Archives for November 2022

Part 1: It’s True | Part 2: Jesus Included | Part 3: No Need to Grow 

Another reason that God doesn’t change, again based on his perfection, is that he doesn’t aspire to anything he doesn’t already have. 

Now that we’re past Thanksgiving here in the States, the Christmas season is in full swing. Decorations are going up, lights are adorning the houses, and the retailers, who live or die by Christmas sales, are blasting their names out of every media outlet, hoping beyond hope that customers will come streaming into their stores, whether physical or virtual.

And those customers—assuming they show up—are there, mostly, for the children, the ones with visions of sugar plums, and Barbie Little Dream Houses, and Jurassic World Inflatable T-Rexes dancing in their heads.

There’s a part of me that heaves a sigh of relief that our children are grown now. And yet there’s another part that remembers those times fondly—the looks on their little faces when they saw the Hot Wheels tricycle or the big doll house or the lights on the Christmas tree or (later) the French onion clam dip with all the chips they wanted.

There’s something special about a little child’s scrawled Christmas list, and there’s something in every parent—I really think there is—that wants to get them everything they’re asking for. As a parent of young children I was honestly surprised at how aggressively tempted I was to spoil them.

I’m not talking about the bratty child in the grocery store checkout line who screams when he doesn’t get the candy he sees there. I’m talking about the stars in the eyes of the little beloved one who really wants something, over time, in an extraordinary way.

When our kids were small, I was planning a summer vacation and asked if there was any place in particular they’d like to go. The younger one, who was maybe 9 or 10, said, without hesitation, “Chicago.”

I thought it odd that a child of that age would have such a strong preference for a specific large city, so I asked, “Why?”

She said, “That’s where the American Girl Doll Place is.”

Aha.

So that summer our travel loop included the Windy City, and we spent a full day at the AGDP.

We also ate at our first Cheesecake Factory there. I think they liked that even better.

We love our children, and we love their aspirations—not just for Christmas gifts, but for life. Later I bought that same younger daughter a Middle English grammar, because she really wanted one. And her love for the Medieval has had far-reaching consequences in her life.

I remember taking the older daughter to her first opera at age 6—how at the overture she scooted forward in her seat and didn’t move for the rest of the performance, drinking it all in. That, too, changed her life.

Just as we want our progeny to mature and grow, we also want them to aspire, to reach, to advance, because we know that without aspiration of some kind, people fall far short of their potential.

But here’s the thing. God is fundamentally different. He doesn’t have aspirations for himself. He doesn’t need to improve his providential leadership skills. He doesn’t need to learn something new, just to broaden his mind. He doesn’t need to travel. He doesn’t need to learn a new language. He doesn’t need to read more kinds of books.

God doesn’t need anything. He is utterly complete in himself.

And that makes it all the more puzzling, amazing, that a long time ago he created. He created the cosmos, filled with all kinds of beauty and power. And in that cosmos, on (as far as we know) just one of its planets, he created life, along with all the elements and compounds necessary to sustain it. And into one species of that life, he placed his very own image.

And for that species, he aspires. He wants them—us—to achieve great things, big things, eternally significant things. He provides us with all the physical and spiritual power to do so.

Do you know the one thing that the Bible says that God “seeks”?

He seeks human beings, to worship him. He seeks them so committedly that in the person of his Son he became one of them, forever. And it is that God-Man who has told us this (Jn 4.23).

God doesn’t change, because he doesn’t aspire for himself.

But he does aspire for us.

Part 5: No Greater Force | Part 6: No Decay | Part 7: Trustworthiness | Part 8: Mercy | Part 9: Confidence | Part 10: Victory

Photo by Taylor Deas-Melesh on Unsplash

Part 1: It’s True | Part 2: Jesus Included

God doesn’t change.

But why?

I’d suggest that we approach this question through the back door. Let’s think about why other things do change, and then postulate that God is not like those other things.

I suppose the first reason for change that would occur to us is the one that’s right before our eyes, every day.

We see children changing all the time—and if we don’t see those children every day, then the change is all the more apparent when we do see them. Every day on social media I see someone ask, “How can my child be 3 [or 9, or 15] already?!” These days parents of small children have taken to buying a blanket with numbers on it, and taking a photo every month with their child lying on the blanket, and the appropriate number circled.

They change so fast.

