inner man, the S anthropose. He consents to the law.
• 11:27
  He agrees it's righteous and beautiful.
• 11:29
  He genuinely wills the good. But that will is just trapped.
• 11:33
  It's stamped by powerlessness because it's enslaved by the
• 11:37
  flesh, by the sarks. And our sources described this
• 11:39
  willing of the good as an impotent gesture.
• 11:42
  It's a real desire. It's an honest wish to obey, but
• 11:46
  it never gets past the intention stage.
• 11:49
  It's a gesture that shows the law is good, but it can't save
• 11:52
  the person who's trying to keep it.
• 11:54
  The analogy that's given for this is really powerful.
• 11:57
  It's the pilot in the hijacked plane.
• 11:59
  It is so. Imagine this pilot.
• 12:01
  He represents the inner man, the part that wills the good.
• 12:04
  He has the flight plan, which is the law, and he agrees.
• 12:06
  Yes, this is the perfect Rd. He's pulling on the controls,
• 12:09
  trying with all his might to steer the plane toward that
• 12:11
  righteous destination. That's the Amon the willing.
• 12:14
  But it's just an impotent gesture.
• 12:16
  Because the controls are completely disconnected from the
• 12:18
  plane's rudder and engines, the plane itself has been hijacked
• 12:22
  by sin by the flesh. So while the pilot is willing
• 12:25
  one thing, the plane is flying in the exact opposite direction.
• 12:29
  His will is good, but the vessel he's in is enslaved.
• 12:32
  He has no sovereignty over his own actions.
• 12:35
  And that is just a devastating picture of our natural state.
• 12:39
  It aligns perfectly with what the Westminster Standards teach
• 12:42
  about total depravity. The will still has its natural
• 12:44
  faculty, the the Oasis, to use that later term.
• 12:48
  But it has lost all ability to choose spiritual good unless
• 12:52
  it's regenerated by grace. Yes, the will is not just
• 12:54
  mistaken or misinformed, it's in bondage.
• 12:57
  And this is what really separates Paul's thinking from
• 13:00
  the other moral philosophies of his day, like Stoicism should
• 13:04
  probably pause on that contrast. That's a vital point.
• 13:06
  The Stoics, people like Epictetus, they knew people
• 13:09
  failed morally. They talked about willing
• 13:10
  something and it not happening. But for a Stoic, that failure
• 13:14
  was basically a logical defect. It was a result of ignorance of
• 13:17
  Ignoya. So if failure is just ignorance,
• 13:19
  the solution is education. You just need to correct the
• 13:22
  person's thinking. Right.
• 13:23
  For a stoic, if you could just show the person the truth, the
• 13:26
  logos, their will would naturally align with it.
• 13:29
  The will is seen as a rational tool that just needs to be
• 13:32
  calibrated correctly. But for Paul, it's not a problem
• 13:35
  of calibration. It's not a rational defect.
• 13:38
  No, it's a tragic enslavement. It's bondage to a metaphysical
• 13:43
  hostile stall power, sin. The man in Romans seven knows
• 13:47
  the good. He consents to the good, but he
• 13:49
  cannot do the good. Knowledge doesn't fix the
• 13:52
  problem because the will itself is a captive.
• 13:55
  And that tragic state is what defines the legal man, the
• 13:58
  person trying to please God through the law in his own
• 14:00
  strength. You have to hit that wall of
• 14:02
  desperation to realize you need something or someone else.
• 14:06
  And that, of course, is the setup for the gospel, the
• 14:08
  resolution in Christ, that gap, that cleavage between willing
• 14:12
  and doing it has to to be bridged by a will that is
• 14:15
  outside of us and is all powerful.
• 14:17
  Which brings us to Philippians 2.13.
• 14:19
  It's the other side of the coin to Romans 7.
• 14:21
  It is Philippians 2.13 says it is God who works in you, both to
• 14:26
  will and to work, to the telamnenkai, to energy.
• 14:30
  Notice God supplies both pieces that were broken in Romans 7.
• 14:34
  He supplies the very desire for good, and then He supplies the
• 14:37
  ability to carry it out. That speaks so directly to the
• 14:40
  doctrine of efficacious grace. Our powerlessness is overcome
• 14:44
  not by God giving us better information, but by God
• 14:47
  literally creating the righteous will within us.
• 14:50
  If the unregenerate man could supply his own light, just the
• 14:53
  land, his own willing, then all God would need to do is give him
• 14:56
  the power, the energy to do it. But because our wills are
• 15:00
  fundamentally corrupt, God has to be the sovereign source of
• 15:03
  the desire itself, and that is how His thalamic gets
• 15:06
  accomplished in the life of a believer.
• 15:08
  This look at the will really sets the stage for our second
• 15:11
  major topic. If God's will is this absolute
• 15:13
  efficacious power, then how does Paul describe the nature of the
• 15:16
  God it comes from? Exactly.
