Good morning, everyone. It's nice to see you. Nice to be back in Sunday school. Looking forward to a new semester of studying our confession of faith together and learning more about God and the faith that we confess. Today's the first day of Sunday school, so everyone is excited and on time. The difficult part is to keep that up, right? So we're going to begin taking attendance, and we have a tardy system. Just kidding, none of that, none of that. I'm very pleased to have you here, and I hope that your children will be blessed by Sunday School and their classes, especially as all of those classes begin catechesis, or memorization of the catechism. We talked about it briefly after one of our services recently, that we have a plan and a system for trying to lead our children through memorization of a catechism. And it's a plan that we will adjust as we get better at it or see how it goes. You know, you make plans and then you have to revise them. And my hope is that especially the younger classes will go a lot faster than we expected and can get us ahead. But we'll see. And we want the teachers to have freedom to teach their own lessons without the catechizing getting in the way. But we will not be doing catechism memorization in this class. It stops at the end of the high school class. We will continue to study our confession of faith. And in two weeks, Lord willing, I'll be traveling to England to teach a conference and preach at a church and then to have just over a week of vacation time. And that means I have two Sunday school slots and then I'll be gone for two Sundays. Last semester, we nearly, nearly, nearly finished Chapter 2 of our confession, and I did not want to... I was planning to do one more lesson on Chapter 2 and then begin Chapter 3, but I did not want to do that, start Chapter 3 and then be gone for two weeks, because Chapter 3 is also very technical, as Chapter 2 is. So what I decided to do is this week let's review Chapter 2 from last semester. Next week we'll have that final lesson which is on communion with God. Then I'll be gone for two weeks and then we'll begin Chapter 3 because I don't have any more international travel for the rest of the year. So this week is review of chapter two of our confession and everything that we studied over many weeks on the past two semesters. Next week is the conclusion of that. If you remember chapter two, paragraph three ends with communion with God, which doctrine of the Trinity is the foundation of our communion and our comfortable dependence upon God. That's what we'll look at next week. let's focus on simply reviewing. And maybe this sheet will be a helpful way of sort of seeing the forest for a moment and not just the trees. Here the forest and the trees. The order follows the way that we went through these things, but some of the smaller details I've rearranged. But this is what we covered if you look back on all of those handouts and all of those lessons, we went through these things. So I hope that it is review for you, perhaps confirming, perhaps refreshing what we believe and what we teach and what we confess in our confession of faith. And if you recall when we began chapter two, I said I wanted to take my time with this because it's our God in whom we trust and whom we serve. And it is worthy of our time and worthy of our effort to study this closely and carefully. And so we went through it in quite a lot of detail. And I often struggled with, is this too much detail? Is this too much? But sometimes you begin to realize that In the moment, you don't capture everything you're hearing and learning, but it does absorb over time. So it's not wasted time, and the more we go back over it, the second time, it's a little bit easier. And the third time, it's often easier. So if you found that at times the lessons were perhaps too much or too high in such things, that's first, my fault. But secondly, don't doubt yourselves too much. It does sink in, certainly over time. So let's go through just brief review of these various points that we studied in chapter two of our Confession of Faith. And we began with the distinction between the creator, and all things that are not the creator, the distinction between God and not God, which is the creator-creature distinction. And the first thing by way of the creator-creature distinction is aseity. If you remember, ase in Latin is of himself. And our confession says that God's subsistence is in and of himself. In what way does God exist? Of himself. in and of himself, ah se iti. Whereas creatures, we all have existence, we are from. He made us and he sustains us. And so the creator alone, only God is ah se. Only God has his own life, possesses his own existence. He is pure being itself being. and no one else and nothing else is like that. Only God exists ase or is ase, whereas all things else are made by God, are created by God, and have their being from him and through him and to him. So aseity establishes a complete and infinite chasm of distinction and difference between God and creatures, between God and all things not God. And because nothing that exists exists in the same way as God, none of us are ase, no creatures are ase, there are various things that follow from this. And one of the things that follow from this is that the creatures, being lesser than God and from God, cannot comprehend God. God is incomprehensible to the creatures. But remember that incomprehensibility does not mean we can't know anything. about God. It simply means that we can only know Him as creatures, which will never be a complete or a total comprehending. To comprehend is to, remember, reach your hands around a tree and fully You are fully covering that whole tree, but we cannot comprehend God, but we can apprehend Him. We can know Him truly. We can put our hand on the tree and say, I know God truly, even if I don't comprehend Him completely. And that's not due to anything wrong with me, I'm just a creature. And the creature cannot contain the creator in its mind. The creaturely mind, the