The Immutability of God, Part 2

When the Bible says that God doesn’t change, it means that He never changes His character or His will. Numbers 23:19 says, “God is not a man, that He should lie, nor a son of man, that He should repent.”

The Lord may, however, choose to react differently to man’s varying responses. For example, God commanded Jonah to preach to the city of Nineveh that they would be destroyed. But at the preaching of Jonah, the whole city repented. The Bible says, “God relented concerning the calamity which He had declared He would bring upon them. And He did not do it” (Jonah 3:10). Instead of destroying them He blessed them. Did God change? No, it was the people of Nineveh that changed, and God responded to their repentance with a blessing, which is consistent with His nature.

Genesis 6:6 says that when God looked at the debauchery of the human race in pre–flood civilizations, He “was sorry that He had made man on the earth.” God had made humanity to be blessed and to be a blessing, but Adam’s fall into sin turned God’s blessing into a curse. God’s will and His character were unchanged. He would reward good and punish evil. But what changed? Humanity had changed, and God was sorry for what His creatures would suffer in judgment. He has no joy when judgment falls (2 Peter 3:9).

When the Bible says God was sorry, it doesn’t mean that He thought He had made a mistake. The King James Version uses the word repented. That doesn’t mean He changed His mind. The Bible simply expresses in terms we can understand a divine attitude of grief over sin. In theological circles this is referred to as a anthropomorphism. It means God responded to man’s iniquity with sorrow and altered His treatment of mankind in accordance with how they were behaving. His will never change. He never varied from His course (cf. Jeremiah 13:17).

God’s immutability sets Him apart from everything created, because everything else changes. The whole universe is changing. Galaxies die and begin. Even the sun is slowly burning out. Our world is constantly changing. The seasons change. We grow old and die, and from the beginning to the end, all we know is change. Not God. He is “the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8).

End of Part 2