36 Pure Goodness vs. Emotion

I guess you noticed, dear reader--astute tour companion that you are, that yesterday in our once-over of Soul Feature #2: Emotion, the last 2 words of the last sentence of the last paragraph were pure goodness.

I always seem to be coming back to that don’t I? Pure goodness, that is.

That’s because it’s where I belong.

Because that’s what God is—pure goodness. And His emotions are morally and ethically subject to and molded by His pure goodness.

So let’s review the particulars from yesterday.

• In the Bible, emotion is associated with the soul.
• In the New Testament, Jesus associates emotion with His soul (Greek, pseuche).
• Pseuch finds its OT equivalent in nephesh, translated soul/heart.
• Heart is a term pointing to the richness of the mind-emotion ties.
• Further, heart is a term frequently interchangeable with mind (Proverbs 23:7).
• In the Old Testament, emotion is associated with God’s heart/mind (Hebrew, lêb).
• In Genesis 6:6, lêb (3820) is used of God.
• God experiences and expresses emotion.
• The primary faculty of emotion in the Godhead is the heart-mind connection producing right feeling.
• In John 3:16, God’s choice is connected to His feeling—His mental faculties to His emotions. His emotions enrich His judgment.
• Product: A quality range of emotional experience (in the Godhead); expression chiefly characterized and structured by pure goodness.

Don’t worry, gentle reader, you will get the hang of it. God honors our every attempt to meditate upon the word and, over time, disproportionately magnifies our reward for such pursuits, enriching us with understanding and appreciation far beyond our wildest imagining.

To continue: There are things about God’s emotional parameters that bear examination.

For example, we know that God edits His emotions.

We know that God allows only emotions which work for good and in so doing, excludes and refutes evil.

We know that God knows about all feelings and the range of all feelings. It is logical to assume that God knew about all emotions (spiritual and fleshly) before He even considered the Creation.

But it is also logical that while in a state of passive consciousness (summering), He had all emotions of the troublesome type de-activated.

It is also logical that when He moved into a state of reflective consciousness necessary to process the Creation, He maintained those troublesome emotions in the de-activated state, leaving them simmering on the back-burner of His mind, so to speak. In other words in a state of knowing, but not knowing from experience, He still knew how awful the experience could/would be. Yet, on with the Creation He went.

(So how did He handle troublesome evil? See if you can figure it out before you get to the solution later-on in this series of blogs. I had no clue. Holy Spirit informed me of the answer to that [and therefore informed you-through-me] through Richard, my inspired editor and serious man of prayer husband.)

To be continued . . .