created mind cannot contain God within it. If we could, God would be lesser than us. If you can contain something in your mind, if you can comprehend it, it is lesser than you are. You are greater than that thing. But because God is ase, of himself, and we are not, we are from him, therefore we cannot contain him in our minds. He is incomprehensible. That does not mean unknowable. It means incomprehensible, to comprehend. If you cannot contain God in your mind because He is infinitely greater than you, then neither can you express Him with your words in fullness. And so God is therefore ineffable, fabulare, to speak in Spanish, hablar, inablable. He is ineffable. The human language, human concepts of speech can truly communicate things about God, just as we can truly know things about God, we can truly communicate things about God and speak of him. But our words will always fall short of reaching the infinite fullness of God's being. We will always know as creatures and speak as creatures, which is not a defect that's not putting us down, it's simply exalting God's greatness. He is infinite, He is great and grand, and therefore we cannot... fully express the majesty and glory of God or the being of God Himself. We know God in a creaturely mode or in a creaturely way, and that's okay. God does not ask us to know Him more than that. He does not expect us to know Him more than that. He expects us to know Him and to love Him and to serve Him as creatures who magnify and adore Him. So God's incomprehensibility and ineffability don't leave us in a mopey silence. I don't know God and I can't say anything about him. No, to the contrary. We say, how good and great and grand and wonderful and majestic is my God. I do know him. And if I know him this much as a creature and yet he's infinitely greater, it leads us to worship. The acknowledgement of our weakness is reciprocally an acknowledgement of God's greatness and power. And so incomprehensibility and ineffability do not discourage us, they ought to lead us to a greater worship. And if we can know things truly about God, how can we know things truly about God? We began first with man's knowledge of God through reason. which is a limited and it stops short of knowing God through revelation, which comes next. Knowing God through reason is limited, but true and helpful and useful. It comes from observing the world, the natural world, the world that God has made. And so we know God through reason when we know him through the way of causation, which means we say, Things are, well, remember we said, why things? Why the world? Why are these things here? There must be a cause behind these effects. And if you follow that chain of causes, that chain of causation, that chain of causality, there must be a first cause. There must be an uncaused cause. There must be one who is in and of himself, who has his being in and of himself and gives life and breath and all things to all things that have life and breath and so on. And so man can reason from the existence of the world to a creator. and say there is a God. There is a first cause. There is a being who has his own being in and of himself. You can know that through reason. And that's a kind of knowledge of God. It tells you that there is a God. Secondly, man can know God through reason by the way of negation. And the way of negation says this one God who made all things he must be perfect. And so therefore, whatever is imperfect, not necessarily immoral, but just a deficiency or a weakness of being, you consider all weaknesses or deficiencies of being, and you say, God is not that. He's not that weakness, and he's not that weakness, or he doesn't have that weakness, or he doesn't have that deficiency or that defect, And we therefore deny certain things of God. And our knowledge of God is in many ways more negative than positive. We know more of what God is not than what God is in many ways. And we'll look at the negative attributes later. So I won't list them here. But we negate things about God and therefore we more clearly know him. And man can reason, can acquire this knowledge through reason. Then there's the way of eminence. We look at the good things in creatures. We look at the good things in men or in angels. We look at their virtues and such things and we say, these virtues must be reflections of an original perfect goodness. These must be a reflection of an original perfect goodness. And so the way of eminence says that whatever things are good and powerful in creatures must be originally and infinitely and therefore eminently in God. And we ascribe those things to God not as God reflecting man, but as man reflecting God who is the original, the infinite, and the eternal. So the way of eminence positively describes God by looking at things that are created and good and attributing that goodness to God originally and essentially. We are good by participation or we are good sometimes, but God is essentially and always all of his attributes. The complete knowledge of God for the creature is not arrived at through reason. Reason says there is a God and there are certain things we know about him. You know that there is a God, but you don't know who he is. And revelation, God's making himself known through special revelation, tells us his names, tells us who he is, and more of his attributes. And so in scripture, in the ways in which God has directly communicated with his people, not seeing him reflected in creation, but God himself speaking and revealing himself, we have a fuller knowledge of God and a saving knowledge of God. You could not be saved simply by appreciating that a creator made the sunset, or creator made the mountains, or creator made the planets, and all of the constellations and the star systems that we behold in the heavens. Those things can lead you to a creator, but the scriptures alone, revelation alone, special revelation, lets us know a savior, a redeemer, God. And so in scripture, to study God, we look at the names. God chooses the names by which he reveals