2023 BBC Bible Conference - Session Four "The Immutability of God"

Well, it is really a joy being with you and even interacting in our break times by the interactions and questions. It's wonderful to see you're getting it and chewing on it. Just my plan for tomorrow on the Lord's Day, we'll have covered, Lord willing, by the end of this session, sometimes they're called the metaphysical attributes or the absolute attributes of God.

And then my plan for tomorrow is in Sunday school to deal with holiness and the morning sermon we'll look at Malachi 1 and talk about love, God's love, and then the evening sermon we'll look at Malachi 2 -3 and talk about God's justice.

So we'll continue and we'll build on and for you specially chosen, the elect that have come to the conference, you'll have a head start in terms of what we'll build on tomorrow looking at God's word together and expounding it.

The Immutability of God and the Security of His Promises

But we want to come and wrap up our time that we began last night and think about God's immutability and impassibility. And if there's any more modern hymn that's become something of a favorite, it has to be Chisholm's Great is Thy Faithfulness.

Most of us probably know the first verse by heart. Great is thy faithfulness, O God my Father. There is no shadow of turning with thee. Thou changest not. Thy compassions, they fail not. As thou hast been, thou forever will be.

How can you know that God's compassions will fail not? How do you know that his compassions won't fail when you fail? How can you be sure that your next sin won't be the last straw for God? Only if thou changest not.

And that's the key of God's immutability and impassibility. Only if we can say, you forever will be, can we be assured our salvation is as secure and eternal as God promises in his word. So I want to think first about immutability and then impassibility and how we're really saying the same thing with both with greater definition, but let's consider first God's immutability.

Defining it, it just means God is unchangeable. He cannot mutate. He's not a ninja turtle. He doesn't mutate. He's immutable. In our confession, we confess God to be immutable. The Puritan Stephen Charnot gave this definition, God is unchangeable in his essence, nature, and perfections.

So that means that everything we say about God is unchangeably true. His love, his blessedness, his goodness are unchangeable. At times, folks object, well, if God truly loves, then he must change and adapt and react to his beloved, his creatures.

I mean, if human relationships involve response and change, how could a relationship with God be real if he does not change? Now we'll press this even further in a little while later, but as we've already seen, when we make God like us, he actually grows more distant.

We lose God and ourselves, and it's always a bad bargain. We also have to remember, because God is absolute and God is simple, then reality is what he defines it. So we have to be really careful when we say, if it's like me, that's the only definition of real, and what we've done is subtly supplaced God with ourselves.

And everything we've already considered, blessedness, incomprehensibility, aseity, independence, irreducibility, simplicity, all of those truths logically entail immutability. God is blessed because he is who he is, eternal, independent, irreducible.

That means he cannot change. If God could change, he would be composed, because he would not be independent. He wouldn't be eternal, because creation is defined by change, and time is a measurement of change, and so on.

So everything we've already said, God is independent of creation, he is immense, he's not bounded by space or location, he's not subject to change, he's eternal, he's self-sufficient, he is what he always was and always will be, so he cannot change.

All change must come from a cause. There is no cause prior to God. He is. This is what Charles Hodge concluded. He said, as an infinite and absolute being, self-existent and absolutely independent, God is exalted above all the causes of and even the possibility of change.

Because of who God is, he cannot change. Or Stephen Sharnock again said, if God does change, it must be either to a greater perfection than he had before, or to a less. If to the better, he was not perfect, and so was not God.

If to the worse, he will not be perfect, and so be no longer God after that change. In other words, all what we've already said means God is changeless. And if God were mutable, then none of what we've said already could be true.

That's why John Owen said, any suggestion of mutability in God is atheism. He said, to ascribe the least mutability to God's essence is transcendent atheism in the highest degree. Change is a characteristic of creation.

If God changes, he is a creature. If God's a creature, all that exists is material existence and creation, and there is no God. So to ascribe any change to God is essentially to be a logical atheist. God is the infinity of goodness, love, and joy.

He is. He is a pure spirit. He is life itself. He cannot possibly be any different. Wilhelmus O 'Brackell said, no one can add to or subtract anything from his being, neither can anyone increase or decrease his blessedness.

And again, this reminds us that God is not immutable like a rock. He's unchangeable like an infinite fountain, the fullness of which cannot be added to and cannot be taken away from. And this is exactly how God argues in scripture.

