Unchanging...?

When we say that God is unchanging, what do we really mean? We mean that his essential character and characteristics (so far as they can be discerned by us) never change. Thus his love, justice, goodness and faithfulness (just to name a few) will always be the same no matter what we do. To put it another way, "good" will always be "good" because God IS, and "bad" will always be determined by its relationship to "good. Furthermore, God must be necessary (uncreated) and not contingent (owing its existence to another being or process) in order for us to have any basis for rationality at all. How we can know that we know anything as "true" were there not an unalterable standard by which truth is measured? In terms of our being, since we are contingent he must be necessary because the changeable can never owe its existence ultimately to the changeable. God's very existence provides a stable playing field for us. If he were changeable every minute just like we are we would have no foundation from which to relate to each other. This is just a very incomplete, thumbnail sketch of the importance of this issue. Everything depends on God's nature in this sense. To put it another way, were God not immutable he would quite simply not meet the standard for divinity. He would cease to be God.

However, we must be careful as we explore this issue of immutability not to build our theology solely from Aristotelian/Socratic metaphysics, ignoring the biblical witness, which shows us that God does, in fact, change his mind. This requires little examination or interpretation of scriptural subtleties; he quite clearly intends to do one thing, then "repents" of it. The bible uses precisely the same Greek word when it speaks of us "repenting", only the context is typically very different. We repent of bad things mostly; God can never do that, of course. The bible shows as a polemic against the pagan religion of the day a God who is dynamic and purposeful, who loves us and lives with us, who will alter his plans based on our prayers or changes in our states of being. He is not, in short, the "Unmoved Mover" of Aristotelian metaphysics. He feels with us, but not like us; he loves with us but is not fickle. He assumes our form but never reduces his own. In Christ we see God who is literally with us, one of us, in the mix and in the mess. Through it all his character is unchanged. He can change his mind without every introducing corruption into his nature. He is not pliable, so to speak. He simply chooses to relate to us based on the current conditions.

Critically, when God makes promises his nature requires that they should never be broken. That is what the Old Testament most often refers to with respect to immutability, not the idea of the Unmoved Mover. Jesus is at once a present fulfillment and a future promise. We can know that God will keep it because God cannot break a promise that he has made while still remaining God. The Holy Spirit is the engagement ring if you will; the tangible presence of a not-yet-realized future certainty.

We can love God and each other confidently and extravagantly because He loved us first and best, lives with us every second and will never change.

Remember your word to your servant,

because you have given me hope.

This is my comfort in my trouble,

that your promise gives me life.

- Ps 119:49-50 (Z)