CHAPTER 9
The Immutability of God
O Christ our Lord, Thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.
As conies to their rock, so have we run to Thee for safety; as birds from their
wanderings, so have we flown to Thee for peace. Chance and change are busy in
our little world of nature and men, but in Thee we find no variableness nor
shadow of turning. We rest in Thee without fear or doubt and face our tomorrows
without anxiety. Amen.
The immutability of God is among those attributes less difficult to understand,
but to grasp it we must discipline ourselves to sort out the usual thoughts with
which we think of created things from the rarer ones that arise when we try to
lay hold of whatever may be comprehended of God.
To say that God is immutable is to say that He never differs from Himself. The
concept of a growing or developing God is not found in the Scriptures. It seems
to me impossible to think of God as varying from Himself in any way. Here is
why:
For a moral being to change it would be necessary that the change be in one of
three directions. He must go from better to worse or from worse to better; or,
granted that the moral quality remain stable, he must change within himself, as
from miniature to mature or from one order of being to another. It should be
clear that God can move in none of these directions. His perfections forever
rule out any such possibility.
God cannot change for the better. Since He is perfectly holy, He has never been
less holy than He is now and can never be holier than He is and has always been.
Neither can God change for the worse. Any deterioration within the unspeakably
holy nature of God is impossible. Indeed I believe it impossible even to think
of such a thing, for the moment we attempt to do so, the object about which we
are thinking is no longer God but something else and someone less than He. The
one of whom we are thinking may be a great and awesome creature, but because he
is a creature he cannot be the self-existent Creator.
As there can be no mutation in the moral character of God, so there can be none
within the divine essence. The being of God is unique in the only proper meaning
of that word; that is, His being is other than and different from all other
beings. We have seen how God differs from His creatures in being self-existent,
selfsufficient, and eternal. By virtue of these attributes God is God and not
some other being. One who can suffer any slightest degree of change is neither
self-existent, self-sufficient, nor eternal, and so is not God.
Only a being composed of parts may change, for change is basically a shift in
the relation of the parts of a whole or the admission of some foreign element
into the original composition. Since God is self-existent, He is not composed.
There are in Him no parts to be altered. And since He is self-sufficient,
nothing can enter His being from without.
”Whatever is composed of parts,” says Anselm, ”is not altogether one, but is in
some sort plural, and diverse from itself, and either in fact or in concept is
capable of dissolution. But these things are alien to Thee, than whom nothing
better can be conceived of. Hence, there are no parts in Thee Lord., nor art
Thou more than one. But Thou art so truly a unitary being, and so identical with
Thyself, that in no respect art Thou unlike Thyself, rather Thou art unity
itself, indivisible by any conception.”
”All that God is He has always been, and all that He has been and is He will
ever be.” Nothing that God has ever said about Himself will be modified; nothing
the inspired prophets and apostles have said about Him will be rescinded. His
immutability guarantees this.
The immutability of God appears in its most perfect beauty when viewed against
the mutability of men. In God no change is possible; in men change is impossible
to escape. Neither the man is fixed nor his world, but he and it are in constant
flux. Each man appears for a little while to laugh and weep, to work and play,
and then to go to make room for those who shall follow him in the never-ending
cycle.
Certain poets have found a morbid pleasure in the law of impermanence and have
sung in a minor key the song of perpetual change. Omar the tentmaker was one who
sang with pathos and humor of mutation and mortality, the twin diseases that
afflict mankind. ”Don’t slap that clay around so roughly,” he exhorts the
potter, ”that may be your grandfather’s dust you make so free with”. ”When you
lift the cup to drink red wine,” he reminds the reveler, ”you may be kissing the
lips of some beauty dead long ago.”
This note of sweet sorrow expressed with gentle humor gives a radiant beauty to
his quatrains but, however beautiful, the whole long poem is sick, sick unto
death. Like the bird charmed by the serpent that would devour it, the poet is
fascinated by the enemy that is destroying him and all men and every generation
of men.
The sacred writers, too, face up to man’s mutability, but they are healthy men
and there is a wholesome strength in their words. They have found the cure for
the great sickness. God, they say changes not. The law of mutation belongs to a
fallen world, but God is immutable, and in Him men of faith find at last eternal
permanence. In the meanwhile change works for the children of the kingdom, not
against them. The changes that occur in them are wrought by the hand of the
in-living Spirit. ”But we all,” says the apostle, ”with open face beholding as
in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to
glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.”
In a world of change and decay not even the man of faith can be completely
happy. Instinctively he seeks the unchanging and is bereaved at the passing of
dear familiar things.