God argues from his essential name, Exodus 3, I am Yahweh. And he concludes and argues with us in his word that because he is who he is, he must never change. His immutability is the consequence of his perfect being.

John Calvin said that God argues from his essential nature and argues with us from his own nature and reasons with us. So, for example, in Malachi 3, verse 6, it reads, For I, the Lord, do not change.

That's the ESV. A better rendering would be, I am Yahweh, therefore I do not change. God is arguing from the fact that we should know he's immutable because he is who he is. He's exalted above all the cause and any possibility of change.

Or what about Psalm 102? Psalm 102, verses 25 to 27, we read, Of old you laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you will remain. They will all wear out like a garment.

You will change them like a robe, and they will pass away. But you are the same, and your years have no end. Now, again, that's the ESV. And in verse 27, literally, we could translate that, You are the same, you are he.

And the translators have added the same because that's the implication. He is. I am who I am. All of the cosmos and all of the creative things, they all change. You can take them off like a garment, but you are he.

The I am. You remain. You are the same. He transcends any limitation and any alterations and any change of creation. The most stable and seemingly constant fixtures of creation that we rely on, earth and sky, they're all changing.

The Bible says they all deteriorate, and God will take them off like we take off a jacket, and he will remain. Now, sometimes it's suggested that what we mean by immutability is only that God's promises will not change.

But it is the immutability of God's being that assures us his promises are unalterable. Because remember, being precedes doing. Genesis 22, verse 16, God said to Abraham, by myself, I have sworn as certain as I cannot change my covenant is true.

And then this is picked up in the book of Hebrews, chapter six, verses 13 to 18. We read this when God made a promise to Abraham since he had no one greater by whom to swear, he swore by himself, guaranteed it with an oath so that by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement.

What are the two unchangeable things? God's word and God himself. God's covenant faithfulness is explained by his unchangeable being. Why can you trust his word will never be altered? Because he is immutable, he doesn't change.

It is God's immutable being that establishes his unchangeable promises and it is the assurance we have that his covenant promises to us in Christ through the gospel are always true and will be true 10 million years from now.

If it could be otherwise, just think if God could be changeable, how could you be sure his word wouldn't also? How could you be certain the covenant promises of God in Christ would not be altered? If we're honest, we have to say we couldn't because he could change.

God never changes so we can be assured. This is why we can trust God's word when circumstances seem uncertain and distressing. What's interesting, when you look at scripture, the places where God's immutability pops up most clearly and explicitly are all places where God's people are in great distress and great wondering what's going on and God's basic answer is, well the one thing you can be sure is not going on is I'm not changing.

And so we need to have a different interpretation of your circumstances. So for example, Malachi 3. In Malachi, we'll look at Malachi a couple times tomorrow, it's a key book about the being of God. God's people were wondering where he was.

They were even asking in the chapter before this, where is the God of justice? And so God gives an answer in chapter 3 verse 6, well you can know one thing, I haven't changed. I am Yahweh, I do not change.

The creator is wholly different from the creation. And then the conclusion he draws from that, the remainder of verse 6, therefore, O children of Abraham, you aren't consumed. You ought to think and reflect on my immutability, it is the basis for your existence given your sin.

And the extension of the argument in Malachi 3 is that what you are seeing is my fatherly discipline. You're seeing my immutable character in effect against your disobedient posture. I have not changed, you have.

That's why you're under discipline. That's the argument he makes. Or in Psalm 102, which we already quoted a portion of, Psalm 102 is a prayer of one afflicted. And in verses 1 and 2 of Psalm 102, the psalmist lays out his lament before the Lord and he calls on him to hear my cries.

And then he reflects on God's immutability that we just quoted, you are the same, you remain, your years have no end. And this is what he concludes, verse 28 of Psalm 102, the children of your servants shall dwell secure, their offspring shall be established.

How can you be sure when circumstances seem desperate and unfavorable that God will be faithful to do what he promises? Because he doesn't change. And even if your whole world is falling apart, that does not signify any change in God, but only a differentiation in his sovereign decree for the providence and purposes of the outworking of his will.

But he hasn't changed. Or what about the encouragement that James gains along that line in James chapter 1 in the New Testament? James wrote to Christians who meet trials of various kinds, in verse 2, and various temptations and tests, but we must never say in James 1, verse 13, that I am being tempted by God.

