R.C. Sproul

Every creature is mutable.

God does not share that quality with created things.

He never changes.

He is immutable.

But when we say He's immutable, we're using the language of negation.

Now, other ways in which the church described speaking about God was speaking about God in what was called the univocal sense or univocal sense, meaning that whatever we say about God has the same meaning with respect to Him as it means with respect to us.

If I say that my arm is strong, and when I say that God is strong, the word strong means exactly the same thing.

What's wrong with that?

The problem is that God's strength transcends my strength, and His strength is of a higher level or order of strength than I enjoy.

But it's not totally dissimilar to us.

There is some similarity between the word strength when applied to us and the word strength that is applied to God.

And so we say, well, we understand strength at one level, at the human creaturely level, and if we put a little prefix on there, we get an idea about God, and the prefix we put there is omni.

We talk about potency, which is power.

and then we speak of God as being omnipotent.

Humans, creatures, have limited finite power.

No creature has all power.

Only God is omnipotent.

Only God is omnipotent.

And so this is the way of ascendancy or the way of eminence that we speak of whereby we project

powers or ideas that we experience in this world and project them to the ultimate degree and then affirm them about God.