I expect that’s the most absurd title you’ll read today. As you may know, I’ve been reading The Existence and Attributes of God by Stephen Charnock, which is not a brief summary. Charnock uses a lot of words to describe God, and none are wasted. There is just no way to put God in a nutshell!

Nevertheless, I am going to try. Call this my attempt to wrap up some enormous concepts in a package more manageable to little bitty minds like mine. As I read Charnock, the following two attributes of God strike me as possibly the most important to understand, before considering his other attributes. That might change as I continue reading, but that’s how I see it presently.

God is eternal.
If God is not eternal, then that which we recognize as God is not God, for if it has a beginning, something must have caused that beginning. So if we look for the cause of that which we have called God, and investigate far enough, we must eventually find the first cause, which is necessarily uncaused, i.e., God.

God is immutable.
Immutability is a necessary characteristic of perfection. God is neither complete nor good if he is mutable. To be mutable is to be in need of improvement, or subject to corruption. If something perfect changes, it loses its perfection; if it becomes perfect, then it formerly lacked perfection. Therefore, God must be what he has always and ever will be, and, contra open theism, know all there is or ever will be to know.

So that’s the eternality and immutability of God in under 150 words. How did I do?