No, instead, what do we say 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. The sun and moon vary, creation shifts from light to darkness, but there is no variation of change in God.

So when we face trials of various kinds, it's not because God has changed, but his perfect gifts test and chasten and form us to be like God himself. God has changed in the outworking of his acts, but he has not changed.

Our shifting circumstances never signal a shift in God, ever. They reflect the varied outworking of his single will of grace towards us. It is because God does not change, we can be assured in the darkest of days that his purposes for me are still good, regardless of how this feels or looks, because he never changes, and of that I can be assured.

And then we can say even further, that ultimately, in the ultimate sense, all of my circumstances are an outworking of God's immutable covenant love. He must mean this for good, even if this isn't good.

It must be meant for good, because all his purposes are love and good for me in Christ. And we must emphasize this, it is such a key aspect of God's immutability, and it means that the rest of his perfections remain.

God is who he is. One analogy that persisted in the Puritans is that God's immutability is like a string of thread through pearls of God's perfections. So, Thomas Manton said that God's immutability is an attribute like a silken string through a chain of pearl runs through the rest.

Just think about what binds all of the perfections of God as perfections is because they're perfect. His love is perfect. His holiness is perfect. His justice is perfect. It's immutable. It never changes.

It's never altered. He is. His mercy is unchanging. His love is immutable. His grace is unaltering. His justice never fades. It's the immutability of God's perfections that distinguish them as divine perfections.

I spoke to a gentleman at a coffee shop recently, saw my theology books, asked if I was a pastor. People have one or two reactions when they find out I'm a pastor. They either clam up or they well up and we're suddenly talking about everything and I've got to get some reading done or whatever.

But I spoke to him recently at this coffee shop and he told me, well you know my God, and he pointed out the window, is the birds and the trees. All that out there. I just reminded him and I said, you know, all those birds and trees, they're all changing.

They're all decaying. They're all going to die. So if that's your God, what hope do you really have? You have none. It's because God is wholly other from His creation, independent of it, immutable and self-sufficient, that we have hope that He is.

He's immutable. He is not altered. We know that He is near. In Him we live and move and have our being. It is the imperfection of change and constancy and inconstancy that mar every other relationship we have.

Why do friendships fray? Well they're just not themselves anymore. They've changed. We withdraw from others because we've changed. We don't have more to give. We might say, I'm exhausted. I can't talk to another person.

I've changed. I'm depleted. God is. He never changes. You can always seek Him. He never tires. It is His immutable independence from creation that establishes God's singular presence with us in creation, though He's not of it.

Beloved, those who suggest that if God's immutable, it destroys our relatedness and our ability to commune with Him, just to be frank, they have no idea what they're talking about. It's abject nonsense.

It's logical pantheism. If God changes, then He's a creature. You have no God. Good luck. God is immutable. We can have confidence He's the same. He's even perceptible apart from changing creation. And even if our world one day is a beautiful sunset and the next day is an abject disaster, you know what you can trust?

God is. He's immutable. You can seek Him and you can trust He must mean this for the good and glorious outworking of His purposes because He doesn't change. The One who never changes also entered our changing world, and the Son assumed humanity for us.

We spoke a little bit about this last night in the Q &A, but the Incarnation did not change God. It is the Incarnation of the Son, not the transformation of the Son. In Christ, the divine and human nature were joined without mixture, separation, or confusion so that Christ did not become some third being, but in Jesus we see true God and true man in one person.

And as a true man, Christ lived for us, and He accomplished fully realized human holiness on our behalf, and He died for us and endured the curse of God's justice for our broken covenant with Him. And He arose ascending, assuring us that His vicarious life and death and resurrection are truly a substitution for us as real people, the real human works, yet we have confidence of their eternal saving efficacy because they are secured by the immutability of Christ's divine nature.

It's wonderful. There's good news. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. And if you trust Him today, He can as assuredly save you as the first time that gospel was preached in Jerusalem by Peter in Acts 2, because the immutable God took on humanity to return us to Him.

So we have this unchanging hope that if you trust the Lord Jesus, the same Lord who lived and died and rose again 2 ,000 years ago and now ascended will save us. Edward Lay reminds us, whom God loves once, He loves forever.

