Chapter 19: The Patience and Longsuffering of God — Slow to Anger, Rich in Love

Think about the last time someone really tested your patience. Maybe it was a child who kept asking the same question over and over. Maybe it was a coworker who made the same mistake for the tenth time. Maybe it was a friend who broke a promise they had made to you before. Remember what that felt like? The tension in your chest. The desire to snap back. The effort it took to stay calm, to hold your tongue, to give them one more chance.

Now imagine doing that — not for a day, not for a year, but for centuries. Imagine watching someone you love deeply, someone you have rescued and cared for and showered with blessings, turn their back on you again and again and again. Imagine them running after things that will destroy them while you stand there calling out to them, begging them to come home. And imagine choosing, every single time, to hold back your righteous anger — not because you do not care, not because you are indifferent to what they are doing, but because you love them so much that you want to give them every possible chance to turn around.

That is the patience of God. And it is one of the most beautiful, most emotionally costly, and most theologically significant attributes in all of Scripture.

In this chapter, I want to show you something remarkable. When God tells us who He is — when He reveals His own name and character in the most important act of self-disclosure in the entire Old Testament — patience is right there at the center. "The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness" (Exodus 34:6, ESV). This is not a throwaway line. It is the headline. It is the first thing God wants us to know about Himself. And the phrase "slow to anger" — in Hebrew, 'erek 'appayim (אֶרֶךְ אַפַּיִם) — is one of the most vivid, emotionally rich descriptions of God in all of Scripture.

My thesis in this chapter is straightforward: God's patience is not passive indifference but an active, emotionally costly choice to withhold judgment and extend time for repentance — and it demonstrates that God's emotional engagement with His creatures is ongoing and responsive. Patience is not the absence of emotion. It is emotion at its most intense and most controlled. It is love doing the hard, exhausting work of restraint.

We will begin by looking at the Hebrew and Greek vocabulary for patience, and then we will walk through some of the most important passages in Scripture where God's patience is on display. Along the way, we will consider what divine patience tells us about the passibility question — the question of whether God truly has emotions. As we will see, patience is perhaps the most clearly emotional of all God's attributes, because patience, by definition, requires something to be patient about. It requires real provocation, real anger, and a real choice to restrain that anger over real time. A God who has no anger has nothing to restrain. A God who exists outside of time cannot be "slow" to anything. Patience, in other words, only makes sense if God genuinely feels, genuinely responds, and genuinely engages with His world over the course of history.

The Language of Patience: Hebrew and Greek Words for a God Who Waits

'Erek 'Appayim — "Long of Nostrils"

The most important Hebrew expression for God's patience is 'erek 'appayim (אֶרֶךְ אַפַּיִם). This phrase appears repeatedly in the Old Testament as one of God's defining characteristics, and it is wonderfully vivid. Let me break it down for you.

The first word, 'erek (אֶרֶךְ), simply means "long." It is a word about length, duration, and extension. The second word, 'appayim (אַפַּיִם), is the dual form of 'aph (אַף), which means "nostril" or "nose." As we discussed in Chapter 16, 'aph is one of the most common Hebrew words for anger. The connection between anger and nostrils is based on the physical experience of anger — when you are furious, your nostrils flare, you breathe heavily, your nose burns with the heat of rage. So 'aph literally means "nose" but it came to mean "anger" because of this bodily connection.

Put the two words together, and you get something wonderful. 'Erek 'appayim literally means "long of nostrils" — which sounds a little funny in English, as David Lamb has noted.¹ But the meaning is profound. It is the image of someone who takes a long, deep breath before responding. Instead of flaring the nostrils in immediate rage — instead of that sharp, explosive exhale of fury — the patient person breathes in slowly, deeply, deliberately. They take their time. They do not react in the heat of the moment. They are, quite literally, "long-nosed" rather than "short-nosed."

This is the picture Scripture paints of God. He is not quick to explode. He does not fly off the handle. When His people sin against Him — even when their sin is outrageous, even when it is a direct slap in the face — God takes a long, deep breath. He holds back. He waits. He gives them time to think, to reconsider, to come back.

Notice something important about this image. It presupposes that God actually has anger to restrain. You cannot be "slow to anger" unless anger is something you genuinely experience. The phrase 'erek 'appayim does not mean that God never gets angry. It means that He takes a long time to get there. As Lamb observes, "While humans are often quick to anger, God arrives there slowly. While God's anger is restricted, his love is unfettered — he abounds in love."² The patience of God is not the absence of anger. It is the restraint of anger. And restraint, as anyone who has tried it knows, is emotionally demanding work.

Sabhal — To Bear, to Carry, to Endure

Another important Hebrew word is sabhal (סָבַל), which means "to bear," "to carry," or "to endure a burden." This is the language of weight and effort. When we talk about God "bearing with" His people, we are using the language of someone who is carrying a heavy load. Isaiah uses this word when he describes God carrying His people: "In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them; in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; he lifted them up and carried them all the days of old" (Isaiah 63:9, ESV). The patience of God is not weightless. It is not effortless. It is bearing a burden — the burden of love that refuses to let go even when the beloved is making things unbearably difficult.

Makrothymia — "Long-Tempered"

When we turn to the New Testament, the primary Greek word for patience is makrothymia (μακροθυμία). This word is beautifully constructed. It is a compound of two words: makros (μακρός), meaning "long" or "far," and thymos (θυμός), meaning "passion," "temper," or "wrath." Literally, then, makrothymia means "long-passioned" or "long-tempered."³ It is the direct Greek equivalent of the Hebrew 'erek 'appayim — a person whose temper is long rather than short, whose fuse does not burn quickly, who endures provocation with remarkable self-control.

Jesse Morrell draws attention to an important detail here. The very word makrothymia contains within it the word thymos — passion, wrath, intense emotion. This means that the concept of longsuffering inherently assumes the reality of passion. You cannot be "long-tempered" unless you have a temper. You cannot be "long-passioned" unless you have passion. As Morrell puts it, the longsuffering of God "necessarily implies or takes for granted the temper or passion of God."⁴ This is a devastating point against the doctrine of strict impassibility — the idea that God has no passions at all. If God has no thymos, He cannot have makrothymia. If He has no anger, He cannot be slow to anger.

This word makrothymia appears in some of the most important New Testament passages about God's character. Paul uses it in Galatians 5:22 as part of the fruit of the Spirit — "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control." Notice that patience — makrothymia — is listed right alongside love, joy, and peace. These are all emotional realities. No one would say that the Spirit produces "love" in us but that this love involves no feeling. The same should be true of patience. It is an emotional virtue, not just a behavioral one.