himself. And God being wise, he has reasons for why he chooses these names. So we looked at his principal names, which come from words of being, like I am that I am, and the shortened forms of Yahweh and Yah. God is the one who is, and his names of power and omnipotence, El, Eloah, Elohim, and so on. God's names tell us about him, the one who is, the one who is powerful, the one who creates and provides and sustains. And then we said that we need to be careful when we say that God reveals himself in scripture or in special revelation, it is still given to us as creatures and in a creaturely mode. So the scriptures themselves speak to us in a way that is on our level. The scriptures are much more direct and clear than what we can behold in nature, but it is still communicated to us in a way that is accommodated to our capacity to understand as creatures. And so we should not bring down God to the level even of the scriptures if he describes himself in the language of human body parts or human emotions. And if you remember, there were two significant words that we looked at. The first was anthropomorphisms. Did I spell that right? Anthropomorphisms. And the second one was anthropopathisms. So anthropo, man, morph, the form, the body of man. Anthropomorphisms are where God in the scriptures describes himself, reveals himself to us by using the language of the human body. He speaks of his arm or his face and so on. God uses the human body to teach us about himself, but we know that's accommodated to our understanding. God doesn't have. a body like us. God is a spirit. And then anthropopathisms, anthropoman, path, is God using the language of human emotion or human passions to describe himself and make himself known to us, but just as he does not have a human body, so also God does not have passions. He does not have motions within him where he is moved one way and moved another way, which we'll talk about in our review as we proceed. So these anthropomorphisms and anthropopathisms are God's revelation to us of himself, but accommodated to our understanding as creatures. They reveal God truly, but we have to be careful not to bring God down to the level of that language that he uses to describe himself to us, which many do, not intentionally. They're not saying, I want to bring God down to this level, but if we're not careful, And this is something that we will see very shortly in our sermon series in 1 Samuel 15, where it uses the language of repentance and regret in relation to God. And God regretted that he had made Saul king. So we will look at that when we come to it in 1 Samuel 15. So let's move on. Creator-creature distinction. We know God through reason up to a point, not savingly. We know God far more fully. We know who he is and how to worship him, how to be saved, how to receive his salvation through his special revelation, which is given to us as creatures and accommodated to our understanding. Well then we came to the negative attributes, the positive attributes, and the relative attributes. And we will just briefly describe what each of these is once more. And remember that we know God through the way of negation. We consider defects, or maybe not, deficiencies, weaknesses, or imperfections of being, and we say God does not have that. And so the first negative attribute is simplicity. That God is without composition. We deny or we negate all composition in God. God is not made up of parts. Because wherever there is a union of parts, there is a cause of that union. And wherever there is a union, and God is not caused. And wherever there is a union of parts, there can be a disunion of parts, and so on. So if God were composite, composed, put together, made up of parts, it completely destroys the doctrine of God. God is, I am that I am. Not, I'm the one who was put together. God is pure being itself being. He is simple, and simplicity is the first negative attribute that denies composition in God. The second thing that we looked at was divine invisibility. And we said that divine invisibility is really an expression of divine incomprehensibility. That man cannot see God in the sense that man's mind cannot comprehend him. And something can be invisible, we said, by two ways. You can be invisible for a lack of light. In a dark room, in a cave, the features of the cave are invisible to you because of darkness. We said that's not the invisibility of God. A thing can also be said to be invisible because of brightness. This week I had my eyes dilated. I went to the eye doctor and everything became invisible because of brightness. As I drove my car with my sunglasses on, I was fighting the brightness. Have you ever had your eyes dilated? You know what that's like. And so things can be invisible for brightness, and that is the invisibility of God. The scriptures speak of him as dwelling in light inaccessible, or light inapproachable, because God cannot be perceived by this body. This body cannot perceive God, and this mind cannot perceive Mahdi. cannot perceive God in its current state. We need to be glorified. The soul needs to be glorified and eventually the body glorified in order to behold God and enjoy that beatific vision of him. And so the invisibility of God relates to his incomprehensibility and his greatness and brightness and glory. Immutability is God without mutation, God without change. To change or to be capable of change is a weakness. If you can be changed, then something can change you. And if you are susceptible to change, then you lack some kind of perfection, you lack something. Why are you being changed? It's for the better or for the worse, or for something else? No, immutability is what we affirm of God. God says, I, the Lord, change not, therefore you are not consumed. James says, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. And the scriptures declare God's immutability. Impassibility is a subset of immutability. It comes back to the pathe, the emotions of human nature. And we say God does not have passions. In us, our emotions are