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IF GOD IS UNCHANGING HOW COME HE CHANGES HIS MIND? |
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Last
week I listed over twenty terms (and passages) that the Bible uses to
describe God. I suggested that
prayerfully reading the passages and thinking about God would lead a person to
worship. While this is most often the
case, sometimes thinking about what the Bible says about God raises
questions, and some of those questions need to be answered. For
instance, some people when thinking about God's unchangeableness1
are reminded of passages where God is said to "repent" or change
His mind.2 How can a God who never changes change His mind? It is
helpful to remember than when the Bible speaks of God's unchangeableness (the
50¢ theological word is immutableness), it is referring to the fact
that God is unchanging in His being, character, purposes and promises. Because He is unchanging, God is
consistent in everything He does – including how He relates to His creatures. As an example, God acts in one way toward
rebellious sinners and He acts in another way toward those sinners who
repent. The fact that God acts one
way toward a person who is willfully in rebellion and another way toward the
same person when he or she sincerely repents does not show that God is
inconsistent or "changing".
Rather, it shows that God is consistent as well as just. There are many Biblical examples of this:
for instance, in the book of Jonah, God declared that in 40 days He would
wipe the city of Nineveh (and all its people) off the face of the earth (Jonah
3:3). That is because the people were
very wicked and unrepentant (1:2).
But in Jonah 3:4 we are told that the people – every one of them –
"believed God" and repented.
God then spared the city and did not destroy it as He had threatened
(3:10). Jonah himself tells us that
He understood that God would always withhold judgment if the people repented
(4:2). God
always acts with consistency precisely because He is unchanging. 1 James
1:17; Ps 33:11, 102:25-27, 110:4; 1 Sam 15:29; Heb 1:10-12, 6:17-18, 13:8;
Mal 3:6. 2 Gen 6:6;
Ex 32:14; Jonah 3:10, 4:2; Jer 18:8; Joel 2:13; Amos 7:3. |
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