immutability of God

⁶ “…I the Lord do not change…” – Micah 3:6 ESV

¹⁴God replied to Moses, “I am who I am. Say this to the people of Israel: I am has sent me to you.” ¹⁵God also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel: Yahweh, the God of your ancestors—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob—has sent me to you.

This is my eternal name,
my name to remember for all generations.

¹⁶“Now go and call together all the elders of Israel. Tell them, ‘Yahweh, the God of your ancestors—the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—has appeared to me.” – Exodus 3:14-16 NLT

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. – Hebrews 13:8 ESV

Our God is unchanging. He is consistently constant and constantly consistent in every way. He does not grow older. He cannot increase in intelligence. There is never a time when He is weak or tired. According to the psalmist, “he who watches over Israel never slumbers or sleeps” (Psalm 121:4 NLT).

This is all tied to His eternality, a one-of-a-kind attribute that He alone possesses. His eternality declares that He has always existed and is uncreated. Which means there He has no beginning or end. God has no birth date and, contrary to the opinion of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, God has no death date. James refers to Him as “the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17 NLT).

When God spoke to Moses from the midst of the burning bush, He identified Himself as “I am who I am.” That sounds like an odd way for anyone to introduce Himself, let alone God. But in Hebrew, the statement is ehyeh asher ehyeh and it has a rich and expansive meaning. The word ehyeh is the verb to be, but it appears in this verse in the first person common singular. If God has simply answered Moses by saying, “I am God,” that would have been perfectly normal and acceptable. But He said, “I am who I am.” He repeated the same word twice, declaring His self-sufficiency, self-existence, and immediate presence. God was letting Moses know that he was talking to the eternally constant God, the ever-present and unchangeable creator of the universe.

In the book of Revelation, God refers to Himself as “the Alpha and the Omega…who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty” (Revelation 1:8 ESV). Later on in the same book, Jesus declares Himself to be “the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (Revelation 22:13 ESV). Alpha and Omega are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, respectively. They start and finish it. Just as God is the start and finish of all things. But unlike the Greek alphabet, God is without beginning and without end.

When we speak of God’s unchanging nature, we are dealing with what theologians call His immutability. That’s a high-sounding word that simply means that God is changeless and unchangeable. In other words, He does not change Himself and He cannot be changed by others. He is impervious to change. The very idea of change suggests either improvement or diminishment. For something to change, it must get better or become worse. It must move from one state to another. And to do so requires time. But God exists outside of time. Again, the psalmist points out God’s timelessness which makes possible His changelessness.

Lord, through all the generations
    you have been our home!
Before the mountains were born,
    before you gave birth to the earth and the world,
    from beginning to end, you are God. – Psalm 90:1-2 NLT

A. W. Pink expresses God changelessness this way:

God is immutable in His essence. His nature and being are infinite, and so, subject to no mutations. There never was a time when He was not; there never will come a time when He shall cease to be. God has neither evolved, grown, nor improved. All that He is today, He has ever been, and ever will be. – A. W. Pink, The Attributes of God

God can’t change for the better, because to do so would mean He was somehow insufficient or imperfect to begin with. God has no deficiencies or defects. He has no lacks in His personality or weaknesses in His attributes that need improvement. A. W. Pink puts it this way: “His power is unabated, His wisdom undiminished, His holiness unsullied.”

This particular attribute of God is difficult for us to understand because we are creatures who exist within and are governed by time. We are born and then we begin the process of growth. We grow up. We gradually become stronger. But our strength is often accompanied by weakness. Eventually, we may find ourselves growing smarter. But our intelligence is never perfect or complete. We will even experience the frustration of forgetting what we once knew. And in time, we will grow old and experience the ultimate and unavoidable change called death.

So, it is almost impossible for us to comprehend the immutability of God. And it doesn’t help that when we read the Scriptures, they seem to portray a God who exhibits all kinds of changing characteristics. When we read the Old Testament, we seem to find a God who is harsh, unforgiving, and legalistic in His relationship with mankind. But the God of the New Testament appears more living, gentle, and kind. But the doctrine of God’s immutability reminds us that our God is the same yesterday and today and forever. What the Bible reveals to us is our unchanging God relating to humanity at various times throughout history. It is the circumstances that are changing, not God. More often than not, it is the particular people group with whom God is interacting and the cultural context within which they lived that is creating the sense of mutability or change in God.

But He is and always has been the same. He has always been loving, righteous, just, holy, set apart, and transcendent. He has always hated sin. He has always shown grace. He has always extended mercy. But He has also been consistent in His hatred of pride, His punishment of the wicked, His desire for mankind’s redemption, and His plan to bring it about through the death of His Son on the cross.

God’s immutability should bring us comfort. What A. W. Pink refers to as “solid comfort.”