The Verb Makrothymeō and the Noun Anochē

The related verb makrothymeō (μακροθυμέω) appears in 2 Peter 3:9, one of the most important verses on divine patience, which we will examine in detail below. It means "to be long-spirited," "to bear long," "to be patient in bearing the offenses and injuries of others," or "to be mild and slow in avenging."⁵ Notice how rich this definition is. It is not just about waiting quietly. It is about enduring injury, bearing offense, choosing not to retaliate. This is the vocabulary of emotional effort.

Another related Greek word is anochē (ἀνοχή), translated "forbearance" in Romans 2:4 and 3:25. This word means "self-restraint" or "tolerance."⁶ Of course, God's "tolerance" of sin is not an approval of wrongdoing. It is the deliberate delay of judgment in the hope that sinners will repent. It is not an acceptance of what is wrong but a control over the strong emotional disapproval God has toward the wrong.⁷ Notice the word "control" — forbearance is about controlling an emotion, not about lacking one. God's forbearance is not indifference dressed up in theological language. It is powerful emotion being deliberately, lovingly held in check.

The English Word "Longsuffering"

I want to pause here and say a word about the older English term "longsuffering," which the King James Version and other older translations use frequently. This word has fallen out of fashion in modern translations — most now use "patience" instead — but I think the older word actually captures something important that "patience" misses.

The word "longsuffering" is a compound of "long" and "suffering." It means, quite simply, to suffer for a long time. And the word "suffer" in older English has two meanings, as Morrell helpfully points out. It can mean "to feel or bear what is painful, disagreeable, or distressing." But it can also mean "to allow, to permit, not to forbid or hinder."⁸ Both meanings are relevant to God's patience.

When God is longsuffering toward humanity, both senses are in play. God allows sinners to continue sinning — He does not immediately strike them down. But this "allowing" is not painless for God. He is suffering the injury of their rebellion. He is bearing the pain of their rejection. He is enduring the hurt of watching people He loves destroy themselves. God, Morrell explains, "lovingly chooses to suffer wrong and injury in the hopes that men will repent instead of cutting off man as soon as man sins against Him and brings Him pain."⁹ Longsuffering is, as the word itself suggests, to be patient in painful circumstances. It is to suffer long.

This is a profoundly passibilist concept. If God is truly impassible — if He cannot suffer, cannot be injured, cannot feel pain from the actions of His creatures — then in what meaningful sense can He be "longsuffering"? The very word implies that patience involves real suffering, real emotional cost. A God who feels nothing has nothing to suffer long about.

Patience at the Center: The Exodus 34:6 Formula

Now that we have our vocabulary in place, let us turn to the most important passage on divine patience — and, indeed, one of the most important passages in all of Scripture about the character of God.

In Exodus 34:6–7, God reveals His own name and character to Moses. This takes place in one of the most dramatic moments in Israel's history. Just two chapters earlier, in Exodus 32, the people of Israel had committed the worst possible sin — the golden calf. While Moses was on Mount Sinai receiving the covenant from God, the people below had made an idol and were worshiping it. God's anger burned hot. He said to Moses, "Let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them" (Exodus 32:10, ESV). As we discussed in Chapter 16, this was a genuine emotional response — real anger at a real offense.

Moses interceded. God relented. And then, in Exodus 33–34, we have the remarkable scene where Moses asks to see God's glory, and God responds by proclaiming His name:

I have already discussed this passage in Chapter 13, where we focused on the compassion and mercy language. But here I want to draw your attention to the phrase that sits right in the middle of this formula: 'erek 'appayim — "slow to anger." Notice the context. God has just been provoked to burning fury by the golden calf. His anger was so intense that He considered destroying the entire nation. And yet, when He reveals His name — when He tells Moses and all of history who He truly is — He does not lead with anger. He leads with mercy. He leads with grace. And He puts patience right at the heart of His identity.

Think about what this means. God had every right to be angry. The golden calf was a monstrous betrayal. God had rescued Israel from slavery, parted the Red Sea, fed them with manna, and given them His covenant — and their response was to melt down their jewelry and worship a cow. If any moment in history called for immediate, explosive wrath, this was it. And yet God's anger, while real and justified, did not define Him. What defined Him was patience. When He spoke His own name into existence, what came out was not "the God of wrath" but "the God who is slow to anger."

As Lamb observes, this description comes from the mouth of God Himself. God uses highly emotional terms to introduce Himself. "He is not embarrassed about his emotions — not even anger. But here and elsewhere he declares himself to be an emotional God."¹⁰ And the Old Testament emphasizes this by repeating versions of this formula across every genre — in law (Numbers 14:18), in history (Nehemiah 9:17), in poetry (Psalms 86:15; 103:8; 145:8), and in prophecy (Joel 2:13; Jonah 4:2; Nahum 1:3).¹¹ This is not one author's personal opinion about God. It is the consistent testimony of the entire Old Testament, repeated so many times and in so many different contexts that it becomes, quite simply, the definitive statement of who God is.

I find this deeply moving. God is compassion. God is slowness to anger. God is abundant love. As Lamb puts it, "Emotions are a fundamental, not peripheral, aspect of God's character."¹² And patience — that costly, emotionally demanding work of holding back — is at the very center of the picture.

The Patience of God in Israel's Story: Nehemiah 9

If the Exodus 34:6 formula tells us who God is, then the book of Nehemiah shows us what that looks like in practice — century after century of God bearing with a rebellious people. Nehemiah 9 is one of the most remarkable chapters in the Bible. It is a long prayer of confession offered by the Levites, and it surveys the entire history of Israel from creation to the post-exilic period. What emerges is a stunning portrait of a patient God dealing with an impatient, ungrateful, and stubbornly rebellious people.

The prayer begins by acknowledging God's goodness in creation and in calling Abraham (Nehemiah 9:6–8). It moves through the exodus from Egypt, the giving of the law at Sinai, the provision in the wilderness, and the conquest of Canaan. But the recurring theme is not Israel's faithfulness. It is Israel's faithlessness — and God's refusal to give up on them.

There it is again — the Exodus 34:6 formula, cited in the context of outrageous rebellion. Israel had literally tried to go back to slavery in Egypt. They had stiffened their necks — a metaphor for stubborn, mule-like defiance. They had rejected everything God had done for them. And God's response? He did not forsake them. He was "ready to forgive." He was slow to anger. He held on.

