Heavy Theology | The Hardest Concepts in Christian ThoughtSample

“Some Things Never Change”

We sing You never change, You never fail Oh God. 

What does that mean? For God to never change?

It means internally, He’s incapable of changing. That follows naturally from assuming God’s infinity. Why? Because if He can change, He can increase or decrease in His perfection. And if He can increase or decrease in His perfection, then He is not perfect and therefore not infinite and therefore not self-existent which is required for anything to exist at all. Because the world is predicated upon some infinite and self-existent cause, that cause must be perfect and therefore unchanging.

This grows difficult because some of God’s attributes assume that creation exists — omnipresence assumes space, for instance, but the changing nature of creation (seasons, orbital patterns, tidal rhythms, wavelengths, entropy) can never apply to its Creator. Those who say that God “lays aside” these attributes or “makes them inactive” in order to become incarnate both misunderstand the nature of these attributes and misunderstand the nature of the incarnation — particularly as relates to time and space, but absolutely in the case of the perfection of God’s character and that includes pre-Christian theists. God created the world without changing. And God incarnated himself without changing, which explains the importance of that Hebrew verse that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” Divine immutability is divine essence.

Whatever you think of God, you cannot set aside the fact that He does not change. If you do, you set aside the bedrock behind the perfected Being who donates being to every contingent thing.