O Lord! my heart is sick,
Sick of this everlasting change;
And life runs tediously quick
Through its unresting race and varied range:
Change finds no likeness to itself in Thee
And wakes no echo in Thy mute Eternity.
Frederick W. Faber
These words of Faber find sympathetic response in every heart; yet much as we
may deplore the lack of stability in all earthly things, in a fallen world such
as this the very ability to change is a golden treasure, a gift from God of such
fabulous worth as to call for constant thanksgiving. For human beings the whole
possibility of redemption lies in their ability to change.
To move across from one sort of person to another is the essence of repentance:
the liar becomes truthful, the thief honest, the lewd pure, the proud humble.
The whole moral texture of the life is altered. The thoughts, the desires, the
affections are transformed, and the man is no longer what he had been before. So
radical is this change that the apostle calls the man that used to be ”the old
man” and the man that now is ”the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after
the image of him that created him.”
Yet the change is deeper and more basic than any external acts can reveal, for
it includes also the reception of life of another and higher quality. The old
man, even at his best, possesses only the life of Adam: the new man has the life
of God. And this is more than a mere manner of speaking; it is quite literally
true. When God infuses eternal life into the spirit of a man, the man becomes a
member of a new and higher order of being.
In the working out of His redemptive processes the unchanging God makes full use
of change and through a succession of changes arrives at permanence at last. In
the Book of Hebrews this is shown most clearly. ”He taketh away the first, that
he may establish the second,” is a kind of summation of the teaching of that
remarkable book. The old covenant, as something provisional, was abolished, and
the new and everlasting covenant took its place.
The blood of goats and bulls lost its significance when the blood of the Paschal
Lamb was shed. The law, the altar, the priesthood - all were temporary and
subject to change; now the eternal law of God is engraven forever on the living,
sensitive stuff of which the human soul is composed. The ancient sanctuary is no
more, but the new sanctuary is eternal in the heavens and there the Son of God
has His eternal priesthood.
Here we see that God uses change as a lowly servant to bless His redeemed
household, but He Himself is outside of the law of mutation and is unaffected by
any changes that occur in the universe.
And all things as they change proclaim
The Lord eternally the same.
Charles Wesley
Again the question of use arises. ”Of what use to me is, the knowledge that God
is immutable?” someone asks. ”Is not the whole thing mere metaphysical
speculation? Something that might bring a certain satisfaction to persons of a
particular type of mind but can have no real significance for practical men?”
If by ”practical men” we mean unbelieving men engrossed in secular affairs and
indifferent to the claims of Christ, the welfare of their own souls, or the
interests of the world to come, then for them such a book as this can have no
meaning at all; nor, unfortunately, can any other book that takes religion
seriously. But while such men may be in the majority, they do not by any means
compose the whole of the population. There are still the seven thousand who have
not bowed their knees to Baal. These believe they were created to worship God
and to enjoy His presence forever, and they are eager to learn all they can
about the God with whom they expect to spend eternity.
In this world where men forget us, change their attitude toward us as their
private interests dictate, and revise their opinion of us for the slightest
cause, is it not a source of wondrous strength to know that the God with whom we
have to do changes not? That His attitude toward us now is the same as it was in
eternity past and will be in eternity to come?
What peace it brings to the Christian’s heart to realize that our Heavenly
Father never differs from Himself. Incoming to Him at any time we need not
wonder whether we shall find Him in a receptive mood. He is always receptive to
misery and need, as well as to love and faith. He does not keep office hours nor
set aside periods when He will see no one. Neither does He change His mind about
anything. Today, this moment, He feels toward His creatures, toward babies,
toward the sick, the fallen, the sinful, exactly as He did when He sent His
only-begotten Son into the world to die for mankind.
God never changes moods or cools off in His affections or loses enthusiasm. His
attitude toward sin is now the same as it was when He drove out the sinful man
from the eastward garden, and His attitude toward the sinner the same as when He
stretched forth His hands and cried, ”Come unto me, all ye that labour and are
heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
God will not compromise and He need not be coaxed. He cannot be persuaded to
alter His Word nor talked into answering selfish prayer. In all our efforts to
find God, to please Him, to commune with Him, we should remember that all change
must be on our part. ”I am the Lord, I change not.” We have but to meet His
clearly stated terms, bring our lives into accord with His revealed will, and
His infinite power will become instantly operative toward us in the manner set
forth through the gospel in the Scriptures of truth.
Fountain of being! Source of Good!
Immutable Thou dost remain!
Nor can the shadow of a change
Obscure the glories of Thy reign.
Earth may with all her powers dissolve,
If such the great Creator will;
But Thou for ever art the same,
I AM is Thy memorial still.
From Walker's Collection