Theology – Page 3

On Thinking Like Christ, Part 4: And Worse

January 12, 2023 by Dan Olinger

Part 1: The Most Important Thing | Part 2: Moving to the Dump | Part 3: It Gets Worse

By becoming fully human—“in the likeness of men” (Php 2.7)—God the Son experienced restrictions that seem ordinary, normal to us, but they are utterly humiliating to the Eternal and All-Powerful God. We meditated on some of those in the previous post.

But now Paul takes it down to further, unimaginable humiliation.

Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross (Php 2.8).

It doesn’t get any worse than this.

He dies. And not at a ripe old age, surrounded by loving family who are singing him into the presence of the angels. Even that would be incomprehensible for God. He cannot die, and for him to die under the best of circumstances would still be abhorrent.

He dies young, in the prime of his life. He dies a criminal, convicted of things he has never done. I say “things”—plural—because the religious establishment changes the charge as they deem it necessary to the circumstance. Before the Sanhedrin, the Jewish Supreme Court, the charge is blasphemy (Mt 26.65), because that’s the surest path to the death penalty from that body. But because the Romans have removed the Sanhedrin’s authority for capital punishment (Jn 18.31), they need to get a Roman judgment, and they know the Romans won’t care a fig about blasphemy, so they change the charge to sedition (Jn 19.12)—though even before the Romans they admit that the real reason is his claim to be the Son of God (Jn 19.7).

Whatever it takes.

There were lots of ways to execute a criminal in those days. None of them were as peaceful or nonviolent as taking too many sleeping pills. There’s stoning, and there’s beheading, which, if done expertly, is relatively painless—or so it appears. But God the Son is sent off to be crucified.

Crucifixion was intentionally designed to kill the victim as slowly and painfully as possible. I won’t go into details—you can find them in a few seconds on the internet—but put simply, there was not, and there never has been, a more painful way to die.

And that was the way he died.

Humiliation.

But there’s something else to be said.

I used the word victim a few lines up. It’s important to note that Jesus was no victim.

He said, “No one takes [my life] from me. I lay it down by myself” (Jn 10.18). As he stood before Pilate, who said “Don’t you know that I have authority to crucify you?!” (Jn 19.10), he responded, “You have no authority over me, except what has been given you from above” (Jn 19.11).

He had set his face like flint to go to Jerusalem (Is 50.7); he had said repeatedly that he “must” go to Jerusalem, and be rejected by the elders, and suffer, and be treated with contempt (Mt 16.21; Mk 8.31, 9.12).

And when it was time, when he knew that everything had been accomplished (Jn 19.28), when he had pronounced it “Finished!” (Jn 19.30), he mentally and volitionally reached inside himself, picked up his spirit, and delivered it over to his Father (Jn 19.30).

In a very real sense, he did not die from crucifixion; he died by an act of his will.

When the soldiers came to break his legs so that he would die before the onset of the Sabbath, they found that he was already dead. People usually lasted much longer—often several days, if there wasn’t a Sabbath to bring a merciful death.

So at his lowest—at the deepest valley of his humiliation—he was still calling the shots.

He was in charge the whole time.

Even the pagan centurion saw it (Mk 15.39).

Jesus obeys the Father, to the most extreme outcome—but without ever relinquishing his divine authority.

Now, we have none of that authority, except what the Son has delegated to his people (Mk 13.34; Jn 1.12; 1Co 8.9; He 13.10). But Paul tells us to have the mind that he had (Php 2.5).

If the Son can walk that path, which was infinitely deep, certainly we can trace the comparatively gentle slope of laying down what rights and privileges we have for the sake of the gospel.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

On Thinking Like Christ, Part 3: It Gets Worse

January 9, 2023 by Dan Olinger

Part 1: The Most Important Thing | Part 2: Moving to the Dump

So now Christ has left the “ivory palaces” and moved to the dump. Let’s talk more specifically about what that was like.