• 15:18
  We shift now from the will of God to the being of God, looking
• 15:21
  at those two very technical nouns, the TS, the Otes.
• 15:25
  They sound so similar it's easy to just read right over them.
• 15:28
  Let's start with the first one, Theotos.
• 15:31
  It only appears once in the entire New Testament, but it's
• 15:33
  in a massive verse. Colossians 2.9.
• 15:36
  Theodos is the stronger ontological term.
• 15:39
  It refers to the absolute essence of God, the state of
• 15:42
  being God. It's about the very Godness of
• 15:45
  God, the fact that He is God in and of Himself.
• 15:49
  So when Paul writes in Colossians 2.9 that in Christ
• 15:53
  dwells all the fullness of the theodes bodily, he's making an
• 15:56
  incredible claim. It's a monumental statement on
• 15:59
  Christology. He's not just saying Christ has
• 16:01
  some divine qualities. He is saying that Christ
• 16:03
  possesses the complete, total, essential reality of the Godhead
• 16:07
  in his physical body. If Paul had used a different
• 16:09
  word there, it could have opened the door to all sorts of
• 16:12
  heresies. It would have a weaker term
• 16:14
  might suggest Christ was just an exalted creature or had some
• 16:17
  divine flavor, but by using Theoter's, Paul grounds Christ's
• 16:20
  person in the very same uncreated being as the Father.
• 16:24
  It's a statement of full equality.
• 16:26
  OK, now let's contrast that with the other word ATS theodoses.
• 16:30
  It also appears only once, but in a totally different context.
• 16:34
  Romans 1.20. Right.
• 16:36
  And Theodos is a descriptive word.
• 16:38
  It refers to the qualities or characteristics that belong to
• 16:41
  deity. It's about divineness.
• 16:43
  It describes the attributes of God that we can see or perceive,
• 16:47
  not the inner essence of His being.
• 16:49
  The context in Romans 1 is natural revelation.
• 16:52
  Paul is saying God's eternal power in deity Theodos can be
• 16:56
  clearly seen in creation. And this is where Paul's
• 16:59
  linguistic genius is so apparent.
• 17:01
  If he had used Theodos in Romans one, he'd be saying the full
• 17:03
  essence of God is visible in a sunset or a mountain range,
• 17:07
  which would lead to pantheism. Right, that creation itself is
• 17:10
  God. But by using Theotwos, he says
• 17:12
  that God's qualities, his fingerprints, you could say his
• 17:15
  attributes like power and majesty are what we see.
• 17:19
  So Theoto's isn't just a synonym for God, it's specifically
• 17:22
  referring to the observable effect of his being.
• 17:24
  It's about his active performance.
• 17:27
  It's a way to talk about God's manifestation, how his character
• 17:30
  is revealed in action, without claiming to fully comprehend His
• 17:35
  hidden, incomprehensible essence.
• 17:38
  The analogies from the sources are helpful here.
• 17:40
  Let's use the one about fire. OK, so theodies is the fire
• 17:43
  itself, the burning substance, the reality of being fire.
• 17:46
  You can't touch it or fully grasp it, but theodies is the
• 17:50
  heat coming from the fire. It's the radiating quality, the
• 17:54
  tangible characteristic that lets you know the fire is there,
• 17:57
  even from a distance. That's a great distinction.
• 17:59
  Or the one about the king? Theodos is the King himself, the
• 18:02
  sovereign person who holds all authority.
• 18:04
  Theodies is His Majesty, the splendor, the power, the glory
• 18:08
  that radiates out from Him that His subjects can see and feel.
• 18:12
  And we actually have confirmation from non biblical
• 18:14
  sources that this is how the word theodies was commonly used,
• 18:17
  right as a manifestation of some kind.
• 18:19
  Yes, very strong confirmation. For instance, with the cult of
• 18:22
  Artemis of Ephesus, Inscriptions say she made the city famous
• 18:25
  through her theodies. Now, they didn't mean her actual
• 18:28
  essence filled the city. No, they meant her power was on
• 18:30
  display there. Exactly, the sources confirmed
• 18:33
  this was understood as manifestations of her power, her
• 18:36
  dynamies. Same thing with the Egyptian God
• 18:38
  Emouths who was associated with healing.
• 18:41
  Papyri talk about people being filled with your Theo ways and
• 18:44
  it specifically means they experienced manifestations of
• 18:47
  healing. So the common usage was all
• 18:50
  about the demonstrable active performance of divine qualities.
• 18:53
  Which proves Paul was being incredibly precise.
• 18:56
  He saves the absolute term Theodos for the full indwelling
• 19:00
  of God in Christ, and he uses the relative term Theodos for
• 19:03
  what can be known about God through his works in the world.
• 19:06
  The distinction is airtight. Christ doesn't just have Theodos
• 19:10
  divine qualities, He has Theodos.
