I’ve discussed before what it means that God is eternal… that He is unchanging in a world where change is the very nature of everything. I’ve talked about that as being a measuring stick we can use, that it provides a mark against which we can measure ourselves because it’s constant. But let’s be honest, while all of that is true and valid, it’s cold comfort in the middle of a crisis, when you’re less worried about how you measure up and more worried about having anything left for what you still have coming.
So why do I come back to this song again? Because God’s immutability, His unchanging nature, is good for more than just judgment. There’s value in having an absolute by which we measure; don’t get me wrong. But God is, to borrow a phrase from Alton Brown’s kitchen, no uni-tasker (sorry, AB! You SO rock!). God’s unchanging nature provides us a constant in an inconstant world, an anchor in the raging storms of life, a certainty when all else is uncertain.
You see, Beloved, if I say that God is good, but He’s only good some of the time, when it strikes His whim and whimsy to be good, is that really good? Is God good if He’s only good when He wants to be, when it’s convenient to be good? What if, the rest of the time, God is really rotten? Is God still good? Can a little good outweigh all the bad, if “good” is the measure by which He is being judged? In order for God to truly be good, He must be constantly, consistently, perfectly good. God must be unchanging.
We could go through this repeatedly, but I despise being heavy handed and hamfisted, so let’s set that aside for the moment. If we grant that for God to be any of the things we understand Him to be, He must be them constantly and consistently, that He must be unchanging, what does that mean in the middle of the night when our child is laying in the incubator, struggling to breathe, or in the middle of the afternoon when we’re trying to decide if it’s time to let Mom go, or even when we’re struggling under a mountain of debt and can’t find a way out or to the end of the month? What good is immutability?
I can’t speak for what God will do in your life specifically. I won’t pretend to. But I can tell you what I know from experience in my life, and let you draw your own conclusions.
When my great-grandmother was dying, my Gramie, the woman who’d been an enormous part of my life, who had been the first, best example of Jesus living on earth, the immutability of God, His unchanging nature was there to reassure me that the faith that had carried her through life, the quiet faith that she’d poured out in her life before my sisters and I, would carry her into the arms of the very God she’d served so lovingly. I had watched her suffer at the end and pleaded with God to give her peace, to just grant her rest… even if that meant I had to say goodbye. I could rest in God’s unchanging goodness and love to know that my Gramie’s death would mean rest for her.
When, entirely too soon afterwards, my father died, the man who’d given up his last visit with me to let me be with his ex-wife’s family for Gramie’s last days and her funeral, the man who loved me and got me like no one had before, and my heart broke, threatening to shatter inside of me, God’s immutability was there. I found that all the people on earth I’d clung to, certain beyond certainty of their love (others loved me, but I thought I had to earn it; somehow, these two had managed to escape that bizarre little exception in my wonky wiring), that my rock of certainty was gone, and I felt lost… until I remembered that my God was my rock, my refuge, my strong tower, my every ready help in times of trouble. He promised to be the resurrection and the life. I don’t think I was hoping for my Dad to get out of the coffin (I’d read “The Monkey’s Paw” by this time, so I wasn’t looking for a zombie version of him), so much as I was clinging to the promise that someday, someday, he’d be on the other side of eternity, waiting for me… that he was with my Gramie now, that he was with my God. It gave me something to cling to in order to survive those early days.
Even more recently, as I struggled with my health (as I struggle, present tense) with my health, God’s immutability is there. His ever constant nature means that no problem I face is a surprise to Him. And when I am weak and weary and worn by the constant drain of life, knowing that God does not change, that He will walk through the waters with me, that He will come through the fires with me, and I will not be harmed… Oh, Beloved, I need those promises to be made by a God that never changes. I need them to be made by a God who is constant.
You see, Beloved, God being unchanging means that He’s never going to abandon you when you need Him. Him being eternal means that He’s always there when you need Him. He’s unshakable. Bring the worst of the storms rocking your world; God’s not going anywhere. Bring the biggest world-shaker. God’s bigger. Bring the scariest changes in your life; God’s not changing. In a world where nothing is constant, Beloved, isn’t it good to know that God is?
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