Paul describes this change as taking on “the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men” (Php 2.7). That word form, by the way, is the same Greek word as form in the previous verse; you may recall from the previous post that Greek scholar J.B. Lightfoot defined it as “that which is intrinsic and essential to a thing.”

That means that he became just as much a servant as he was God before the incarnation. He became a human being, with all of the limitations that human beings have—with the one exception, as the author of Hebrews tells us, of being “without sin” (He 4.15).

So, to start with, he became embodied; he lived “here.” And “hereness” is not something he had known before, being spirit, and being omnipresent. Now, this is puzzling to us, because we’re not good at wrapping our finite minds around the concept of infinity. I said in the previous post that Jesus remained fully God throughout his incarnation—and that means, logically, that he retained all the attributes of God, which would include omnipresence. How does that work after he assumes a human body?

I dunno.

I’ve written before of the heaven-shaking nature of the (verbally, anyway) simple statement that God became man. How does Jesus experience omnipresence when he’s in a body that his disciples, who are pretty much always with him, can see is right there? Does he move with super speed? That’s not omnipresence. Does he just not go anywhere outside his body for 33 years? Well, “going” isn’t omnipresence either. Is he present bodily in Palestine, and everywhere else spiritually?

I dunno.

There’s a verse that seems to imply that his presence is not limited to his body. At one point he speaks of himself to Nicodemus as “the Son of man, who is in heaven” (Jn 3.13; note the present tense). But as it happens, there’s a significant question as to whether that final phrase is in the original text, so the case isn’t closed.

At any rate, the Son is now “placed”; he is located “here” or “there.” It appears to me that that’s a significant restriction. Even as he heals the sick, calms the storm, and raises the dead, He works from within a prison that He has constructed for Himself.

Second, he experiences, as Shakespeare put it in the mouth of Hamlet, “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” If he doesn’t eat, he gets hungry (Lk 4.2); if he doesn’t drink, he gets thirsty (Jn 19.28); and if he’s active, he gets tired.

Arriving at the community well in Samaria, he’s too exhausted to draw enough water for a personal drink, so he has to wait for someone to come along—in the hottest part of the day, when people didn’t go out to draw water, and traffic there would be sparse (Jn 4.6). When the boat he’s in enters a storm so violent that the professional fishermen among his disciples believe they’re doomed, he’s sound asleep in the bottom of the boat (Mt 8.24). Have you ever been tired enough to sleep through something like that?

Theologian Millard Erickson compares the incarnation to a three-legged race. The racers have three legs instead of two, but that doesn’t make them faster; it slows them down. When the Son added to his divine nature a human one, he ran, so to speak, more slowly. He who had never experienced difficulty at all found everything more difficult.

In his prayer to the Father the night before his death, Jesus refers to “the glory that I had with you before” (Jn 17.5).

“I had.” Past tense. That’s poignant. He was remembering the way it “used to be.” The everlasting, unchangeable God speaks of “used to be.”

This is a humiliation.

But Paul is not done yet.

Next time.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

On Thinking Like Christ, Part 2: Moving to the Dump

January 5, 2023 by Dan Olinger

Part 1: The Most Important Thing

I have an exciting offer for you. I’m going to give you an opportunity to live at the dump. You’ll have your very own personal mound of trash, with all the rags you can wear and all the garbage you can eat. You’ll have lots of little companions—rats and cockroaches, mostly—to spend the night with. And best of all, you’ll be freed from the pesky necessities of bathing and brushing your teeth.

How many would like to take me up on this offer?

Hmm. Don’t see any takers.

I thought so. Surely no one would do such a thing.

But someone has. For you.

In our passage in Philippians 2, Paul writes that Jesus “emptied himself” and joined the human race. Have you thought about how great a step that was?

The passage begins (Php 2.6) by noting that the Son gave up a long, comfortable life.

That last sentence is an intentional understatement. His life was infinitely long, and it was infinitely beyond comfortable.

He existed in the form of God.

Now, that English has an unhealthy, even heretical implication. It sounds like he looked like God, but he wasn’t.