And while we teasingly ask them to stay little forever, we really don’t want that.

We really, REALLY don’t want that.

We don’t want them to be helpless and dependent forever—if for no other reason than that we’re likely to be helpless and dependent someday, and we want somebody making the decisions who knows and loves us. And who owes us. :-)

We revel in the things our growing children learn and the skills they acquire.

First it’s as simple a thing as rolling over, then sitting up, then standing, cruising, walking, running.

And then catching a baseball, or executing a grand jete or a tai otoshi, or graduating summa cum laude, or any of those other italicized things out there.

People need to change because they start out so limited in their knowledge and skills. Because they are, in that sense, imperfect, uncompleted.

Even as adults we feel the need to keep learning and growing. The first day at a new job we feel intimidated and useless, asking lots of questions and feeling clumsy both physically and intellectually. We love progressing to the point where we know what we’re doing and we accomplish it well.

We read books. We watch YouTube videos. We take adult education classes. We travel.

Always growing. Till the day we die.

Why is that? Why the constant push to get better—at the things we’re already doing, or at new things we’ve never tried before?

Simple.

Because we’re incomplete, undeveloped, short of our potential. We have things to learn. We can always get better at something.

Okay, we’re in the back door; now let’s take it out on the front porch, where everyone can see it.

One reason that God doesn’t change is that he doesn’t need any of what we’ve just described.

He doesn’t need to grow; he doesn’t need to mature; he doesn’t need to get better at anything.

He has always existed, and he has always existed in perfection. He didn’t need his infinite past to get infinitely good at an infinite number of things; he has always been infinitely good at everything. It’s his nature; he can’t be less than perfectly good, and great, and wise. There’s nothing he had to learn, no skill he had to polish.

That means that he satisfies your needs perfectly now; he won’t be better at it later. You never need to wait for a “better time” to go to him with this or that problem or request.

That also means that his will for you is perfect right this minute; he won’t have to change it later because he realized something then that he doesn’t realize now.

He doesn’t change, because he’s perfect.

What a liberating and peace-giving truth.

Part 4: No Need to Aspire  | Part 5: No Greater Force | Part 6: No Decay | Part 7: Trustworthiness | Part 8: Mercy | Part 9: Confidence | Part 10: Victory

Photo by Taylor Deas-Melesh on Unsplash

Part 1: It’s True

Everything changes, except God.

The Psalmist meditates lyrically on this idea:

²⁴ I said, O my God, take me not away in the midst of my days: Thy years are throughout all generations. ²⁵ Of old hast thou laid the foundation of the earth: And the heavens are the work of thy hands. ²⁶ They shall perish, but thou shalt endure: Yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment; As a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed: ²⁷ But thou art the same, And thy years shall have no end. ²⁸ The children of thy servants shall continue, And their seed shall be established before thee (Ps 102.24-28).

Generations change. Heaven and earth change. But not God.

And because God is changeless, his children will continue, because his promises last forever.

Incidentally, the writer of Hebrews applies this passage to Jesus (He 1.10-12). He’s listing a number of passages from the Hebrew Scripture that demonstrate that the Son is greater than the angels—

• For unto which of the angels said he at any time, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee? And again, I will be to him a Father, and he shall be to me a Son? (He 1.5, citing Ps 2.7, 2S 7.14).
• And again, when he bringeth in the firstbegotten into the world, he saith, And let all the angels of God worship him (He 1.6, citing Dt 32.43 in the Septuagint).
• Unto the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever: a sceptre of righteousness is the sceptre of thy kingdom (He 1.8, citing Ps 45.6).

And then he cites this passage from Psalm 102.

And he’s not done. He begins his epistle/sermon with this idea, and he ends it with the same idea:

• Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever (He 13.8).

Bookending a document with parallel ideas like that is called an inclusio, and among other things it tells us that this idea is a key part of the writer’s message.

Now, this is surprising, because we all know that at a point in time the Son, who was always God, took on human flesh and became incarnate—permanently. He lived on earth, and died, and rose again, and ascended back to the Father. We could say, to use the terminology of Hebrews 13.8, that “yesterday” he was the Creator and Redeemer, and “today” he is our Mediator and Intercessor, and “forever” he will be our King.

How is that not change?

That’s a good question.