The prayer continues through the period of the golden calf (9:18), God's provision despite their idolatry (9:19–21), the conquest (9:22–25), and then the devastating cycle of sin that defined the era of the judges:

This is the pattern: rebellion, suffering, crying out, and God's merciful deliverance. Over and over and over again. The patience involved here is not a one-time act of restraint. It is a centuries-long commitment to a relationship that keeps being broken from one side.

And then comes the climax of the prayer — a summary of God's patience that takes my breath away every time I read it:

"Many years you bore with them." Stop and sit with that sentence for a moment. This is not the language of a God who is serene and unbothered. This is the language of a God who is carrying a heavy weight. The word "bore" (from the Hebrew nasa', נָשָׂא, meaning to bear, carry, or lift up) is the vocabulary of burden. God bore with them. He carried the weight of their rebellion on His shoulders. He endured — year after year, decade after decade, century after century — the pain of being rejected by the people He loved.

Notice the emotional layering in this passage. God's patience is not isolated from His other emotions — it is intertwined with them. He warned them "by your Spirit through your prophets" (9:30) — this is the language of passionate, persistent communication. He "gave them into the hand of the peoples of the lands" (9:30) — this is discipline, which as any parent knows is emotionally painful for the disciplinarian as well as the disciplined. And even then, "in your great mercies you did not make an end of them" (9:31). Patience, mercy, warning, discipline, and enduring love — all woven together in a single, breathtaking portrait of God's emotional engagement with His people.

The Patience of God in the Time of the Judges

Nehemiah 9 gives us the summary. But the details are found throughout the historical books. The period of the judges is perhaps the single best illustration of divine patience in action, because it presents the same cycle repeating itself over and over again for roughly three hundred years.

Here is what provocation looks like. God had rescued His people from slavery. He had performed miracles on their behalf. He had made a covenant with them. And they turned around and worshiped the gods of the people God had just defeated for them. This is like a husband who rescues his wife from a burning building, carries her to safety, and then watches her run back inside to be with someone else. The provocation is not abstract. It is deeply, profoundly personal.

And yet, when they cried out to God in their suffering, what did He do? "Then the LORD raised up judges, who saved them out of the hand of those who plundered them" (Judges 2:16, ESV). And again: "Whenever the LORD raised up judges for them, the LORD was with the judge, and he saved them from the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge. For the LORD was moved to pity by their groaning because of those who afflicted and oppressed them" (Judges 2:18, ESV).

The word translated "moved to pity" here is the Hebrew nacham (נָחַם), which can mean "to be sorry," "to have compassion," or "to be moved to pity."¹³ What moved God to act was not a cold calculation that deliverance was strategically advantageous. What moved Him was the sound of their groaning. He heard their suffering and He was moved — emotionally moved — to respond. This is patience in action: the God who had every right to leave them in their suffering chose instead to rescue them, again and again, because their groaning reached His heart.

The pattern repeated itself for generations. As Andrew Schmutzer notes in his analysis of this period, "God remains committed to a relationship that hurts him."¹⁴ This is the uncomfortable truth about divine patience: it is not painless. Every cycle of rebellion and deliverance cost God something. Every time He extended mercy to a people who would soon betray Him again, He was choosing to endure the pain of that future betrayal rather than end the relationship. That is what longsuffering means. It means suffering — long.

An Unrighteous King and an Unchanged God: 2 Kings 13

One of the most remarkable examples of God's patience in the Old Testament involves a king who, by all accounts, did not deserve it. In 2 Kings 13, we read about King Jehoahaz of Israel — a king who "did what was evil in the sight of the LORD and followed the sins of Jeroboam" (2 Kings 13:2, ESV). God's anger burned against Israel, and He gave them into the hand of the Syrian king for years. But when Jehoahaz prayed to God — this king who had led Israel into evil — something astonishing happened:

And then the text gives us the theological explanation for why God would respond to the prayer of such a wicked king:

As Lamb points out, this is extraordinary. We might expect God to answer the prayers of righteous people — the Elijahs and the Daniels. But here God answers the prayer of an evil king. "The prayer of an evil ruler still prompted our highly compassionate God to respond in mercy."¹⁵ Notice the language: "The LORD was gracious (hanan, חָנַן) to them and had compassion (raham, רָחַם) on them." These are the very words from the Exodus 34:6 formula. Even in the face of persistent evil, God's patience and compassion are not exhausted. He turns toward His people, not away from them.

I find this story deeply encouraging — and I suspect Lamb does too, because he writes, "I find this story quite encouraging, since I'm more likely to identify with unrighteous Jehoahaz than righteous Elijah."¹⁶ Most of us are more like Jehoahaz than Elijah. We are not heroes of the faith. We are imperfect, inconsistent, sometimes deeply unfaithful people who keep coming back to God hoping He has not given up on us. And the testimony of Scripture, over and over, is that He has not. His patience is wider, deeper, and longer-lasting than our ability to exhaust it.

The Patience of Jonah's God: When We Resent God's Patience

We explored the book of Jonah in detail in Chapter 13, looking at God's compassion for the Ninevites. But the book of Jonah is equally important for what it tells us about patience — and about the fact that not everyone appreciates God's patience.

The whole drama of the book centers on the tension between God's patience and Jonah's impatience. God sends Jonah to preach judgment to Nineveh — the capital of Assyria, the brutal empire that had terrorized Israel. Jonah does not want to go. Not because he is afraid, but because he knows what will happen. He knows that if the Ninevites repent, God will relent. And Jonah does not want God to relent. He wants God to destroy Nineveh.

Sure enough, when Jonah finally preaches in Nineveh, the people repent — from the king all the way down to the common people. "When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it" (Jonah 3:10, ESV). God was patient with an entire pagan city. He gave them time. He gave them warning. And when they responded, He held back His judgment.

Here is the Exodus 34:6 formula again — but this time quoted as a complaint! Jonah knows exactly who God is. He knows that God is "slow to anger." He knows that God is patient. And he resents it. He resents that God is willing to extend to Israel's enemies the same patience and mercy that He extends to Israel.

This is a powerful reminder that God's patience is not always welcome — especially when it is directed at people we think deserve judgment. We want God to be patient with us, but we are not always enthusiastic about God being patient with others, especially those who have hurt us or those we love. Jonah wanted justice, not patience. He wanted destruction, not delay. And God gently confronted him with a question that cuts to the heart of the matter: "Should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?" (Jonah 4:11, ESV).