That’s most definitely not what Paul was saying, first, because the Greek in which he was writing doesn’t carry that implication, and second, because Paul is not an absent-minded sort of person who’s going to contradict both himself—

In Him [Christ, v 8] all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form (Co 2.9)

And the Apostle John—

The Word was God (Jn 1.1).

No, Paul is saying is that Jesus was in the same “shape” (morphe) as God—that is, he was just like him. New Testament scholar J.B. Lightfoot wrote on this passage that morphe is “that which is intrinsic and essential to a thing.”

Jesus didn’t “resemble” God; he was God.

Next Paul tells us that Jesus, incredibly, counted his heavenly abode and divine status as not “a thing to be grasped”—that is, not something he had to hold onto for dear life.

Picture a purse snatcher trying to seize a woman’s purse. This woman is a fighter; she hangs on. (A friend of mine did that once. I wasn’t surprised when she described her instinctive response.) This guy is not going to get my purse.

Jesus was so essentially God, so comfortable with his standing as God, that he didn’t need to be defensive; he didn’t need to hang onto it. He was fine with letting it go.

Now, that’s dangerous talk; I need to specify what I mean. I do not mean that he gave up his deity; he was still fully God for every minute he walked the earth. I do mean that it cost him something to join us here; he left “ivory palaces” (Ps 45.8) and perfect shalom (Is 6.1-3) to take up residence in a place that was anything but comfortable.

How uncomfortable?

Well, how uncomfortable would you be living in a garbage dump?

Does it bother you when you see sin all around you? How intensely do you suppose that sight discomfited the perfect Son of God, the one whose conscience, unlike yours and mine, was never hardened by the slightest sin?

Does it bother you when you’re rejected by people you care about? How much did it bother Jesus when he came to his own, and his own rejected him (Jn 1.11)? when a disciple of three years betrayed him with a kiss? when his own brothers didn’t believe in him (Jn 7.5)?

If sin is a stench in God’s nostrils, how repulsive was the human condition to Jesus every single day of his earthly life?

Next time we’ll look at the pain of the incarnation in a little more depth.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

On Thinking Like Christ, Part 1: The Most Important Thing

January 2, 2023 by Dan Olinger

Here we are at another New Year. And as is the routine, we’re thinking about resolutions, bettering ourselves. And that task has us thinking about priorities: what’s most important? What’s the best use of our limited time and resources?

It’s good to do this kind of thinking.

For Christians, the Most Important Thing is to be on God’s side, to be devoted to his plan(s) for us. And that involves a lot of things.

But most especially it involves God’s work of sanctifying us, making us to be more like His Son.

For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren (Ro 8.29).

But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit (2Co 3.18).

In the process called sanctification, God is changing us, over time, to be more like his Son.

That ought to be our Most Important Thing.

New Year or not.

In light of that, I’d like to spend a few posts meditating on that classic Christological passage in Philippians 2:

⁵Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, ⁶who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, ⁷but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. ⁸Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. ⁹For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, ¹⁰so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, ¹¹and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Php 2.5-11).

The passage begins by telling us—that’s who Paul is addressing—that we ought to be thinking the way Jesus is thinking here. And that thought pattern, as we shall see, ought to be surprising, given who he is.

The paragraph has a very clear two-part structure. Verses 5 through 8 describe the way Jesus thought, and how he acted as a result. We can call that his humbling, or his humility, or perhaps his humiliation.

The rest of the passage, verses 9 through 11, describes the Father’s action in response to Jesus’ humble way of thinking: his exaltation.

It’s worth noting at the outset that Jesus did not humble himself in order to be exalted; he was already exalted, as verse 6 makes clear. He humbled himself, first, in obedience to the Father’s plan, and second, to rescue those he loved as his creatures in his image. The exaltation unavoidably followed.

So when Paul tells us that we ought to think like Jesus, he’s not saying that we should be all about the exaltation; the command is focused on verses 5 through 8.

We’ll spend several posts considering this passage. Perhaps these thoughts can inform and animate your resolutions, whatever they may be.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

On Christmas

December 22, 2022 by Dan Olinger

I usually write a new post every Christmas, but this year I’d like to direct you to a brief series on the topic that I wrote in 2018.