passions. are motions, they are movements, where we are moved to feel and experience certain things. And because we can be moved into that state of being, we can be moved out of it, we are passable. But in God, his love is not a passion that he is moved to and can be moved out of, his love is the very perfection of his being. John says God is love. And so, therefore, God is impassable. What we call God's mercy and God's love or God's wrath and so on are not emotional states of being in God. It is the very being of God, which we at times experience in a start-stop way. But in God, who does not change and cannot change, his love is a permanent, settled, it is his very being. Immortality is, well, God without mortality. His being cannot decay. His being cannot be extinguished. His being is not susceptible to corruption or disintegration and so on. Immensity is God without measure. And so this is, remember we said that omnipresence is not, is not the best way to express this. Omnipresence is a sort of a subset of immensity. God without measures, there's no place where you can measure and say, this is where God is. Or there's no way to quantify the being of God and say, we have measured God. God is infinite. He cannot be measured. And so therefore, omnipresence says God is present in all places by virtue of being creator and sustainer of all things. That's omnipresence, but immensity says, and also, he's not contained anywhere. He is everywhere, omnipresence, but by immensity, he's not contained. Remember what Solomon said at the dedication of the temple. He said, can this house contain you? The heaven of heavens cannot contain you. And yet God is truly in the temple, and God has truly manifest his presence in heaven or in various special places. So God may manifest his presence in a special place, and he is present everywhere by virtue of his deity, but he being immense without measure is contained nowhere. Infinity is God without finitude. There's no limitation, nothing that contains or ends or puts a fin. I'm gonna start repeating my words. Nothing puts an end to God's being and to all that God is. He is that He is without anything outside of Himself setting the boundaries. Nothing outside of God sets limits on who or what He is or who or what He does and so on. He is infinite. God without finitude. Eternity. This is a very important one to define carefully. And if you remember, God's eternity is God without succession. God without succession. eternity is God without succession. The being of God does not pass through successive moments of being. He is, and then he is, and then he is, and then he is. God is without succession. He is all that he is. It's not God fills time. God's not on a timeline. God does not exist in successive moments. God transcends what we know of as time. Time is a created thing. Time is a measure of motion. God is not subject to time because God is not subject to successive existence. His eternity is God without succession. His being does not pass through successive moments. Moving on to the positive attributes. and speeding up a little bit. Omnipotence. See the word potence, omnipotence. If you recall, omnipotence is positively, just recall we're in the positive attributes now. We're not denying things about God. We are now attributing them to him directly. Omnipotence, God has infinite, active, potency, which means that he has the power to cause things to be. Potency, to move something from potentiality to actuality, to bring it into existence. If God has infinite active potency, he has infinite power to make things to be and to keep them in being, and if he so chose, to make them cease being. Omnipotence does not mean that imagine all the power we have and God has all of it, that's still thinking of God on a creaturely level. None of us has the potency God has to make things to be. Let there be light, none of us can say that. Let there be, let there be, none of us can do that. But God can because he has omni, all active potency. Omniscience, which is God's wisdom, His knowledge of all things. We spent a good amount of time, a whole lesson, talking about God's knowledge, that God knows Himself. And because God knows Himself, He knows everything He could make, which is infinitely more than He has made. And because He knows Himself and He knows what He has made, therefore he knows all that is. And he knows all that is not because he learned it as something outside of himself which he is receiving knowledge, he knows it because he knows himself. So God has an omniscience, a knowledge of all things by virtue of knowing himself, not by virtue of knowing something outside of himself. And creation comes from him because he chose to make it, therefore he knows it with omniscience that comes from himself. God's holiness is God in conformity to himself. God's liberty is God's freedom. Nothing puts a limit on God to act. Why does God do this? Why does God do that? God has complete liberty to do as he sees fit. God's absoluteness, remember that the word absolute in technical terminology and theology, is as opposed to relative. The correlated word to absolute is relative. Absolute, on its own. Relative, in relation to something else. So God is absolute. He does not need creatures. He does not need creation. His being is not in any way dependent or relative to anything else. He is absolute. On his own, God does not stand in need of any creature, we confess. He is most absolute. Will, we attribute will to God. Why? Why the world instead of no world? Why things instead of no thing, nothing? Because God chose, God willed to create. Things happen according to God's will. There is intention and wisdom and decision. Those are human concepts, but truly describe that God has made the world that he chose to make. We attribute will to God. God is not some abstract necessary force God is, in our terms, a personal being, one with will who chooses and acts. The last positive attribute was perfection. When we speak of the glory of God, this is the sum total, the put all of God's