God's patience is rooted in His compassion for people — even people who are deeply sinful, even people who are our enemies, even people who do not yet know the difference between right and wrong. The patience of God is universal. It extends to everyone. And that is both the glory and the scandal of divine patience.

The Psalms: The Patience Formula Sung

The Exodus 34:6 formula does not just appear in narrative texts. It echoes throughout the Psalms — the songbook of Israel's worship. The psalmists sing about God's patience because it is central to their experience of God. Let us walk through several of these appearances.

Psalm 86:15 says: "But you, O Lord, are a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness" (ESV). This is a psalm of David, a personal prayer in a time of distress. When David needs to remind himself of who God is, he goes straight to the patience formula. God is slow to anger. God abounds in love. That is the bedrock.

Psalm 103:8 says: "The LORD is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love" (ESV). This psalm is one of the great hymns of praise in the Bible, and it continues with a remarkable statement about the relationship between God's anger and His patience: "He will not always chide, nor will he keep his anger forever. He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities" (Psalm 103:9–10, ESV). Here we see the practical outworking of patience: God's anger does not last forever. He does not hold grudges. He does not give us what our sins actually deserve. Instead, "as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us" (Psalm 103:12, ESV).

And then comes one of the most tender images in the entire psalm: "As a father shows compassion to his children, so the LORD shows compassion to those who fear him. For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust" (Psalm 103:13–14, ESV). God's patience is rooted in His understanding of our weakness. He knows we are fragile. He knows we are dust. He knows we are going to fail. And He chooses to be patient with us anyway — not because He is indifferent to our failures but because He understands them and loves us despite them.

Psalm 145:8 says: "The LORD is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love" (ESV). And the very next verse adds: "The LORD is good to all, and his mercy is over all that he has made" (Psalm 145:9, ESV). Notice the universality: God's patience and mercy are not limited to Israel. They extend to "all that he has made." This is consistent with the message of Jonah — God's patience reaches even the Ninevites, even the pagans, even those outside the covenant.

Joel and Nahum: Patience in the Prophets

The prophet Joel uses the formula in the context of a call to repentance: "Return to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love; and he relents over disaster" (Joel 2:13, ESV). Joel is calling the people back to God in the midst of a devastating locust plague. And the basis for his call is God's character — specifically, God's patience. The very fact that God is slow to anger means that there is still time to repent. The door is still open. The invitation is still on the table.

Nahum is an interesting case. This prophet is writing about the coming destruction of Nineveh — the same city that had repented in Jonah's day but had since returned to its violent ways. Even here, in a book announcing judgment, the prophet pauses to acknowledge God's patience: "The LORD is slow to anger and great in power, and the LORD will by no means clear the guilty" (Nahum 1:3, ESV). Even when judgment is inevitable, God's slowness to anger is still part of the picture. Nineveh is not being judged hastily. It is being judged after centuries of patience have been exhausted.

This is an important balance. God's patience is real, but it is not infinite in the sense that it never arrives at judgment. Patience means that judgment is delayed, not that it is canceled. Slowness to anger is not the absence of anger. The God who is 'erek 'appayim is still a God who has 'appayim — who has real, genuine anger at genuine evil. Patience does not eliminate justice; it delays justice in order to create space for mercy.

Numbers 14: When Moses Appealed to God's Patience

One of the most dramatic illustrations of divine patience in the entire Old Testament comes in Numbers 14, and it deserves careful attention because it shows us something remarkable: God's patience can be appealed to. It is not an impersonal mechanism. It is a character trait that can be invoked in prayer — and God responds.

The context is the crisis at Kadesh Barnea. Israel has sent twelve spies into the Promised Land. Ten of them return with a terrifying report: the land is full of giants. The people cannot be conquered. It is hopeless. Only Joshua and Caleb dissent, insisting that God is with them and the land can be taken. But the people side with the majority. They weep. They complain. And then they do something breathtaking in its audacity — they say, "Let us choose a leader and go back to Egypt" (Numbers 14:4, ESV). Back to Egypt. Back to slavery. Back to the very bondage God had miraculously delivered them from. As Schmutzer notes, this is "an insurrection against God and Moses" and also "God's broken marriage" — God experiences "the pain of a divorce."²¹

God's response is fierce: "How long will this people despise me? And how long will they not believe in me, in spite of all the signs that I have done among them? I will strike them with the pestilence and disinherit them" (Numbers 14:11–12, ESV). Notice the emotion in God's voice. This is not calm, detached observation. These are the words of a God who has been deeply hurt. "How long?" is the language of lament — language that, as Schmutzer observes, is always "an integral part of the wrath of God" and demonstrates "something about the God who suffers with his people."²²

And then Moses does something extraordinary. He appeals to God's own self-revealed character — the very formula from Exodus 34:6:

Moses is quoting God's own words back to Him. He is saying, in effect, "You said You are slow to anger. You said You abound in steadfast love. I am asking You to be who You said You are." And God's response? "Then the LORD said, 'I have pardoned, according to your word'" (Numbers 14:20, ESV).

I find this exchange deeply moving — and theologically significant. God's patience is not a mere abstraction. It is a living, active, invocable reality. Moses can appeal to it. God can respond to that appeal. There is a real conversation happening here, a real relational exchange in which God's patience is engaged, tested, and ultimately vindicated. This is not the portrait of a God who has eternally decreed every detail in advance and is simply executing a script. This is the portrait of a God whose patience is part of His character and can be appealed to in real time by real people making real intercessions.

Note also that God's pardon is not without consequences. The people are forgiven, but the generation that refused to trust God will not enter the Promised Land (Numbers 14:22–23). Patience delays judgment; it does not always eliminate consequences. God's patience gave them every opportunity to trust Him. They refused. And so while God's mercy spared them from immediate destruction, their lack of faith still bore its natural fruit. This is an important lesson: God's patience is not a blank check. It is an invitation to repentance — and that invitation can be accepted or rejected.

Psalm 78: A Historical Meditation on Divine Patience

Psalm 78 is one of the great historical psalms — a long meditation on God's dealings with Israel from Egypt through the monarchy. What makes it relevant to our topic is its sustained portrait of God's patience in the face of repeated provocation. The psalmist writes:

The word "grieved" here is the Hebrew 'atsav (עָצַב), the same word used in Genesis 6:6 of God being "grieved to his heart" by human wickedness (as we discussed in Chapter 15). This tells us that Israel's rebellion was not merely an offense against divine law. It was an assault on divine feeling. God was grieved — hurt, pained, wounded — by what His people were doing. And yet He continued to be patient with them.