Merry Christmas!

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Unstable World, Stable God, Part 9: Confidence

December 15, 2022 by Dan Olinger

There’s another way we benefit because God doesn’t change.

Back before my Dad was saved—even before he was a Dad—a door-to-door salesman came by. When Dad answered his knock, the salesman had a large glass kitchen mixing bowl in each hand, and, without saying a word, he bashed them together vigorously. They didn’t break.

Dad bought a set.

That evening a bunch of his siblings came over, and they were playing cards and drinking beer, and generally behaving as they did in those days. As the evening went on, and Dad—in his own estimation—began thinking more creatively, he remembered those unbreakable bowls and thought he’d entertain the group with a demonstration. Without saying anything to anyone, he got up, went into the kitchen, grabbed a bowl in each hand, swept into the doorway, and cried, “Hey, everybody! Look at this!”

He bashed the two bowls together, and they shattered into a million pieces.

The fact that none of the spectators knew that the bowls weren’t supposed to break just adds to the magnificence of the scene.

Do you think my Dad got a refund for those bowls?

That salesman was long gone.

Years later, my Dad told me, “Buy from Sears. They’ll always be there if you have a problem with what you bought.”

Well, as it turns out, Dad was wrong about Sears too, but the principle is sound.

Deal with people who won’t disappear when you need them.

Now, the story’s ridiculous, and I considered not using it in this context. But I think it makes the point in a memorable way.

The counsel of the Lord stands forever,
the plans of his heart to all generations (Ps 33.11).

God doesn’t change.

And because he doesn’t change,

he will always be there;
his attitude toward you will always be steady;
his promises will always be kept;
his Word will always be true;
and his plans for you will certainly be fulfilled.

Now, what’s the only natural response to that kind of faithfulness?

Confidence.

It’s the infinite, perfect analog to the confidence of a man who’s worked for the same people at the same company for 40 years, or a man who’s been married to the same woman for 50.

It’s the settled state of knowing that this relationship is good, and that it will last—that things will be as they should be, now and forever.

The Hebrew Bible calls that concept shalom—“peace.”

In his first epistle, the Apostle John talks a lot about confidence, or knowing, or having assurance. Many commentators have noted that he bases our confidence on a tripod of factors:

obedience (1J 2.3)
love (1J 3.14)
the witness of the Spirit (1J 3.24).

All of those are things that God works in us—and he works those things in us because he is unchanging in his love for us, his forgiveness of us, and his promises to us.

In June 1944, the Allied armies began their assault on Hitler’s “Fortress Europe” by getting boots on the ground at the beaches of Normandy. “D-Day,” they called it.

From that moment, the outcome of the war was never in doubt. Oh, there was a lot of fighting yet to be done—another year in Europe—and some of the fiercest fighting of the war, including the infamous Battle of the Bulge. But with Allied soldiers, and their equipment, on European soil, Hitler could hold out only so long. It was just a matter of time.

In the person of his Son, God has entered enemy territory and declared his intentions. His plans will never change, and his power—unlike that of the Allied armies—is unlimited.

Your circumstances may be dark, even terrifying. But God is directing your steps according to his perfect plan, and nothing will deflect or deter him. You can endure in the confidence that comes from an unchanging God.

Part 10: Victory

Photo by Taylor Deas-Melesh on Unsplash

Unstable World, Stable God, Part 8: Mercy

December 12, 2022 by Dan Olinger

There’s another way we benefit because God doesn’t change.

We noted last time that God keeps his promises to us, because (among other things) he’s never surprised by circumstances that prevent him from keeping them.

There’s another side to that principle, one that has benefited us infinitely and continues to benefit us every day.

Sometimes other people surprise us. We do nice things to them, and they take no notice—or worse, they begin to expect those things. They don’t respond in kind. And they leave us wondering, “What is wrong with people like that? How can they return evil for good? Well, see if I ever do anything for them …”

That’s a typical human response. Tit for tat. Eye for an eye. Don’t cry for people who won’t cry for you.