attributes together in the human mind, and we attribute glory to him, total, absolute perfection. It's a way of describing God's beautiful completeness, or his complete beauty. He is glorious and majestic, and we will enjoy him forever. Then we proceeded to relative attributes. We went from negative to positive to relative attributes. And this is attributing a relation between God and the creatures, but not one that changes God. It's from the perspective of creatures to God. So we attribute creation to God. because to be creator implies a relation to something created. God's providence to govern and guide all things is all things outside of God. Goodness and love, love is to do good to another and so God's showering us with bounty in this world. A good world full of good things is God's goodness and love to creation. His sovereignty that God is together with His providence that He governs all things, mercy to help the helpless, justice to give what is due according to God's Word, either positively approving the righteous or negatively disapproving and punishing the wicked, and redemption. God is Redeemer who saves His people from their sins. God did not become these things. This is the perfection of God described in relation to us. God does not become creator or become sovereign or become merciful or become just and so on. This is God's infinite perfection now in relation from our perspective to creatures. And these things, especially the relative attributes, but more than that, we know so much more clearly through the scriptures. We proceeded from considering God's essence and attributes to God being three, the Trinity of God, triune, three in one. And we looked at biblical foundations of the Trinity to say that the Trinity is not an abstract or theoretical doctrine. It's not a philosophical construct. It's something we believe because God has revealed himself to be triune. The Scriptures say that there is one God, but then the Scriptures describe divine actions to three from the beginning in Genesis. And all throughout the same three are described, we see in Genesis, God and God's Word and God's Spirit. And then we tracked that trio, that three, throughout the scriptures. And the names vary, but the three are the same throughout. And then in the New Testament, most clearly, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are made known to us. But throughout all of scripture, the same three. And divine action is attributed to all three. And human worship is given to all three. Human worship and obedience are given to the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And so we conclude from the Scriptures there is one God. And this one God exists, or better subsists, in three persons, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And we confess the doctrine of the Trinity because of Scripture, not imposing it upon Scripture, but drawing it from Scripture, putting together what all of the Scriptures say about God, and concluding as a necessary consequence the doctrine of The Trinity. And then we proceeded to the distinction of the persons. If God is one, how is he three? In what way are the three persons distinct? What distinguishes them? And how are they not three gods? Are they three gods? No. Well, how are they not three gods? And we said that the three persons, using the language of our confession, are three subsistences. And to subsist is to be in a particular way. It is a manner or a mode of being. And so to say that God is three subsistences or subsists in three ways, is to say that the very way in which God is, what God is, and the way that God is, is nothing other than this. God is the Father who eternally begets the Son, and God is the Son who is eternally begotten of the Father, and God is the Spirit who eternally proceeds from the Father and the Son. Each of those three is the divine essence subsisting in a particular way, subsisting in or as the father who begets and who spirates the spirit, the son who is begotten and spirates the spirit, and the spirit who proceeds from the father and the son. And each of those three subsistences is truly distinct. Only the father is of none. And only the Son is eternally begotten of the Father, and only the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. And so therefore we confess the three, who are not three gods, but rather are the divine essence subsisting in three relative properties. The relative properties, the Father beginning the Son, the Son being begotten, the Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son. And the question that always arises when we speak about subsistence and mode of being is, wait a minute, how is this not modalism? Isn't modalism a heresy in the doctrine of the Trinity? And the answer is, yes, modalism is a heresy, but this is not modalism, because modalism Modalism is an outward threeness. Modalism says the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are just three ways in which God presents himself to the world. And so outwardly, man sees God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but God is not three. It's just three modes of God revealing himself. It's a threeness that is only outside of God in his revelation. And the church rightly condemns this to say that destroys the doctrine of the Trinity because you're denying any threeness to truly be the being of God. That's modalism, that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are just three modes of God revealing himself to man, ad extra, outside of God. But the true orthodox doctrine of the Trinity is that the threeness is the very being of God, God subsisting in Father begetting the Son, Son being begotten, Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son. That is the very being of God, ad intra. And so that is in no way the doctrine of, or the heresy of modalism, and yet we do use the language of mode of being, not mode of revelation, but mode of being. And because the three persons are three subsistences, or the divine essence subsisting in three ways, or three relative