The Unchanging God
Mary Batchelor - September 19, 2004
How many times have you wished you could change your mind once you’ve given your order in a restaurant? By then it’s too late. And of course the same dilemma crops up in more important decisions to be made. Sometimes it’s not too late to change our minds and we do so – and perhaps in so doing alter the course of events completely for ourselves and others.
Is it a good characteristic to be the kind of person who sticks to first decisions or is it sometimes a good thing to feel free to change our minds? Perhaps circumstances alter cases.
The Old Testament tells the story of Jephthah, a man who refused to change his mind. He had a bad start in life, born illegitimate into a large family of legitimate sons. Once they were all grown-up, the other brothers booted him out of the family home, refusing to let him have a share in the estate. Nothing daunted, Jephthah took his rejection as a spur to prove he could succeed on his own account. He moved right away and in time became the leader of a successful, if notorious, outlaw band.
There came a time when his own family, a leading clan in Israel, were at serious risk from a neighbouring foreign tribe. So the brothers sent an urgent message to Jephthah asking him to help them out of their trouble. After a few sharp words about their sudden change towards him, Jephthah finally agreed to help them - on his own terms.
He and his band of followers set off to fight the marauding army that was threatening his family’s tribe. Not surprisingly, Japheth was desperately keen to win the skirmish, so before the battle he prayed for victory promising, in return, to give God the first one who came out of his house to meet him - on condition he was successful.
Jephthah and his men pounded their way to victory and he returned home in a blaze of glory. But as he came close to the house, he saw to his horror that it was not one of his servants coming out to meet him but his only child, a beloved daughter, welcoming him home with dancing and singing to celebrate his success.
Jephthah was distraught. He blurted out to her the whole sorry story of his rash vow to God. But in spite of his anguish, he refused to change his mind and after the two month’s reprieve that she asked for, she was put to death.
Should he have changed his mind? What lay behind his refusal to do so? The Bible makes no comment either way and we are left to face the quandary as Jephthah was.
Perhaps it is sometimes right for us human beings to change our minds. But surely God, since he is God, would never change his mind – would he? Isn’t he unchanging?
Perhaps we need to think again about that when we read the experience of Jeremiah, one of the Old Testament prophets. This is what he writes:
The Lord told me, ‘Go to the pottery shop, and when you get there I will tell you what to say to the people.’
I went there and saw the potter making clay pots on his pottery wheel. And whenever the clay would not take the shape he wanted, he would change his mind and form it into some other shape.
Then the Lord told me to say:
‘People of Israel, I, the Lord, have power over you just as the potter has over the clay. If I threaten to uproot and shatter an evil nation and that nation turns from its evil, I will change my mind. If I promise to make a nation strong, but its people start disobeying me and doing evil, then I will change my mind and not help them at all.
‘So listen to me, people of Judah and Jerusalem! I have decided to strike you with disaster, and I won’t change my mind unless you stop sinning and start living right’.
It looks, in fact, as though God does sometimes change his mind.
In another Old Testament book we read about the prophet Jonah. God sent him to preach that God was going to punish the people of Nineveh because of their terrible cruelty and inhumanity. When Jonah finally went and preached to them they were deeply sorry for their wickedness and promised to changed their ways. The king ordered even the animals to be covered in sackcloth – the rough material of mourning. And God changed his mind and decided not to punish them after all. Jonah was mortified and told God angrily:
‘I knew from the very beginning that you wouldn’t destroy Nineveh. That’s why I left my own country and headed for Spain. You are a kind and merciful God, and you are very patient. You always show love and don’t like to punish anyone, not even foreigners.’
So God sometimes changes his mind and changes his actions. Does this mean that he is not an unchanging God? Certainly not. In fact, in a strange way it is just because God is an unchanging God that he changes his mind. What is unchanging is God’s character. We can bank on God’s utterly unchanging nature.
First and most important of all, it is God’s nature to be merciful. A poet who was left in Jerusalem after it had been besieged and conquered by Babylon, was surrounded by the most terrible sights and smells – small children dying in the streets, distraught wailing mothers and gaunt, starving survivors. The sort of scenes we sometimes can hardly bear to look at on our TV screens. Everywhere was havoc and destruction. The prophet writes some heart-rending poems of lament about the horrors around him and the sense of being God-forsaken. Then, in the midst of it all he remembers that God’s mercy and love are unchanging. He writes:
‘The Lord’s kindness never fails!
If he had not been merciful we would have been destroyed.
The Lord can always be trusted
To show mercy each morning,
Deep in my heart I say. “The Lord is all I need:
I can depend on him!”’ (Lamentations 3:22-25)
Even in our deepest distress, God shows his mercy.
Jesus taught us that God’s mercy is for everyone, and shown in the everyday events as well as the crises. He said:
‘God makes the sun rise on both good and bad people. And he sends rain for the ones who do right and the ones who do wrong’ (Matthew 5:45)
This certainly doesn’t mean that God is not concerned with the good or bad things that we do, because God’s unchanging nature is moral as well as merciful.
He has created a universe and a world that acts according to physical laws and also – more often forgotten - a world that functions according to moral laws. At the very beginning God warned our first parents of what would follow if they decided to step outside their proper domain, assert their own wills and disobey God’s rules for survival. They chose to ignore it and the rest, as they say, is history.