And in a way, there’s a certain kind of justice in that. He mistreated me; he gets what he deserves. What goes around comes around.

Karma.

We excuse ourselves by calling it justice, but in fact we’ve changed. We were inclined to do the right thing, to be kind, to be generous, to be caring. And a circumstance—the way we were treated—changed us. Now we’re not so inclined.

That change of attitude and inclination tells us something. It tells us that our original motives weren’t philanthropic or altruistic at all. We were expecting payback.

We were motivated not by love for our neighbor, but by love for ourselves.

God’s not that way. At all.

He is motivated, as always, by his own nature—in this case, his nature to be perfectly, consistently, eternally, selflessly loving.

He treats us well. And by “us,” I mean all of us. He placed our first parents into a world perfectly designed for them. And thousands of years later, he sends rain to the just and also to the unjust (Mt 5.45). He gives us—all—everything we need, for free.

How did we respond to his kindness? We turned on him like utter ingrates, rebelling against him, rejecting his offer of relationship, denying his goodness, insisting that we were wiser than he.

If you and I were God—I speak as a fool—how would we have responded in that situation?

Ah, but that’s the difference, you see. We are changed by our circumstances, slaves to our own limited knowledge, victims of surprise.

God is not. He is not surprised; he is not changed.

He knew, when he made us, how we would turn out. He loved us before we rebelled, and he loves us after. On the day he made our first father, he committed to an eternal relationship with us—committed, in fact, to becoming one of us, forever, offering himself in mortal flesh as the infinite and morally perfect sacrifice for our sin.

We would strike out at those who mistreat us, and do it in the name of Justice.

He withholds that judgment, taking it upon himself, so that Justice is done, but not at our expense.

He withholds from us the evil consequences that we justly deserve.

The technical term for that is Mercy.

And he offers that gift to anyone who wants it. For free.

It comes to us, because our God does not change, even in the
face of our rebellion.

Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow (Jam 1.17).

The gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable (Ro 11.29).

God, desiring even more to show to the heirs of the promise the unchangeableness of His purpose, interposed with an oath, ¹⁸so that by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have taken refuge would have strong encouragement to take hold of the hope set before us. ¹⁹This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, a hope both sure and steadfast and one which enters within the veil, ²⁰where Jesus has entered as a forerunner for us, having become a high priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek (He 6.17-20).

Part 9: Confidence | Part 10: Victory

Photo by Taylor Deas-Melesh on Unsplash

Unstable World, Stable God, Part 7: Trustworthiness

December 8, 2022 by Dan Olinger

Because God doesn’t change, certain benefits accrue to his people.

I’d like to begin with the obvious observation that an unchanging God is trustworthy, or reliable. He tells the truth. He doesn’t lie, or even change his mind. And his word comes true; he never fails in a promise or a prediction.

God is not a man, that He should lie,
Nor a son of man, that He should repent;
Has He said, and will He not do it?
Or has He spoken, and will He not make it good? (Nu 23.19).

The Glory of Israel will not lie or change His mind; for He is not a man that He should change His mind (1S 15.29).

The Lord of hosts has sworn saying, “Surely, just as I have intended so it has happened, and just as I have planned so it will stand” (Is 14.24).

“I, the Lord, have spoken; it is coming and I will act. I will not relent, and I will not pity and I will not be sorry; according to your ways and according to your deeds I will judge you,” declares the Lord God (Ezk 24.14).

Sceptics have often observed that the Scripture seems to contradict itself on this point. Sometimes it says that God doesn’t change his mind (“repent”) and sometimes it says that he does.

I won’t dispute that. That’s what the various verses say. But I note something else: three of the allegedly contradictory verses occur in the same passage, 1 Samuel 15. Specifically, in verse 11 God himself says that he has repented; then in verse 29 Samuel says that God (“the Glory of Israel”) will not change his mind; then in verse 35 the author says that God (Yahweh) repented.

Now, what are the odds that the author of Samuel was so incompetent, so inattentive, so stupid, that he made a boneheaded mistake like that, yet produced overall a book of such high historical and literary quality?

I can only conclude that he interplayed these terms intentionally—similarly to what Solomon did in Proverbs 26.4-5, placing two directly contradictory statements right next to each other, to make the reader stop and think: “When should I answer a fool? And when should I not?”

So what is the author of Samuel doing here? In what sense has a God who cannot change or lie or be surprised “changed his mind” with reference to Saul? What is the author communicating to us by this literary device?

This post isn’t about 1 Samuel 15; we can work through that application another time. My only point here is that God is not the sort of person whose thoughts, plans, and promises are unreliable. He doesn’t change; he keeps his promises, and you can trust him with your life on this earth and your life into eternity. You may not understand his purposes during the difficult times, or his reasons for choosing this tactic or that outcome, but you can be sure that he won’t say one thing and do another, or make a promise he cannot or will not keep.

Our most practical response to this truth is to make a point of hearing and remembering his promises. As you read your Bible, highlight the promises, particularly the ones that are given to God’s people in general. (When the ascended Jesus tells Saul in Acts 9.6 that someone will tell him what he’s to do, that’s a promise, all right, but not one made to us.)

Think through these promises, carefully considering how they can be fulfilled in your life, praying for God’s wisdom in discerning when the fulfillments come, and living in gratitude for those fulfillments. God’s people don’t simply rejoice at occasions of “good luck”; they recognize the personal source of those blessings, and they consciously allow their gratitude to strengthen and deepen their love for, and trust in, the Giver of all good gifts—and Keeper of all his promises.

Part 8: Mercy | Part 9: Confidence | Part 10: Victory

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Unstable World, Stable God, Part 6: No Decay

December 5, 2022 by Dan Olinger

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

There’s one more cause of change that I’d like to consider.

For several summers I took teams of students on short-term mission trips in Africa. Several of those trips were to the same place, an orphanage just south of Mwanza, Tanzania; and for the same purpose, to tutor the children during their school break, to ensure that they didn’t fall behind in their studies. I was happy to take along any students with character, but I was especially looking for Education majors, because they had some learning about learning, and they always did a good job with the children.

On one of those trips, I saw one of the guys—Matt was his name—with a group of 5 or 6 children down by the outdoor fireplace we called the incinerator, where we burned the burnable trash. They had taken a load down there, and he had lit it up. He was explaining what was happening—oxidation, of a rapid sort. The compounds in the trash were chemically uniting—or something—with oxygen in the air, and the output was gases and particulate matter, a different chemical form.

A few minutes later the group was up by the choo—that’s “cho,” like “slow,” and means “toilet.” He had the metal door open and was pointing out the rust, which in a few places had eaten all the way through the door. Same process, he said. Oxidation. But this is much slower; you can’t really see it happening, but it is.

That swingset I bought for my girls when they were little has long since become random clumps of iron oxide and a few chips of paint.

Everything in the world is decaying. Any walk in the woods will confirm that. There’s a cycle of growth, death, decay, and rebirth all throughout nature.

We see it in people as well as things. You and I have been dying since the day we were born—and technically even before. At any given moment we don’t feel the aging process, but when we see a friend after a long absence, we can’t but notice. Going to a high-school reunion, as I did in October, will impress that truth on you.

Our possessions are on a determined course to the landfill, and we are on a determined course to the grave.

I don’t say that to depress anyone; it’s the cycle of life, where new life comes from death, in both the physical and the spiritual worlds. For believers in Christ, the grave is no threat, for it has no victory (1Co 15.53-57).

I recount all this in order to make the point that none of it applies to God.

He doesn’t age; he doesn’t weaken; he doesn’t die; he doesn’t decay.

I find it interesting that even when Jesus died, his body was not allowed to decay. His friend Lazarus’s body had begun to decay after 4 days in the tomb (Jn 11.39), but Jesus was in his tomb only for parts of 3 days. A few weeks later, in his sermon at Pentecost, Peter noted that Jesus’ body had not decayed (Ac 2.31), and he noted that this fact had been predicted a thousand years earlier (Ac 2.27).