Look at the language here. God "restrained his anger often." The Hebrew literally says He turned back or diverted His anger — He redirected it, held it in check, kept it from reaching full expression. And He did this "often" — not once, not twice, but over and over and over again. This is patience as a habitual, repeated, ongoing practice. Every time Israel sinned, God had a choice: let His anger loose, or restrain it. And "often" — most of the time — He chose restraint.

Why? Because "he remembered that they were but flesh." God's patience is connected to His understanding of human frailty. He knows we are weak. He knows we are mortal — "a wind that passes and comes not again." And in that knowledge, He finds a reason for patience. He does not hold us to the standard of angels. He takes into account our dust-like nature and adjusts His response accordingly. This is not weakness. It is wisdom. It is the wisdom of a God who knows exactly what we are made of and loves us anyway.

The word translated "compassionate" in verse 38 is rahum (רַחוּם) — the same adjective used in the Exodus 34:6 formula. Once again, we see that patience and compassion are inseparable. God restrains His anger because He is compassionate. Compassion fuels patience. And patience makes room for mercy. The whole cluster of divine emotions — compassion, patience, mercy, love — works together as a single, unified expression of God's heart toward His struggling, failing, but still-beloved people.

The New Testament: God's Patience Revealed in Christ

Romans 2:4 — The Kindness That Leads to Repentance

When we turn to the New Testament, we find the same picture of divine patience, but with an important new development: God's patience is now explicitly linked to His desire for human salvation.

In Romans 2:4, Paul asks a devastating question: "Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?" (ESV). Three words pile up here — kindness (chrēstotēs, χρηστότης), forbearance (anochē, ἀνοχή), and patience (makrothymia, μακροθυμία). Together, they paint a picture of a God who is pouring out extraordinary restraint and generosity toward sinners, not because He approves of their sin but because He wants them to change.

Paul's question is a challenge. Some people see God's patience and draw the wrong conclusion. They think, "God must not really care about my sin. If He did, He would have punished me by now." But that is like a child who concludes that their parents do not care about their behavior because they have not been punished yet. The truth is the opposite. The parents care deeply. They are giving the child time to come around on their own. And the longer they wait, the more it costs them emotionally. The same is true of God. His patience is not evidence of indifference. It is evidence of love — love that is costly, love that endures, love that gives every opportunity for change.

Romans 9:22 — Patience Even with "Vessels of Wrath"

Paul returns to the theme of divine patience in Romans 9:22: "What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction?" (ESV). This is a theologically complex verse, and I do not want to wade too deeply into the debates about predestination that swirl around Romans 9 (those belong to other books and other discussions). But the key phrase for our purposes is "endured with much patience" (or "much longsuffering," as the KJV puts it).

The word "endured" (the Greek verb pherō, φέρω, meaning "to bear" or "to carry") echoes the Old Testament language of God bearing with His people. And the phrase "much patience" (makrothymia) tells us that this endurance is emotionally costly. God is not casually observing human rebellion from a comfortable distance. He is bearing it. Carrying it. Enduring it. And doing so with extraordinary self-restraint.

1 Timothy 1:16 — Paul as the Exhibit of Patience

Paul offers himself as a personal exhibit of God's patience in 1 Timothy 1:16: "But I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life" (ESV). Paul was a persecutor of the church. He hunted down Christians. He approved of Stephen's murder. And yet God was patient with him — not just tolerant, but actively pursuing him, calling him, and transforming him from persecutor to apostle. Paul sees his own conversion as a showcase of divine patience. If God can be patient with someone like Paul — someone who actively tried to destroy the church — then surely God's patience is available to anyone.

Romans 3:25 — The Forbearance of God and the Cross

There is one more passage in Romans that deserves attention here. In Romans 3:25, Paul writes that God "put forward [Jesus] as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins" (ESV). The word "forbearance" here is anochē (ἀνοχή) — the same word we encountered earlier, meaning "self-restraint" or "tolerance."

Paul is making a profound theological point. Throughout the Old Testament, God had been patient with human sin. He had "passed over" sins — not ignoring them, not pretending they did not matter, but delaying the full consequences. Generation after generation, God had exercised forbearance, holding back the judgment that sin deserved. But this created a theological problem: if God is just, how can He let sin go unpunished? Would not centuries of forbearance make God look unjust — as though He did not really care about sin after all?

Paul's answer is the cross. At the cross, God's patience and God's justice finally meet. All those centuries of forbearance were not an indication that God was soft on sin. They were a foreshadowing of the moment when God would deal with sin decisively and comprehensively through the death of His Son. The cross is where God's patience pays off — where all that accumulated forbearance finds its resolution. God was patient for centuries because He had a plan. He was holding back judgment not because He lacked the will to judge but because He was pointing history toward the one act that would satisfy both His justice and His mercy simultaneously.

This means that God's patience across the Old Testament was not aimless or purposeless. It was redemptive. Every century of forbearance was a step closer to Calvary. Every delay of judgment was a sign pointing forward to the cross. God's patience, in other words, was always headed somewhere. It was always aimed at the ultimate act of saving love. And this tells us something important about the nature of divine patience: it is purposeful, redemptive, and costly. God bore with centuries of human sin — not passively, not indifferently, but actively, lovingly, and at great emotional cost to Himself — because He was working toward the day when sin would be dealt with once and for all.

2 Peter 3:9 — The Heart of Divine Patience

Now we come to what I believe is the single most important New Testament verse on divine patience:

Peter is writing to Christians who are wondering why Jesus has not returned yet. Some are beginning to mock: "Where is the promise of his coming?" (2 Peter 3:4). The scoffers think that the delay means the promise has failed. Peter's answer is that the delay is not failure — it is patience. God is not late. He is waiting. And He is waiting because He loves people and does not want them to perish.

First, God's patience is purposeful. It is not aimless waiting. It is not killing time. God's patience has a goal: the salvation of as many people as possible. He is holding back the final judgment because every day that passes is another day in which someone might repent.

Second, God's patience is emotionally motivated. The verse says God is "not wishing that any should perish." The word "wishing" (boulomai, βούλομαι) is a word of desire and intention. God does not want people to perish. The thought of people being lost is contrary to His desire. This is emotional language. A God who has no desires, no wants, no feelings about the eternal destiny of His creatures could not be described this way.

Third, God's patience is universal in scope. Peter says God does not wish that "any" (tinas, τινάς) should perish, but that "all" (pantas, πάντας) should come to repentance. This is one of those texts that raises important questions about the scope of God's saving will — questions that my companion book on postmortem salvation explores in detail. If God genuinely wants all people to repent, and if some people die without having repented, does God's patience extend beyond death? I believe this is a question worth taking seriously, even if we must be cautious about the answers. What we can say with confidence is that 2 Peter 3:9 reveals a God whose patience is driven by a universal, saving desire — a God who is genuinely reluctant to bring judgment because He genuinely wants people to be saved.

Fourth, Peter adds an additional remarkable statement in 2 Peter 3:15: "And count the patience of our Lord as salvation" (ESV). Think about that phrase. The patience of God is salvation. Not just the precursor to salvation. Not just the context for salvation. It is salvation itself — because every moment of God's patience is a moment in which the door of mercy remains open, in which the offer of grace is still available, in which someone who is far from God can still come home.

1 Peter 3:20 — The Patience of God in Noah's Day

Peter also points us back to the story of Noah as an illustration of divine patience: "When God's patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared" (1 Peter 3:20, ESV). The days of Noah are described in Genesis 6 as a time of extraordinary human wickedness — "every intention of the thoughts of [man's] heart was only evil continually" (Genesis 6:5, ESV). And yet God did not bring the flood immediately. He waited. The ark took a long time to build — tradition suggests many years, perhaps over a century. All that time, God's patience was holding back judgment. All that time, the opportunity for repentance was open.

As we discussed in Chapter 15, this is also the period when "the LORD regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart" (Genesis 6:6, ESV). God's patience during Noah's day was not painless patience. It was grief-stricken patience. God was watching the entire human race descend into corruption, and He was hurt by it — genuinely, deeply hurt. And yet He waited. He gave them time. His patience, even in the face of that kind of heartbreak, was extraordinary.

The Emotional Cost of Patience

I have been making this point throughout the chapter, but I want to develop it more fully here because it is crucial to the passibility argument. Patience is not the absence of anger. It is the control of anger. And controlling anger is hard work.

Think about it in human terms. When someone wrongs you — when they lie to you, betray your trust, or hurt someone you love — your natural response is anger. You want to act. You want to respond. You want to do something about it. Patience means choosing not to do what your anger demands. It means biting your tongue. Counting to ten. Walking away. Taking a deep breath — a long, slow breath, like God's 'erek 'appayim. And anyone who has ever tried to do this knows that it is emotionally exhausting. Patience is not passive. It is intensely active. It is the deliberate, costly, moment-by-moment choice to hold back a response that your emotions are demanding you make.

Now apply that to God — but multiply it by infinity. God is not dealing with a single offense or a single offender. He is dealing with the accumulated rebellion of the entire human race, stretching across all of history. Every act of cruelty, every act of injustice, every act of idolatry, every act of indifference to His love — God sees all of it, feels all of it, and chooses to be patient with all of it. Not because He does not care. Not because He does not notice. But because He loves the offenders and wants them to repent.

As we noted above, God's patience does not mean He is unaware of sin or unaffected by rebellion. It means He is choosing to withhold the judgment that His anger warrants because His love is giving people time to repent. This is emotionally costly. Anyone who has ever bitten their tongue, counted to ten, or chosen not to respond to a provocation knows that patience requires emotional effort. God's patience is not effortless serenity. It is love doing the hard work of restraint.

This is why I believe patience may be one of the strongest arguments for the passibility of God — the reality of genuine emotions in God. Let me explain why in the next section.

Patience and the Passibility of God

Throughout this chapter, I have been hinting at the implications of divine patience for the passibility question. Now let me state those implications directly.

If patience is real — if it is what Scripture describes it as — then patience requires at least three things:

First, patience requires real anger that is genuinely restrained. The phrase 'erek 'appayim means "slow to anger," which presupposes that anger is a reality. A God who has no anger has nothing to be slow about. If God is strictly impassible — if He literally has no passions, no emotional responses to the world — then "slow to anger" becomes meaningless. You cannot restrain what does not exist. The entire concept of patience collapses without real emotion underlying it.

Second, patience requires real time in which the restraint takes place. "Slowness" is inherently a temporal concept. To be "slow" to something means that it takes time to arrive at it. A God who exists outside of time — in a timeless, eternal "now" where there is no succession, no before and after — cannot be "slow" to anything. He cannot wait, because waiting requires the passage of time. He cannot delay judgment, because delay requires a temporal sequence in which the judgment is postponed to a later moment. As I have argued in my companion volume on God and time, the biblical portrait of divine patience is one of the strongest reasons for believing that God genuinely experiences temporal succession.¹⁷

Third, patience requires genuine responsiveness to the world. God's patience is not a preprogrammed setting that operates regardless of what His creatures do. It is a response to real provocation. God is patient because people are sinning — and His patience adjusts to what they do. When people repent, God relents (Jonah 3:10). When people persist in rebellion, God eventually brings judgment (Nahum 1:3). When people cry out in their suffering, God is moved to pity (Judges 2:18). This is the language of responsive, interactive relationship — not the language of a God who is eternally, immutably, impassibly set in one unchanging mode.

Let me be clear about what I am and what I am not saying here. I am not saying that God is out of control or that His patience might run out unpredictably. God's patience is perfectly under His sovereign control. He is never overwhelmed by His emotions, never surprised by human behavior, and never forced to act against His own character. What I am saying is that God's patience is a genuine emotional experience — a real, felt, lived experience of restraining real anger over real time in response to real provocation. This is what the biblical language means. This is what 'erek 'appayim describes. And it only works if God is passible — if He genuinely has emotions that are genuinely responsive to the world.

The Impassibilist Challenge: Can an Emotionless God Be Patient?

I want to be fair to the other side here, as I have tried to be throughout this book. The classical theist who holds to strict impassibility will want to say something like this: "God's patience is a metaphor. When Scripture says God is 'slow to anger,' it is describing the effect of God's actions from our perspective, not a real emotional experience within God. From our point of view, it looks like God is patiently restraining anger. But from God's eternal perspective, there is no anger, no restraint, and no temporal delay. God eternally and immutably wills to permit sin for a time and then to judge it. The appearance of patience is simply how this eternal decree unfolds in time."