God’s moral law has been at work throughout history and still is at work today. Certain wrong actions inevitably bring bad consequences. Paul describes it in terms of sowing and reaping:
‘Do not deceive yourselves; no one makes a fool of God. A person will reap exactly what he sows. If he sows in the field of his natural desires, from it he will gather the harvest of death; if he sows in the field of the Spirit, from the Spirit he will gather the harvest of eternal life.
A word of caution is needed at this point. Because we live in a world where evil has been around ever since Eden, the innocent often suffer both physically and emotionally as a result of other people’s poisonous sowing. It is very important not to accuse anyone of deserving what they get when they may well be the innocent victims of others’ wrongdoing. But it is still true that we reap what we sow and often regret actions of ours in the past that have resulted in a harvest of bitterness and alienation. Of course it works both ways; many who have given themselves to God and to helping others have reaped a bountiful harvest of friendship and love.
God does not very often suspend or override the physical or spiritual laws that he has built into our universe. Of course he is ready and longing to forgive those who turn back to God, but the damage that is done – often to others –can never be expunged. However much a drunk driver may regret his selfishness and law-breaking, no one can bring back the child he killed. Yet it is also important to remember that even in the worst circumstances, God is ready and able to make something good come out of evil.
It rather looks as though these two characteristics of God are on a collision course. Which is God going to choose to show? His mercy or his rightful punishment? James assures us that:
’Mercy triumphs over judgement’
In fact it seems that every example in the Bible where God is said to change his mind, he changes it in favour of showing mercy and not the punishment deserved. That was certainly true in the case of Jonah and the Ninehvites.
Here is the heart of the matter. God can only change his mind when we change ours. In the end, God’s decision to change his mind depends on us – whether we are willing to change our mind.
This is true of our first meeting with God. When we turn to God and ask for his forgiveness and new life in Christ, we are changing our mind about ourselves and the direction of our lives – we turn around God’s way. And we show this by a change in the way we live. Sometimes this complete turn-around to God is called repentance and the outcome, conversion.
God longs to show mercy not judgement, but unless we change our attitude to him and turn around from the self-pleasing lifestyle we had chosen, and decide to please and serve God, he is not able to change his mind.
This continues to be true in our Christian lives. We fail God many times and each time we need to change our minds about the way we have been thinking or behaving and turn back to God. He longs to show us his mercy rather than punishment.
God is at work in our lives, not to make everything run smoothly for us, but to work out his purposes through us. The amazing privilege of being a Christian is that we’re allowed to work with God in bringing about his purposes for our world. He has even let us know what his great plan is for our universe. Paul writes:
God … made known to us the secret plan he had already decided to complete by means of Christ. This plan, which God will complete when the time is right, is to bring all creation together, everything in heaven and on earth, with Christ as head. (Ephesians 1:9-10)
God’s master plan for the universe is to create a whole perfect design with Christ at the centre. J B Phillips’ translates the same extract ( Ephesians 1:9-11) like this:
For God has allowed us to know the secret of his plan, and it is this: he purposes in his sovereign will that all human history shall be consummated in Christ, that everything that exists in Heaven or earth shall find its perfection and fulfilment in him. And here is the staggering thing – that in all which will one day belong to him we have been promised a share’
Amazingly, God has chosen us, who have become his children through our trust in Christ, to be part of his creative design. God began to work out his plan millennia ago but he is still at work today and will continue until it is completed. When we refuse to live to please God, we are opting out of our share in his great work. But when we change our minds – repent - and ask to co-operate once more, God is able to use us, perhaps in some other way, in his grand design. We may be afraid that we have failed God in the past so must be excluded from God’s plans. But Jeremiah saw that when some flaw in the clay frustrated the potter’s first plan and purpose, he was able to use the same clay again to make something different. He is a skilful Creator who can adapt to our failings natures when we truly repent and return to him.
But there is warning as well as encouragement for us. In the next chapter of his book, Jeremiah tells us how God sent him to the pottery shop once again, this time to buy a completed pot. He was told to carry the pot (an unusual enough thing for a man to do in his time) and take with him the religious leaders and rulers of the day. They were to go to the city rubbish dump and there Jeremiah was to smash the pot to smithereens before his baffled audience. Then he said to them:
‘Listen everyone! Some time ago, the Lord All-Powerful, the God of Israel, warned you that he would bring disaster on Jerusalem and all nearby villages. But you were stubborn and refused to listen. Now the Lord is going to bring the disaster he promised.’ Jeremiah 19:15
God’s people had been given every opportunity to return to God and go in the right way, but they had utterly refused to change their ways. Now they had reached the point of no return.
Once the soft clay, that can be re-kneaded and reshaped has been baked hard in the kiln, it can no longer change or be changed. It is beyond the potter’s skill to make it anew. Its only fate when disaster strikes, is to be smashed.
Every time we harden our hearts against God and insist on going our own way instead of submitting to his design, we make it harder to change and harder for God’s mercy to reach us. That is why the psalmist speaks the urgent words that we still need to hear and to heed:
Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts!