"God is absolutely simple."

With humans, one may talk about various parts – the head, the hands, the feet. We are mosaic like beings with different pieces stuck together. Apart from the physical, we also are composed metaphysically – we have both hearts and minds, feelings and intellect.

God's ways, however, are not like ours. He is absolutely simple. Within Him there is no composition of lesser parts, no sum to form a whole – He is indivisible! In our physical world this can be hard to picture. Snow, seemingly homogeneous, is composed of flakes, which are composed of water and dust, the former composed of hydrogen and oxygen, both of which are further composed of electrons, neutrons, and protons, and all of those are yet even further composed of yet even smaller particles! All physical analogies fall short, because the lack of composition of God is partly related to the fact that God is Spirit (John 4:24). Certainly spirits can be composed of other spirits or whole, but I have yet to see something physical that isn't made up of parts.

What, then, is a proper analogy? Something like the Spirit of St. Louis would be a composite spirit, the spirit of adventure and exploration, the spirit of settlement and new lands. Rather, for a divided spirit, one would be better to think of love. Whole and pure, love drives out other competing spirits of lust and hatred. Love is not composed of other spirits, but solid and unified. It, like God, may be described with a variety of terms, but all the terms get at the same singular spirit of love.

God, then, is simple, because He is not complicated by numerous pieces. He is simple because He is not complex. He is a single mystery, rather than many pieced jigsaw puzzle. One cannot cut God into pieces and study Him any more than one can study life but cutting up dead animals. The whole might be illuminated by such a practice, but the true mystery remains unprobed.

Further reading: God's pedagogical laws teaching us how to be whole like God is whole, (Deuteronomy 22:9-11).