properties, therefore they are not three beings or three gods. They are the one divine essence subsisting in three modes or manners. internally. And then the next question is, okay, having distinguished the three, in what ways are they one, the unity of the persons? And in brief, look at the second and the third points in that outline. First, you ask the question, does the Father or the Son or the Holy Spirit have the whole divine essence? And the answer is yes, the Father has the whole divine essence because He is the divine essence, eternally begetting the Son and eternally spirating the Spirit. He is the divine essence. Does the Son have the whole divine essence? Yes, He is the divine essence being begotten eternally of the Father. Does the Holy Spirit, and spirating the Spirit, does the Holy Spirit have the whole divine essence? Yes, the Holy Spirit has the whole divine essence because the Holy Spirit is the divine essence, eternally spirated, of the Father and the Son. And so each person, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is therefore God in Himself. The Father is God in Himself, the Son is God in Himself, the Spirit is God in Himself. and therefore they are one in substance, in power, in glory, in will, and external works, because they are the divine essence. They are the one true God. But then we can ask, in what manner does the Father, or the Son, or the Holy Spirit have divine essence? The Father of none. the Son eternally begotten of the Father, the Spirit eternally spirated or eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son. And so the Father is God in himself and of himself. The Son is God in himself, but not of himself, rather of the Father. And the Spirit is God in himself, but not of himself, rather from the Father and the Son. And therefore, in the three persons, we can distinguish in order, one and then two and then three, but what does not follow from this is a sub-order. Remember that we said that it goes, it works better in 3D. We said it's like this, it's not like that. It's not most God, mostly God, kind of mostly God, one, two, three, it's not a sub-order, it's more God, God, God, one, two, three, where there's no greater or lesser. There's no prior and posterior, before and after. There's no, we can't reason from the language of human generation and causation to cause and effect relationships, or before and after effects, and so on and so forth. There is an order that we can distinguish, or a taxis, but not a suborder. They are one in substance, the divine essence. One in power, the divine essence. One in glory, the divine essence. One in will, the divine essence. One in external works. The external works of the Trinity are undivided. And remember, the external works are everything God does outside of God. All creation, all acts in creation, the Father does it, the Son does it, the Holy Spirit does it. As distinct from what? as distinct from the internal. Acts of God of begetting and spirating and being begotten and being spirated or proceeding. Those are personal, peculiar relative properties. The Father alone generates. The Father and the Son alone spirates. The Spirit alone is proceeding from the Father and the Son. Those are internal works that are distinctly peculiar to person and person. But creation is not, well, the Father creates, but the Son and the Spirit do not. No, God creates. Therefore, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit create. And in all things outside of God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit do this. Also as distinct from the human nature of the second person of the Trinity. God the Son, according to his human nature, suffers and does all the things appropriate to the human nature. in a way that the divine nature of the Father, Son, or Holy Spirit does not participate in the suffering of those things, because they cannot, God being impassable. So Jesus Christ alone dies. Jesus Christ alone suffers and sheds his blood, and so on. And yet, it is the one God who redeems us. And we shouldn't think of, well, the Father planned this. And then the Son agreed to this plan. And then the Holy Spirit came in to help out. It's the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one true God, one will, one power. And the different acts that we see in scripture that are attributed to one person are not done so in a way that excludes the other. Certain acts are attributed to certain persons, Father, Son, or Spirit, because they most eminently reflect the being or the subsistence of that person. So since the Father is of none, acts of planning are often attributed to him. Because the Son is begotten of the Father, therefore acts of redemption and continuation are often attributed to him. And because the Holy Spirit is of the Father and the Son, the third acts of completion and consummation are often attributed to the Spirit. but not in a way that the others should be excluded. Because if the Spirit does something that the Father and the Son do not, He's a separate being. And if the Son, according to His divine nature, does things that the Father or the Spirit do not, then you have different powers, you have different Almighty's, you have different wills, and that destroys the doctrine of the Trinity. And then our confession concludes by saying that this doctrine of the Trinity is the foundation of our communion with God and our comfortable dependence upon Him. And that's what we will look at next week, communion with God. The premise being, if all of this, if this is who God is, and we know God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, then to have communion with Him, you need to have communion with Him knowing this and in light of this. And that's what we will look at. next week. So I hope that that was a helpful review and a summary of all the things that we covered. Maybe a good little sort of cheat sheet to keep somewhere if you find it helpful. And I look forward to studying communion with God next week. Thank you for your attention. You're dismissed.