God's people shall never fall from grace, shall never be wholly overcome of temptation. And into our complete salvation, John Owen said this, God laid the shoulders of the unchangeableness of His own nature to the work.

We can be confident that God's saving purposes will be fulfilled as He's promised, and we can be assured that they will never change because in the salvation God has wrought in Christ, He's laid the shoulders of His immutability.

It's secure. It's unalterable. So God's love and joy are immutable perfections, and we can be assured that God's love then is eternal. Now this is what we're protecting, and everything we've just said, when we go further and we say that because God is immutable, He's impassable.

Because He's a fountain of infinite goodness and joy, He is not subject to passions. Now when we come to God's impassibility, we come in some ways to the most challenging aspect for us, but one which we've already been prepared for since last night.

Now impassibility used to be taken for granted by Christians for centuries, but we live in an age, we've all grown in it, that's obsessed with emotions. We consider expressing our emotions as the basis of what we call authenticity, but it's often instinctively rejected because of that impassibility.

But let's start with just a basic definition of impassibility from one encyclopedia. It says impassibility is that divine attribute whereby God is said not to experience inner emotional changes of state, whether enacted freely from within, or affected by His relationship to and interaction with human beings and the created order.

Pretty good. God does not have emotional changes of state. God doesn't change. He doesn't change Himself, and He doesn't change in response to someone acting upon Him. No one acts upon God. He is. Now this is again plain, vanilla, normal Christian understanding of God for centuries, and what's key is it's consequential to what we talked about last night, God's blessedness.

So John Gill, for example, said, properly speaking, there are no affections and passions in God to be wrought upon or worked up, so as disturb and disquiet Him. He is invariably and unchangeably the same and so most blessed forevermore.

Because God is blessed, He must be impassible. John Calvin said, in God we know is subject to no passions. We know no change takes place in Him. It must ever be remembered. God is exempt from every passion.

Now again, this was normal. Christians took it for granted. But we became obsessed with emotions and therapy. We assume emotions and our emotional life define what is real. That's why we'll have in our culture, people say things like, well, I may be biologically male, but I feel like a woman because we've given ontological freight to our feelings.

You pick it up even in more subtle ways. Notice this. When someone's asked a factual question now, they often answer with their first words, well, I feel. We don't say, I think anymore. When we're asked the question, well, I think, well, I feel, it's like, that's significant.

We think feelings are the foundation of reality. And so when we hear God's impassable, we think He's indifferent, apathetic, dispassionate. No. Passion technically and historically meant to undergo change, to suffer.

That's why we will still refer to the passion of Christ, the sufferings of Christ. And we've already seen God is immutable. So by saying God has no passions, what we're doing is we're protecting the perfections of His love and joy and goodness as real and perfect and proper in God.

That's who He is. We're preserving them as perfections and not as creaturely passions. So to just have one example in scripture and one place to consider impassability, think of Acts 14, when Barnabas and Paul go into Lystra.

They go into Lystra, this town of pagans. They miraculously heal a crippled man. And the pagan polytheists do what pagan polytheists do. They start worshiping Paul and Barnabas because they have this obvious miraculous power.

Now we're told in Acts 14 verse 14 that Paul and Barnabas tear their garments. That's very emotional. They're worked up. They're passionate. They're ripping their clothes. And then in verse 15 they say this, men, why are you doing these things?

We are also are men of like nature with you. And we bring you good news that you should turn from these vain things to a living God who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them.

Now we have to go back to the King James to get the full import of what's being said here because there the translation is more literal. ESV has we are men of like nature with you. The King James has literally we are men of like passions with you.

Why are you worshiping us? Can't you see how passionate and emotional we are? And the conclusion that Paul and Barnabas expect their audience to draw, if we are so passable, so passionate, we must not be God.

Because he is not like us. God is impassable. Now we have to apply what we've considered then with how we read scripture. And consider carefully about what we discussed in our last session about analogy.

That there is similarity but not sameness. God speaks analogically. And we apply that according to what is proper to each nature. So when we say God is impassable, we're saying passions are not proper in God.

So William Perkins says the affections of the creature are not properly incident to God because they make many changes and God is without change. And therefore all affections and the love that is in man and beast is ascribed to God by figure.