Part of our problem understanding this is that it involves the biblical teaching of the Trinity, the very nature of the Godhead, and our finite minds are just not good at wrapping themselves around it. (If you think you understand it, then there’s something you’re missing.)

The standard view is that Jesus added to his eternal, and unchanging, divine nature a human nature that had not been there before.

How does that work?

Well, some of the smartest people on the planet wrestled with that question for 400 years, and when they were done, they chose to state what happened but to not even try to explain how it happened.

You and I are probably not going to do better than that.

But however it all works, this we know: God is the same. He is faithful. He will never forget. He will never leave. He will never change.

This isn’t just some theological abstract coming down from an ivory tower somewhere. This is highly practical, every day, and truly life changing.

I’d like to consider two questions for the rest of this series:

• Why does God not change?

and

• What difference does his changelessness make—to me?

Next time.

Part 3: No Need to Grow | Part 4: No Need to Aspire  | Part 5: No Greater Force | Part 6: No Decay | Part 7: Trustworthiness | Part 8: Mercy | Part 9: Confidence | Part 10: Victory

Photo by Taylor Deas-Melesh on Unsplash

The world’s gone crazy, hasn’t it?

Culture has changed. Government has changed. Politics has changed. Society has changed. Church has changed.

Some would observe that this is nothing new, that these things change constantly. And indeed they do.

But it does seem as though the pace of change is accelerating, doesn’t it?

• As my father aged, it occurred to me that when he was born on his father’s homestead ranch in Idaho in 1918, everyday life was pretty much the same as it was in Abraham’s day: you got water from the well or the river; you grew your food in the dirt just outside the house; you plowed your fields with oxen; you did your excretory business in a hole in the ground. But before he died, he and I sat down at my computer, pulled up Google Earth, and revisited the homestead virtually. He showed me which side of Sandy Creek the ranch was on, and we “stood” there and looked up at the Continental Divide, just a couple of miles east.
• An internet meme observes that it was only 66 years—shorter than my lifespan—from the Wright brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk to the moon landing. And the SR-71 Blackbird was introduced 3 years before that.
• And the sociosexual changes in the last 20 years in the US would have been unimaginable even when I embarked on my working life after graduate school.

Closer to home, there’s change in our individual lives as well: you change jobs; you change bosses; you change residences; you face a financial setback; a family member dies; your marriage breaks up.

I see a lot of angst over this.

A lot of people are bewildered, scared, frustrated about all this change.

And they should be. The change is real and often devastating, and we’re not designed to live in constant chaos.

The Scripture doesn’t ignore this problem, and it doesn’t try to “pep talk” us out of our distress with platitudes. But it does offer two truths that can stabilize us despite the instability of our world.

The first is the simple fact that instability is temporary. Most of us find that we can endure all kinds of things if there’s light at the end of the tunnel. (And yes, we all know the joke about the oncoming train.) The brokenness of our world, which is the cause of its instability and pain, has already been reckoned with, and Scripture promises an eventual onset of permanent peace, shalom (Re 21.1-7)—regardless of your eschatological system. :-)

That’s not pie in the sky, meant to keep the proletariat in bondage; it’s the promise of God.

Which brings me to the second truth, and the focus of this series.

God doesn’t change.

I change; you change; our loved ones change, as do our friends, our suppliers, our lawyers, our pastors, and every one of our circumstances.

But not God.

He can’t.

His very nature is to be stable, to be steady, to be faithful, to be reliable.

Theologians call this divine attribute “immutability”—God doesn’t mutate. It’s closely associated with his attribute of faithfulness. The Hebrew word for the latter is ‘emunah, the source of our word “Amen”—“may it ever be so.”

Interestingly, this idea is part of the personal name that God chose for himself; as he told Moses at the burning bush, “I AM THAT I AM” (Ex 3.14). He says, “This is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations” (Ex 3.15). In context, God’s point is that centuries earlier he had made promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and now he was going to see that those promises were kept—the descendants of those patriarchs were now going to enter the land that God had promised them.

Faithful. That’s essentially his name.

More to come.

Part 2: Jesus Included | Part 3: No Need to Grow | Part 4: No Need to Aspire  | Part 5: No Greater Force | Part 6: No Decay | Part 7: Trustworthiness | Part 8: Mercy | Part 9: Confidence | Part 10: Victory

Photo by Taylor Deas-Melesh on Unsplash