Looking for help w/ presentation about God

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Redneck_still_Reforming

Puritan Board Freshman
Hello,

In a few weeks, I will be speaking to a small group about aspects of who God is (aspects applied analogously as God is a simple, complete being w/out parts). I affirm simplicity and I can talk about it a little using terms I was taught but how should I present it to a group of laypeople (they are incredibly wise but this language is foreign to them)? I will be talking about God's Wrath and God's Mercy. In our human finite minds, we see them as opposite which violates our Reformed understanding to say that univocally. How do I speak about these topics without dividing God? Would it be correct to say "though they seem like two aspects to us, in Him they are perfectly united. The difference is human in that we experience these two concepts (which come from His righteousness) in seperate ways."

If you would, please correct any of my phrasing, thinking and statements if they violate the Doctrine of God held by the Reformed. I want my lesson to be edifying, not heterodox and confusing. Any tips from older brothers and sisters would be appreciated.

God Bless
 
I don’t have time to go into detail, but a couple helpful statements to meditate on in the meantime would be:
  1. All that is in God is God.
  2. God is his attributes.
Here also is a helpful section from Geerhardus Vos:

11. May we make a distinction in God between His being and His attributes?
No, because even with us, being and attributes are most closely connected. Even more so in God. If His attributes were something other than His revealed being, it would follow that also essential deity must be ascribed to His being, and thus a distinction would be established in God between what is essentially divine and what is derivatively divine. That cannot be.​
12. May we also say that God’s attributes are not distinguished from one another?
This is extremely risky. We may be content to say that all God’s attributes are related most closely to each other and penetrate each other in the most intimate unity. However, this is in no way to say that they are to be identified with each other. Also in God, for example, love and righteousness are not the same, although they function together perfectly in complete harmony. We may not let everything intermingle in a pantheistic way because that would be the end of our objective knowledge of God.​
—Geerhardus Vos, Theology Proper, ed. Annemie Godbehere, Roelof van Ijken, and Kim Batteau, trans. Richard B. Gaffin, vol. 1, Reformed Dogmatics (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2014), 5; italics original.​
 
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In God, aren't they the same? Ad extra; not the same, but ad intra, aren't they identical to each other and to God?
They are "referentially identical, but denotatively diverse" to use the magisterial phrasing of Steven Duby.

W.G.T. Shedd, A History of Christian Doctrine, Book III, Chapter 1, with perhaps a clearer take on the point that Vos is trying to make:
"In proportion as the attributes have been discussed in connection with the essence of the Deity, has the doctrine of God been kept clear from pantheistic conceptions. In proportion, on the contrary, as speculation has been engaged with the essence of the Godhead, to the neglect or non-recognition of the attributes in which this essence manifests itself, has it become pantheistic. It is impossible for the human mind to know the Deity abstractly from his attributes. It may posit, i.e., ser down on paper, an unknown ground of being, like the unknown x in algebra, of which nothing can be predicated, and may suppose that this is knowing the absolute Deity. But there is no such dark predicateless ground; there is no such Gnostic abyss. The Divine Nature is in and with the attributes, and hence the attributes are as deep and absolute as the Nature. The substance and attributes of God are in the same plane of being. Neither one is more aboriginal than the other. Both are equally eternal, and equally necessary. Christian science, consequently, has never isolated them from each other. It distinguishes them, it is true, in order that it may form conceptions of them, and describe them, but it is ever careful to affirm as absolute and profound a reality in the Divine attributes as in the Divine essence."
 
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