Opus 2026-103: Celestial Changing Room

One of the controversial concepts we have in the Christian world is, “Does God change?’  It’s not a fair question because it has so many nuances and so many different understandings that it became useless.  As in the question of, “It all depends what the meaning of ‘is’ is…”  This all depends on what you mean by change and what aspect of God is changing.

We have this simple statement,

(Mal 3:6 KJV)  For I am the LORD, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed.

That could be taken in a simple, literal, and biblical sense and the way it is quoted shows that it is taken that way.  What confuses me is the refusal to keep reading.  Just a few verses further we have the familiar,

(Mal 3:10 KJV)  Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me now herewith, saith the LORD of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it.

Notice that God is saying if Israel will obey then He will change what He is doing.  Change?  Sounds like it to me.

You also run into problems in other places.  Take for instance, the announcement by God in Genesis 6, 

(Gen 6:6 KJV)  And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.

That seems clear to me but my son said his pastor went to great lengths to say something different.

He then proclaimed He is going to destroy the entire human race and just a few versus later, we find that Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.  Either these blanket declarations are hyperbole, God wasn’t aware of Noah, or God changed his mind.

A way of approaching that occurred to me today is that we keep wanting to look at God in His dealings with us as a complete picture.  That cannot be.  God is so universal and complex that we can’t even begin to approach His total reality.  Jesus told us that if we have seen Him, we’ve seen the Father, but even there we don’t know the depths of Jesus.

We see what we need.  God never changes in the sense that all of the things that we need are present, along with all of the things that the rest of humanity needs, and everything that the universe needs, and all those things that God has in reserve that we will never know about.

So, no, God doesn’t change.  What changes is our view of him and what he chooses to reveal to us.  It sounds like word games to me and it probably is but the question remains.  I hope you find an answer for yourself.

homo unius libri