• 19:13
  He is God in essence. And because Theodos just
• 19:15
  describes a quality, a kind of divineness, we see in the
• 19:19
  sources that it could be applied to things that weren't God at
• 19:22
  all. Right.
• 19:23
  This flexibility really underscores its meaning.
• 19:26
  It could be used to describe people or things that had a
• 19:28
  close connection to the divine. Let's look at some of those
• 19:31
  examples. Sure.
• 19:32
  The Jewish historian Josephus, for instance.
• 19:35
  He applies the Otus to the Prophet Daniel.
• 19:39
  He's not saying Daniel's a God. Of course not.
• 19:41
  He's talking about Daniel's divinely inspired ability, the
• 19:44
  wisdom he had to interpret dreams.
• 19:46
  It was a divine quality at work in him, showing he had a special
• 19:50
  connection to God. We even see it used for artists.
• 19:53
  Heraclitus the Stoic applied it to the poet Homer.
• 19:56
  Yeah, because Homer's genius was seen as so far beyond normal
• 20:00
  human ability that it had to be divinely inspired.
• 20:02
  It had a Theotoos, a divine quality.
• 20:05
  But the most, let's say controversial application of the
• 20:08
  term was in politics, with the Roman emperor called.
• 20:11
  Oh, absolutely. The word was used all the time
• 20:13
  in inscriptions for emperors like Augustus.
• 20:16
  Attributing Theatus to him was a way of saying his rule had a
• 20:19
  divineness to it, a superhuman authority that connected him to
• 20:22
  the gods of the state. And that context makes Paul's
• 20:25
  precision even more vital. In a world where emperors were
• 20:28
  claiming theotes, Paul had to make it crystal clear that
• 20:31
  Christ wasn't just another divinely favored ruler.
• 20:34
  He was claiming theatus. It's a direct defense of
• 20:37
  Christ's unique identity against the claims of the state, and the
• 20:40
  Word was even applied to abstract ideas.
• 20:43
  Theophilus of Antioch used it to describe Christian teaching the
• 20:46
  Logos. The message itself had a divine
• 20:49
  quality, a wisdom that was clearly from God.
• 20:53
  So this little word theotas, it acts like a bridge.
• 20:56
  It lets us talk about the fingerprints of God that we see
• 20:58
  in the world, in creation, in inspired prophets and profound
• 21:02
  wisdom, without ever confusing those things with God's own
• 21:06
  unshared essence, the theochos. It's a beautiful and necessary
• 21:10
  distinction, and it ties everything together.
• 21:13
  The sovereign will of God flows from the absolute being of God.
• 21:16
  OK, so let's try to bring this all together.
• 21:18
  This deep dive has covered a lot of ground from linguistic
• 21:20
  history to some very high level theology.
• 21:23
  We've seen how the verbs for willing changed over time until
• 21:26
  Theo became the standard in the New Testament.
• 21:28
  We followed that path from the old Ethelish through the
• 21:31
  classical preference for Boulamie right to the triumph of
• 21:34
  the common word Theo, and we saw how that choice grounds the New
• 21:38
  Testament in the language of everyday people, but then uses
• 21:41
  it to describe the singular sovereign Theo of God.
• 21:45
  And then we spend time on that critical distinction between
• 21:48
  God's essence, the theodies that dwells fully in Christ, and his
• 21:52
  observable qualities, the theodies that we can all see in
• 21:56
  creation. And the synthesis really comes
• 21:58
  back to the absolute sovereignty of God, which is so central to
• 22:02
  our Reformed faith. The only will in the universe
• 22:04
  that is perfectly unified and has the power to do everything
• 22:07
  it desires is God's singular Thelema.
• 22:10
  We see reflections of His theories in the world, His power
• 22:13
  and nature, which leaves us without excuse.
• 22:16
  But our own will are the feel, and when we're under the law is
• 22:19
  completely fractured and powerless, just like Paul
• 22:22
  describes in Romans 7. It is.
• 22:24
  It's unable to bridge that gap between what it knows is right
• 22:26
  and what it actually does. Which brings us to our final
• 22:29
  thought for you to take away from this.
• 22:31
  It ties together everything we've talked about sovereignty,
• 22:34
  the will, and even prayer. Since our natural will is
• 22:37
  impotent, completely powerless, and since God's will is the only
• 22:40
  one that can create both the desire and the action, consider
• 22:44
  this. When you pray the words thy
• 22:47
  thelema be done, what are you actually asking for?
• 22:50
  Is it just a request for events out there in the world to line
• 22:53
  up with God's plan, or is it something more personal?
• 22:56
  Is it at its heart a desperate plea for God to exert His
• 22:59
  sovereign, effective will inside of your own captive heart to
• 23:03
  make you will what He wills? The very choice of that word,
• 23:06
  the llama. It seems to demand that we see
• 23:08
  prayer not as informing God of our wishes, but as asking Him to
• 23:12
  perform His will in us, since we cannot.