William Ames said something similar. The affections attributed to God in scripture, such as love, hatred and the like, either designate acts of the will or apply to God only figuratively. So when we read in scripture emotional language attributed to God, we are to understand that metaphorically, figuratively referring to God's acts of his will according to his perfections.

So we call those, as we talked in the Q &A, anthropopathisms. Man-like passions being ascribed to God. God is acting in the form, is explaining his actions in the form of how we understand humans act according to emotions.

So John Owen said this, it is agreed by all that those expressions in scripture of repenting, grieving and the like are figurative. Where no such affections are intended as those words signify in created natures, but only an event of things like that which proceed from such affections.

So what Owen is saying here, notice two things. He is saying first this is normal. Owen can say everyone agrees with this. It is agreed by all. And the second thing, just like Ames he says, they signify an event that is similar to what we understand when we understand human repentance and human grief.

So what Owen is saying here is helping us read our Bibles. He said when you read passages that say that God regrets or God grieves or God repents, we know that that is not truly proper to God who is without change.

Yet God is signifying that he is about to act like a man who is grieved. So that we could understand something of the truth of what he is doing. We can understand he is revealing himself to us. So when we encounter the passionate language of God and his word, we understand that God is acting according to his perfections and he is accommodating himself to our minds as creatures.

So let's take as a classic example that shows up very early in our Bibles, Genesis chapter 6 verse 6. The Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth and it grieved him to his heart. Well let's think about what we have already considered and what we know about God properly.

He is pure spirit. God doesn't have a heart. He is eternal. The eternal one who knows all things and has himself declared from the end to the beginning, he doesn't regret. It is not possible. Also he is blessed.

He is blessed in himself eternally so he doesn't grieve. So what is he saying? Well God is communicating himself in a way that we can understand and so he is accommodating us and speaking of his acts as though they were human, as though they were man-like.

And he is indicating that the act he is about to take speaking analogically is like the act of a man who is pained by injustice and evil. Because we understand what that means. We understand what it means to have someone you love act in unconscionable ways and to be out of your love be grieved, have regret, and then act accordingly.

That communicates to us. And so what God is communicating here truly is not any change in him properly but actually changes in men whose hearts are wicked. It is actually because God doesn't change that he says he is grieved and regrets and he will act according to his immutable love, his immutable holiness, his immutable justice, that he is grieved over the state of creation.

It is because of God's unchangeable love for the good, for himself, that he cannot leave it. God will never shrug it off. God is not a bad father who is just overcome by emotion towards his children so he puts off justice because he can't bear to judge.

He is not wrought upon that way. He can't. He is immutable. And so the simple God will act according to his justice. And he communicates that to us in a manner that we can understand like a man who is grieved and regrets and grieves in his heart.

It is because God never changes that we know an act of judgment is coming. He is not just going to shrug it off and say, well what are you going to do? Kids are kids and I just love my kids. No, he can't.

He never changes. And regret, well regret is the passion that we experience, the emotion that we experience when we are about to change our course of expected action. We were going to do something but we have regret so we no longer do that thing.

So now, here in Genesis 6, regret is signifying that God is going to destroy what we would have assumed would have continued according to his justice. And so he will say that in verse 7, the very next verse, I will blot out man.

And it comes in the judgment of the flood. And this is analogous. It is communicating the effects of human anger and indignation and regret that we understand. God is acting according to them that we understand what he is doing.

So Augustine said the anger of God is not an agitation of his mind but it is a judgment imposing punishment on sin. Or Calvin again says whenever we hear, and he means by reading scripture, God is angered, we ought not to imagine any emotion in him but rather to consider that this expression has been taken from our human experience because God whenever he is exercising judgment exhibits the appearance of one kindled and angered.

We ought not to think of God as plagued by emotional excess and anger or he has moved to anger. It is an indication of God's acting according to his holy justice and love and goodness. Now of course this raises a question for us.

Why does God speak this way? Why does God use anthropomorphic language, human-like language to communicate to us in his word? Well, how else would he communicate the incomprehensible, simple, absolute, immutable perfection of who he is?

The simple acts of his will according to infinite perfection of love and holiness and justice would be incomprehensible to us. God is going to act according to the infinite perfection of his justice. Yeah, I have no idea what that means.

It would be not communicating. There would be no true revelation. So Augustine, for example, says this very thing in the City of God. He says, ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...