No, God doesn’t age, despite the passage of time. At the age of infinity (yes, I know that statement is technically problematic; work with me here), he is as strong and clear-headed as he ever was, and he always will be.

He doesn’t change.

That means that you don’t have to wonder how he’ll interact with you, or whether he’s still good, or whether his posture toward you will change, or whether he’s getting cranky. You don’t need to walk on eggshells. He is always great, and he is always, only good.

Beginning next time, we’ll expand on these thoughts and delineate some consequences and applications of God’s immutability.

Part 7: Trustworthiness | Part 8: Mercy | Part 9: Confidence | Part 10: Victory

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Unstable World, Stable God, Part 5: No Greater Force

December 1, 2022 by Dan Olinger

Part 1: It’s True | Part 2: Jesus Included | Part 3: No Need to Grow | Part 4: No Need to Aspire

Another reason that God doesn’t change, again based on his perfection, is that he doesn’t face any power greater than himself.

Often we’re changed by outside forces greater than we are. Poverty. Crime. Disease. Politics. Even weather.

We fret about these things. We rage against the machine. Some of us obsess over one or more of them, I suppose as a way of feeling stronger against them. Both my mother and my brother died of cancer, and I well remember how all-consuming that battle became for each of them. I’ve known a lot of people who have survived cancer and lived long and happy lives afterwards. That wasn’t the outcome for my two family members.

I’ve written before about my visit to the little farming community of Spencer, South Dakota, a week after a tornado had changed the whole place from a town to an empty field in less than 10 minutes. There was literally nothing anyone there could do, other than wait for it to be over, and then rebuild.

Which they did.

I suppose politics is one powerful force where we (at least, those of us in democratic countries) feel as though we can make a difference—and perhaps that’s the reason why so many of us obsess in that area.

I’m all for doing what we can. I’ve been politically involved in multiple ways over the years. But I’ve also noticed that no matter who wins—“our” side or “theirs”—the leaders don’t become messiahs, and they are no substitute for the Real One.

God, you see, God is the Most High, the Most Powerful, the Mighty Warrior. There is no force in the universe—or outside of it—that is greater than he is. He is never between a rock and a hard place. His holdings are never decreased by the advance of enemy armies. He is not moved; he is not threatened; he is not set back; he is not frustrated in any of his purposes.

He is absolutely great, absolutely powerful.

The history of the world is the story of the rise and fall of kingdoms.

Sumer. Akkad. Assyria. Babylon. Persia. Greece. Rome. The Mongols. The medieval Church. The Holy Roman Empire (OK, not quite so impressive as the others). The British Empire. The French Republic. The Third Reich. The USA. The …

On and on it will go, for as long as the King of Kings allows. But whether the remaining time is half a decade or a hundred thousand years, one thing is certain.

Leaders will rise, and then they will fall. Enslaved peoples will be liberated, and free peoples will be enslaved. Pendulums will swing.

And none of those leaders will deliver us. None of them will be reliable. No social contract will endure. No human utopia will ever come.

But one day, oh, one day, the King will rise from his throne, where he has silently but surely and powerfully been orchestrating earthly kingdoms for all of time, and he will shake the heaven and the earth, the sea and the dry land, and he will establish his kingdom forever.

I happen to think he will do so visibly and politically. Many of my friends—and they are friends—do not. They’re not moved by my arguments, even as I am not moved by theirs. As thus will it ever be, until the King rises and speaks.

But he will rise, and he will speak. And all the forces in the universe, including that old serpent himself, will fall, silent and powerless, before him.

And then, eternally, justice will be done, and peace will prevail, for the King is greater than any force outside himself.

And we will never die. For he is greater, too, than death. We need not rage against the dying of the light, either.

Now if someone is that powerful, we had better hope that he is Good.

And he is.

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

Photo by Taylor Deas-Melesh on Unsplash