Human nature cannot be relied upon; but God can! However unstable I may be, however fickle my friends may prove, God changes not. If He varied as we do; if He willed one thing today and another tomorrow; if He were controlled by caprice, who could confide in Him? But, all praise to His glorious name, He is ever the same. His purpose is fixed; His will is stable; His word is sure. Here then is a Rock on which we may fix our feet, while the mighty torrent is sweeping away everything around us. The permanence of God’s character guarantees the fulfillment of His promises… – A. W. Pink, The Attributes of God

In a world where inconsistency, unreliability, and constant change are the new normal, it is comforting to know that we worship a God who is consistently constant and constantly consistent. He is totally reliable because He is completely unchangeable. His love never fades. His plans never fail. His power never diminishes. His patience never runs out. His promises never disappoint. And according to the prophet Isaiah, “His government and its peace will never end.” This comforting fact will be made possible through the eventual return of His Son to earth, when “He will rule with fairness and justice from the throne of his ancestor David for all eternity. The passionate commitment of the LORD of Heaven’s Armies will make this happen!
(Isaiah 9:7 NLT).

English Standard Version (ESV)
The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Permanent Text Edition® (2016). Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

New Living Translation (NLT)
Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Then Solomon stood before the altar of the Lord in the presence of all the assembly of Israel and spread out his hands toward heaven, and said, “O Lord, God of Israel, there is no God like you, in heaven above or on earth beneath, keeping covenant and showing steadfast love to your servants who walk before you with all their heart; you have kept with your servant David my father what you declared to him. You spoke with your mouth, and with your hand have fulfilled it this day.” – 1 Kings 8:22-24 ESV

1 Kings 8:22-53

Solomon had just finished the construction of the temple, a long-term building project, and the fulfillment of a dream of his father, David. But while the temple was complete, Solomon knew it would not be truly ready for use until it had been dedicated or set apart for God. The prayer Solomon prayed at this occasion is the longest recorded in the Bible. It was a public prayer of dedication that honored God for who He was and all that He had done in the lives of the people of Israel, including allowing them to finish this massive building project. Solomon stood before the people as their king and addressed God on their behalf. One of the first things he did was to acknowledge God’s incomparable nature. He said, “There is no God like you.” God was one of a kind. He was unequaled and in a class by Himself. It is important to remember that the Israelites lived in a context and time when false gods were a dime a dozen. Every nation that surrounded Israel had its own god or gods. The Israelites themselves had long struggled with a propensity to worship other gods. While they had been exiled in Egypt, they had developed a habit of worshiping idols, and that temptation was always alive and well for them. False gods were an everyday reality for the people of Israel, but Solomon knew and acknowledged that there was no god that could ever compare to the one true God.

And one of the things that set God apart was His character. Solomon described Him as the covenant-keeping God. Unlike the false gods of the other nations, Yahweh was one who kept His word. He wasn’t fickle or untrustworthy. What He promised, He would do. He could be counted on to be consistent in His interactions with those who worshiped Him. While God’s moods could change, He was always consistent in His behavior. He would not tolerate sin. He hated pride. He blessed those who were obedient. He punished the disobedient. With the God of Israel, you always knew what to expect. His ways were always righteous and His character was immutable or unchanging. Solomon knew from personal experience that God had been faithful, because He had seen God fulfill His promise to David that his son would build the temple. Solomon was that son. He had personally experienced the blessings of God and knew that his success as king was God-ordained so that he might build the temple. He knew that his wisdom and wealth were both provided by God – all so he could accomplish God’s will and complete the construction of the temple. Even though Solomon knew that he and others had done the actual planning and construction, he acknowledged God’s non-debatable role: “You spoke with your mouth, and with your hand have fulfilled it this day.” God had said it and He had accomplished it.

There is a certain sense in which we, as Christians, fail to appreciate the uniqueness of God. We tend to take for granted who He is and all that He has done for us. While we would never think to compare God with other gods, because we don’t believe in them, it might help us appreciate Him more if we better understood just how unique and incomparable He really is. Our God is faithful, just, always righteous in all that He does, and never fails to keep His word. What was true in Solomon’s day is just as true today. We worship the same God. We benefit from the same unchanging characteristics that He displayed in those days. Moses wrote in the book of Numbers, “God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it?” (Numbers 23:19 ESV). He is faithful, true and constantly consistent in His character. He can always be trusted. There is no god like our God. The character of God is what defines the nature of God. We don’t get to add to or alter His character. We don’t get to create a God of our own making. While we might prefer an all-loving, never-angry version of God, that is not up to us. We don’t get to recreate Him or reimagine Him as what we would like Him to be. But the more we understand just exactly who He is, the greater our appreciation for Him will be. He deserves our praise, appreciation, worship, and faithful obedience, because there is no god like our God.

Devotionary

The Bible Made Accessible and Applicable

Our Constantly Consistent God

None Like Him.