This is the kind of move that Anselm made when he discussed compassion, as we saw in Chapter 13. Anselm argued that God is compassionate "in terms of our experience" but not "in terms of his own being."¹⁸ The same logic would apply to patience: God appears patient from our perspective, but does not actually experience patience in Himself.

First, it empties the biblical language of any real content. When the Bible says God is "slow to anger," it is not describing how things look from our limited perspective. It is describing who God actually is. The Exodus 34:6 formula is a self-revelation — God telling us His own name, His own character, His own identity. If "slow to anger" does not describe something real about God's inner life, then God's self-revelation is misleading. God is telling us He is something He is not. This is a serious theological problem.

Second, it makes the repeated emphasis on patience inexplicable. If patience is just a metaphor for how God's eternal decree appears from our temporal perspective, why does Scripture emphasize it so heavily? Why does God include it in His self-revealed name? Why is it repeated across every genre of Old Testament literature? Why does the New Testament give it such prominent place? If patience is not a genuine divine experience, then the Bible is devoting an enormous amount of attention to an illusion.

Third, it undermines the pastoral power of divine patience. When a struggling believer reads 2 Peter 3:9 and is comforted that God is patient with them — not wanting them to perish — is that comfort based on a fiction? If God does not actually experience patience, does not actually feel the tension between His holiness and His love, does not actually choose to wait and give people more time — then the comfort is illusory. We are being comforted by a metaphor, not by a reality. I believe the Bible invites us to find real comfort in a real attribute of a real God — a God who genuinely, truly, experientially is patient with us.

Rob Lister, in his thoughtful mediating work, argues that God's emotional life unfolds "in the temporally progressive covenantal context."¹⁹ In other words, even while God eternally knows and ordains His plan, His experience of that plan — including His emotional responses — unfolds in time. I find this a helpful framework. It preserves God's sovereignty and foreknowledge while allowing for genuine divine experience, including the experience of patience. God is not surprised by human rebellion — He has always known it was coming. But knowing that something is coming is not the same as experiencing it when it arrives. A parent who knows their teenager is going to make bad choices still feels the pain when those choices are actually made. The foreknowledge does not eliminate the experience. In the same way, God's foreknowledge does not eliminate His experience of patience. He genuinely experiences the tension of holding back judgment, even though He has always known that He would do so.²⁰

Patience and the Other Emotions of God

Before we move toward our conclusion, I want to briefly show how patience connects with the other divine emotions we have explored in this book. Patience is not an isolated attribute. It is deeply interwoven with everything else we know about God's emotional life.

Patience and love: God's patience is the expression of His love in the face of provocation. As 1 Corinthians 13:4 says, "Love is patient and kind." Patience is what love looks like when the beloved is being difficult. God's patience with sinners is the temporal extension of His eternal love — it is love stretched out across time, giving people room to respond. (See Chapter 12 for the full treatment of God's love.)

Patience and compassion: We saw in Chapter 13 that God's compassion (raham, רָחַם) is a deep, visceral, gut-level response to suffering. Patience and compassion are closely linked because both involve God choosing to act in mercy rather than judgment. The Exodus 34:6 formula places them side by side — "merciful and gracious, slow to anger" — because they are different facets of the same diamond. God is compassionate because He feels the suffering of His people, and He is patient because He wants to give them every opportunity to stop causing that suffering.

Patience and anger: This is perhaps the most important connection. As we discussed in Chapter 16, God's anger is real, righteous, and responsive. Patience does not eliminate anger — it delays it. Patience is anger being held in check by love. The two exist in dynamic tension: God's anger says, "This sin must be punished." God's patience says, "Not yet. Give them more time." And this tension is itself an emotional experience — a real, felt tension within the heart of God.

Patience and grief: As we discussed in Chapter 15, God grieves over human sin. Genesis 6:6 tells us that God was "grieved to his heart" by human wickedness in Noah's day. And yet God waited — He was patient even while He was grieving. This combination of grief and patience is one of the most poignant aspects of God's emotional life. He is simultaneously hurt by our sin and willing to endure that hurt in order to give us time to repent.

Patience and joy: When patience bears fruit — when the person God has been patiently waiting for finally turns around and comes home — the result is joy. This is the connection Jesus draws in the parables of Luke 15 (see Chapter 14). The shepherd who patiently searches for the lost sheep, the woman who patiently sweeps for the lost coin, the father who patiently waits for the prodigal son — they all burst into joy when the lost is found. Patience, in other words, is what happens between God's love and God's joy. It is the waiting period, the holding-on period, the "not yet" that makes the "finally!" so sweet.

What God's Patience Means for Us

I want to close this chapter with some reflections on what divine patience means for how we live and how we relate to God.

First, God's patience means that it is never too late to come back. If you have been running from God — if you have been ignoring His call, rejecting His love, living in rebellion against Him — the fact that you are still alive means that God's patience is still extended toward you. The door is still open. The invitation is still on the table. As Paul says, "God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance" (Romans 2:4). Do not mistake His patience for indifference. He is waiting for you — not because He does not care, but because He does.

Second, God's patience is a model for our patience with others. Paul lists patience as a fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22), and he commands believers to "be patient with them all" (1 Thessalonians 5:14, ESV). Our patience with difficult people is meant to reflect God's patience with us. When we are tempted to give up on someone — to write them off, to stop extending grace, to decide they are beyond hope — we should remember how long God has been patient with us. As we discussed briefly in Chapter 31's topic of imitating God, we are called to mirror the divine character. And one of the most important things we can mirror is God's patience — His willingness to keep extending mercy long after most people would have given up.

Third, God's patience should lead to gratitude, not presumption. Paul's warning in Romans 2:4 is aimed at people who take God's patience for granted — who use His patience as an excuse to keep sinning. "God hasn't punished me yet, so He must not really mind." This is a dangerous misunderstanding. God's patience is not permission to sin. It is an invitation to repent. And while God is remarkably, astonishingly, almost unbelievably patient, patience does have an endpoint. As Nahum 1:3 reminds us, the God who is "slow to anger" is also "great in power" and "will by no means clear the guilty." Justice delayed is not justice denied. The day of reckoning will come. God's patience is meant to lead us to that reckoning prepared — not unprepared.

Fourth, God's patience gives us hope in our own struggles with sin. If you are a believer who keeps falling into the same sin, who keeps confessing and then stumbling again, who wonders whether God has finally had enough — take heart. God is 'erek 'appayim. He is long-nosed. He takes a long, deep breath. He does not give up on you just because you keep falling. The fact that He is patient does not mean that your sin does not matter — it does. But it means that His commitment to you is stronger than your failure. His patience outlasts your weakness.

