Lesson 5 Immutability
1. God is immutable. The word immutable comes from the Latin word immutabilis (im= not, and mutabilils = mutable or changing). The immutability of God means he never changes in His being, His attributes, His plans, or His______. He cannot diminish, deteriorate, or regress because then He would no longer be God. Whatever God is, He has always been, and always will be. He does not change His mind, or overrule one decree with another. He does not make a promise and then change His mind.
2. Aseity says God’s existence and well-being is not ______or contingent upon any being or circumstance. He is the final and primary cause of all things. If God could be changed, it would have to be from something more powerful and outside of God in order to be who He is in being. Were that the case, God would not be “God”.
3. If God is whatever God has, as the doctrine of Simplicity states—that He is simple, without parts and indivisible - then it does not make sense to say that God can undergo a change of any kind. For example, if we suggest that God gains knowledge from our future, then knowledge becomes a part of God that is capable of growing and learning. This would wrongly make Him depend on His fullness of being on that which is not______. Since God is not composed of parts, He is not composed of inactive potential. Potential is what enables change, and since there is no potential in God, He does not change in his knowing, willing and loving, etc. He doesn’t move from one state of being to the next.
4. For us, change occurs when comparing states of something between two periods of time, and since past present and future do not exist *as such* in God’s “timeless now”, there are not two periods of ______to compare God’s state to. Since God exists infinitely outside of time and space, He is not subject to their influence. He is perfect before all ages and after all ages. He is what he always was, and he will be what he will always be. God is!
5. God is absolutely immutable in his essence, attributes, plans, and purposes. He can neither increase nor decrease. He is subject to no process of development, or of self-evolution. His knowledge and power can never be greater or less. He can never be wiser or holier, or more righteous or more merciful than He ever has been and ever must be. Because He is immutable in His plans and purposes there can be no failure in their______.
6. There is very strong scriptural support for the ______of God’s immutability. It is clearly taught in: James 1:17 Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. Matthew 24:35 Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away. Malachi 3:6 For I the Lord do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed. Also: Hebrews 10:23, 2 Tim 2:13, Psalm 119:89-92, Psalm 33:11
7. The “______” changes in God in some texts are not actually changes in Him at all, but in creation. For example, we could say that God is unchangeably angry with sin and unchangeably pleased by righteousness. So when a sinner with whom God is angry, repents and, by faith, is united to Christ and covered in Christ’s righteousness, God is now pleased with him. God did not change. The sinner did.
8. God’s immutable love is not contingent or dependent upon His creation, or what created ______do, because His love is as eternal as He Himself is. This is shown in Eph. 1:4-10
9. God is the same throughout eternity. ______revelation in Scripture is the gradual unveiling of the developing purposes (from our perspective) of an unchanging God, not the gradual revealing of the developing character of an evolving God.
10. Those passages which speak of God changing his mind or “repenting” - Gen 6:6-7 - creating man; 1 Sam 15:10-11 - making Saul king; Jer 18:8-10 - destroy a nation which repents,; Jonah 3:10 - destroying Nineveh must be interpreted in ______with the rest of Scripture. This is done by recognizing their literary character, and the usage of metaphors, anthropomorphisms or anthropopathisms. 11. We should understand that ______scripture often reports things like the way Moses saw them “from his perspective” and “point-of-view” in Exod. 32:10-14. As they appear to Moses, not necessarily as they really are, as shown in didactic (teaching) scripture like Num. 23:19.
12. In this narrative, Exod. 32:10-14, God is not talked into “changing His mind.” Out of His graciousness, God uses Moses’ intercessory prayer as an element of His will and purpose to show His grace. The effectiveness of that prayer is shown in characterizing God by the human term “relenting”. But God knows and always has known the future perfectly, having planned it according to His unalterable______. He always acts in the way that He planned to act from eternity past.
13. God’s self revelation speaks in “creature-language” in many Bible stories, but we have to remember that these literary devices still tell us something. In God’s hands, anthropomorphisms *are*______. The point is that if we don’t recognize that these are accommodations to our finite brains, we will end up thinking about God in ways that He has explicitly forbidden us from doing elsewhere in Scripture.
14. The incarnation was a miracle of______, not subtraction. The Son took on humanity; He did not divest himself of deity. There was no change in God.
15. What Christ did (ad extra), he did as a single Person in the ______of two natures. Christ’s divine nature did not change when He added a human nature. The human nature is subject to change, even death, but the divine nature is not. God the Son does not change in His essential divine being. The humanity of Jesus only exists in union to the divine Son. Jesus’ human nature did really change. He "increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man" (Lk 2:52). He "learned obedience" (Heb. 5:8) and was "made perfect" (Heb. 5:9). Jesus, according to his divinity, possesses infinite joy, but, while on earth he was a "man of sorrows" (Isa. 53:3).
16. Nowhere in the Bible is the Christian encouraged to pray so that God would ______His will. Quite the opposite is the case. I John 5:14 “This is the confidence which we have before Him, that, if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us.”
17. If we pray for a blessing, and we receive it, it is not that we altered the course of things that God had determined. It is that we were blessed to pray for what was ______the purpose of God to do.
18. Some might ask, so what is the use of praying to a God whose will is already fixed? The answer is; Because God______it: Philippians 4:6, 7
19.We pray because not only is God transforming us in praying, but we are the ______that God uses to get His work done. Whether God intends that work of prayer to be in us, or in others for whom we pray, He ordained prayer to be the vessel of changing things (but not His plans). Prayer does not cause any change in God, but is offered to God to bring about those things that God has eternally determined to give us only as a result of prayer.
20. When we think of God as immutable, we shouldn’t think of him as ______or completely unfeeling, inert or static like a blob. There is a difference between immutability and immobility! We don’t declare him immobile; we declare him unstoppable - God tells us in his word that “He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep” (Ps. 121:4). His character and his plans are unchanging, yet he does not simply sit back to watch those perfect plans unfold. No, he is working constantly within creation to bring His unchanging plans into being.
21. Scripture tells us that if we’ve taken refuge in God, his immutability gives us strong encouragement to hold on to what is promised to us. Because our God is unchanging in His being, His attributes, His plans, and His promises, the hope we have is an “an anchor of the soul, a hope both sure and steadfast” (Heb. 6:19). As the church passes through great trials and temptations, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb. 13:8). If we are in Christ, then God’s love for us is______.