Part 1: It’s True | 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
Some final thoughts.
Because God never changes, he will never go away. His enemies will never be able to defeat him or even diminish his power and presence in the world.
He wins.
That’s good news. Assuming, of course, you’re on his side.
So let me muse on that a bit.
God does have enemies. Even aside from the evil supernatural powers, there are people who reject him. They disagree with how he runs the world; they refuse his word; they deny his power. I know some people who find that the Almighty falls short of their supposedly high moral standards.
They have a right to do that, of course—a right they have, ironically, because they were endowed with it by their Creator. For the life of me, though, I can’t figure out why they should think that way. Maybe it makes no sense to me because God has been unfailingly kind and gracious to me for nearly
seven decades. Or maybe because I managed to make a convoluted mess of my life in just a few months at the age of merely 17. But I’ve noticed that God has been gracious to them, too, and many of them seem not to realize it. Many of them are awash in messy lives, as I was, but they illogically and absurdly blame God for the mess, even though it’s traceable directly to decisions they
have made.
The Scripture says that “the way of transgressors is hard” (Pr 13.15). Even that fact is an act of God’s grace; he has designed the universe so that if you choose a path for which you were not designed, circumstances will tend to point you to a better one. Nature is not kind to foolishness. God is good that way, among many, many others.
Solomon, who made that comment, made another one as well:
Whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it. God has done it, so that people fear before him (Ec 3.14).
The unchangeableness of God’s person and work are not good news to those who choose to oppose him. They have good reason to be afraid.
But here’s the thing.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
No one needs to be God’s enemy. No one needs to be afraid. No one needs to find himself in the vortex, the maelstrom, of his life’s being dragged down into the abyss.
God doesn’t want to be the enemy of anyone in his image. He takes no pleasure in their destruction. In fact, he has done all that is necessary for those who reject him to be delivered from their frustration, their confusion, their peril. Every person whom he has delivered was his declared enemy when the delivery was planned and then accomplished.
And it’s free—to us, at least. It’s a simple turn—a turning of the back toward sin and the face toward the Son, the Deliverer. “I don’t want that anymore; I want you instead.”
The technical terms for that change are repentance and faith. Together they constitute conversion.
And for those of us who have trusted and made that turn to the unchanging God, everything has changed. There’s no reason for fear anymore—fear of God’s wrath, fear of life circumstances, fear of the unknown. The fear has been driven out by love (1J 4.18), and the result has been joy.
God’s purposes stand (Pr 19.21). God wins. His promises are fulfilled, to the last one, and forever.
“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty” (Re 1.8).
Everything in this world is unstable, shakable, unreliable.
Come rest in the almighty, unchangeable God.
Photo by Taylor Deas-Melesh on Unsplash