Fifth, and finally, God's patience reminds us that He is a God of deep, genuine, costly emotion. A God who is patient is a God who cares. A God who endures is a God who feels. A God who is longsuffering is a God who suffers — not because He is weak, not because the world has power over Him, but because He has chosen to bind Himself to His creation in love. He has chosen to feel the pain of our rebellion. He has chosen to bear the weight of our sin. He has chosen to wait, and wait, and wait — not because He has to, but because He loves us.

Conclusion: The God Who Waits

In this chapter, we have explored the patience and longsuffering of God — an attribute that sits at the very center of God's self-revealed character in Exodus 34:6. We have seen the rich vocabulary of patience in both Hebrew ('erek 'appayim, sabhal) and Greek (makrothymia, anochē, makrothymeō). We have walked through the Old Testament history of divine patience, from the golden calf to the period of the judges to the post-exilic confession of Nehemiah 9. We have looked at New Testament passages that reveal the emotional motivation behind divine patience — especially 2 Peter 3:9, which tells us that God is patient because He does not want anyone to perish.

And we have seen that patience is a profoundly emotional attribute. It requires real anger to restrain, real time in which to exercise restraint, and real responsiveness to the actions of others. A God without emotions has nothing to be patient about. A God without temporality cannot be "slow" to anything. A God without genuine engagement with His world cannot "bear with" His people in any meaningful sense. Patience, in other words, is one of the strongest biblical arguments for the passibility of God — for the reality of genuine divine emotions that are genuinely responsive to the world.

God is patient. He takes a long, deep breath. He holds back. He waits. He endures. He bears with us in our weakness, our rebellion, and our failure. And He does all of this not because He is indifferent to what we are doing, but because He loves us with a love that simply refuses to let go.

That is the kind of God we serve. A God who waits — not because He has to, but because His love is stronger than His anger, deeper than His pain, and longer than our capacity to test it.

May we never take such patience for granted. And may we learn to extend to others even a fraction of the patience that God has so lavishly extended to us.

¹ David T. Lamb, The Emotions of God: Making Sense of a God Who Hates, Weeps, and Loves (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2022), 59. Lamb notes the vivid and somewhat humorous image of God having a "big nose" — an image that is deeply meaningful when understood in its original cultural context. ↩

² Lamb, Emotions of God, 59. ↩

³ Jesse Morrell, The Emotions of God: How Man Can Bless or Hurt God (Open Air Outreach, 2016), "The Divine Longsuffering of God." Morrell provides a helpful breakdown of the compound structure of makrothymia, noting that makros means "long" or "far" and thymos means "passion" or "wrath." ↩

⁴ Morrell, Emotions of God, "The Divine Longsuffering of God." ↩

⁵ Joseph H. Thayer, Thayer's Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995), s.v. "μακροθυμέω." Thayer defines the word as "to be of a long spirit, not to lose heart... to persevere patiently and bravely in enduring misfortunes and troubles... to be patient in bearing the offenses and injuries of others... to be mild and slow in avenging... to be longsuffering, slow to anger, slow to punish." ↩

⁶ James Strong, Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2007), s.v. "ἀνοχή." Strong defines the word as "self-restraint, that is, tolerance: forbearance." ↩

⁷ Morrell, Emotions of God, "The Divine Longsuffering of God." Morrell notes that God's "tolerance" is not acceptance of wrongdoing but a delaying of judgment. ↩

⁸ Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), s.v. "suffer." Morrell cites this definition in his chapter on divine longsuffering. ↩

⁹ Morrell, Emotions of God, "The Divine Longsuffering of God." ↩

¹⁰ Lamb, Emotions of God, 59. ↩

¹¹ Lamb, Emotions of God, 59. Lamb provides a helpful list of the various genres across which this formula appears. ↩

¹² Lamb, Emotions of God, 59. ↩

¹³ Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), s.v. "נָחַם." As Lamb notes, this word has a range of meaning including "be sorry," "moved to pity," and "have compassion." See also Lamb, Emotions of God, 130. ↩

¹⁴ Andrew J. Schmutzer, "The God Who Grieves: A Theology of Lament and Divine Suffering," in Andrew J. Schmutzer, ed., Divine Suffering: Theology, History, and Church Mission (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2023), "The Grief of God in the Wilderness." Schmutzer writes that "God remains committed to a relationship that hurts him." ↩

¹⁵ Lamb, Emotions of God, 137. ↩

¹⁶ Lamb, Emotions of God, 137. ↩

¹⁷ For a full discussion of the relationship between divine temporality and divine emotion, see the companion volume in this series on God and time. The argument there is that the biblical portrait of a God who acts in time, responds to events, and experiences temporal succession is best explained by a view of God as genuinely temporal rather than timelessly eternal. Divine patience is one of the strongest pieces of evidence for this position. ↩

¹⁸ Anselm, Proslogion, chap. 8. Anselm wrote that God is compassionate "in terms of our experience" but not "in terms of your being" — meaning God acts compassionately but does not feel compassion. See the full discussion in Chapter 13 of this volume, and R. T. Mullins, God and Emotion, Elements in the Philosophy of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), §5.1. ↩

¹⁹ Rob Lister, God Is Impassible and Impassioned: Toward a Theology of Divine Emotion (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2013), 257. Lister argues that God's emotional experiences unfold in the "temporally progressive covenantal context" even while God stands as Lord over that context. ↩

²⁰ See the fuller discussion of the relationship between foreknowledge and genuine emotion in Chapter 25 of this volume. The point here is that foreknowledge does not eliminate experience. A parent who knows a child will make bad choices still genuinely grieves when those choices are actually made. Similarly, God's foreknowledge of human rebellion does not eliminate His genuine experience of patiently bearing with that rebellion as it unfolds in time. ↩

²¹ Andrew J. Schmutzer, "God's Broken Marriage: The Testing Texts of Numbers 14," in Andrew J. Schmutzer, ed., Divine Suffering: Theology, History, and Church Mission (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2023), "The Grief of God in the Wilderness." Schmutzer describes the Numbers 14 crisis as both an insurrection and a broken marriage, emphasizing God's emotional pain at Israel's rejection. ↩

²² Schmutzer, "God's Broken Marriage," in Divine Suffering, "The Grief of God in the Wilderness." Schmutzer cites Old Testament theologian Horst D. Preuss: "When even YHWH himself laments, then this demonstrates something about the God who suffers with his people." ↩