The Weight of Majesty | God’s Immutability

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Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast. I'm John Snyder, and this week we have a special edition.

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You'll be hearing from men who contributed to the Behold Your God, The Weight of Majesty study.

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If you've been following the podcast, you know that we have at times been able to give you material from our first study,

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Behold Your God, Rethinking God Biblically, and what we've done in that situation is we've given you the full interview from one man.

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What we felt would be more beneficial in this situation is to give you portions of the interviews from these men which were not able to fit into the videos, and these will be all given on one topic.

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Today you'll be listening to men speak about the immutability of God. Of the men that we interviewed for the study, you'll be hearing from Sinclair Ferguson, Joel Beeky, Steve Lawson, Conrad Mbewe, Andrew Davis, Jeff Thomas, Ian Hamilton, and others.

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We hope that you find this beneficial as we think together about God's immutability.

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What do we mean by the immutability of God? Whenever I think of God's immutability,

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I think of that wonderful verse in Malachi, I am the Lord, I do not change, therefore you sons of Jacob are not consumed.

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It's his changelessness, the fact that whereas everything else changes, he doesn't.

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He is eternally the same. Every attribute therefore that he possesses will always be the same and always has been.

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He doesn't change, he is unvarying. There are wonderful verses in the

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Bible that tell us this. I do love that verse in the letter of James where James says, every good and perfect gift comes down from above from the

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Father of lights with whom is no variation, neither shadow cast by turning. What a wonderful thing that is to know that God is unchanging and unchangeable, unchangeably faithful to save, almighty to rule and command.

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Actually, James then goes on to speak about the gift of the new birth. Every good and perfect gift is from above from the

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Father of lights. Then he says, of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, the new birth.

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This good and great and precious gift from the immutable God, once he's given it to you, he will never take it away.

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It's yours. You're saved. He's immutable. He doesn't go back on his promises.

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He doesn't renege on them. So we can trust him absolutely. Well, basically when we say

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God is immutable, we mean that he doesn't change. But then we've got to go on to describe what that means.

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We need to make clear, I think, that it doesn't mean God is like a fixed photograph that doesn't change, but that he's a person who is constant, that he is true and faithful and good and righteous and just and holy, and he is all of this all of the time.

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When the Bible speaks about that, it often speaks about it by way of contrast with human beings.

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You go and visit somebody, and then you meet somebody who knows them, and they say, well, how did you find them today?

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We mean by that that people are very changeable, and we are therefore very unreliable.

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So when we speak about the immutability of God, we mean that all he is, he always is, and he always is that to us who are his children, and therefore he is always reliable.

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Eventually that means for us that with respect to the promises he's made, he can be absolutely trusted.

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The way in which he's really proved that is that he gave a promise to save us, and though it cost us everything to trust him, we remember that it cost him the best he had to prove that he would keep his promises.

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So in many ways the immutability of God lies very much at the foundation of his being and is the anchor of our

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Christian faith. We talk about the immutability of God, we're talking about the fact that God is, he is,

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God exists, there is a God, and that God possesses every perfection, therefore he does not change.

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That's what we mean when we're talking about God's immutability, the fact that he is, and he is as he has always been, and as he always will be.

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The cause for him to shift in any measure, in any way, would be to diminish perfection.

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He possesses all the perfections infinitely. He is therefore unchanging.

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God is immutable. He says of himself, I am the

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Lord, I do not change. That's who he is. How does the immutability of God relate to his other attributes?

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I think particularly of Psalm 139, where David speaks about the omniscience of God, his omnipresence, his omnipotence, and that means that he will always be omniscient, always be omnipresent, always be omnipotent.

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That has a profound effect upon us, it had a profound effect upon David. He asked

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God to search him and to know his ways and his thoughts, and that's the implication and I think the impact of grasping the relationship between the immutability of God and his other attributes,

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I'm thinking of those three in particular. Instead of just thinking of them as theological constructs, they actually bear in upon our lives and give us a sense of his wonder, his greatness, his glory, and therefore the all -seeing eye is upon us, the laser beam of omniscience is upon us, which at one stroke is a cause for concern and on the other a cause for great confidence.

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These doctrines are meant in Scripture to challenge us and expose us to God's eye and to comfort us because of his power and to enable us to look forward to heaven when the little thing that we now know, the small thing that we now know, will expand and enlarge and we shall have eternity to discover more and more of the glorious things that God has within himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and we shall be able to see and know and understand in ways that at the moment we are not capable of.

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That's a great encouragement. So it's a truth, I think, that spurs us on.

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Yes, clearly the immutability of His love is enormously significant, and also the immutability of His holiness.

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You know, I sometimes say that God's immutability is a great comfort to the believer, but it really should be a terror to the unbeliever.

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I think if I remember Jonathan Edwards spoke about this, that people wouldn't mind God being holy for a little while, but that He is immutably holy is a terror to them, and yet the reality in God that He is immutably holy that's a terror to the unbeliever is a great comfort to the believer.

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So, you know, we shouldn't parcel out God's attributes.

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We speak about God's attributes because we're limited in our ability to express the entirety of God's being, and so in a way we look around God's character like as though we were looking at a diamond's different facets.

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So God's immutability is related to really to all of His attributes. There's a line in a,

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I think it's an old Scottish hymn that speaks about our bestie state being tossed about, our feelings ebb and go, but then goes on to say, thou change us not.

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And I think through the ages this is a reality in which Christians have been able to anchor themselves that whatever aspect of God's character we are in need of seeing in order to stabilize us, the knowledge that He is unchangeably that, that He's unchangeably true and faithful and good, righteous, loving, holy, just, is just a great anchor to ourselves.

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My own heart is warmed right now as I'm remembering that not only can

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I not be condemned, there is therefore now no condemnation for you who are in Christ Jesus, and as glorious as that is, that's what

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I'm saved from, condemnation. I'm also saved for the everlasting enjoyment of God, and it's impossible for me not to have that.

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Nothing can separate me from His love. Why? Because He doesn't change.

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He said through the last book of the Old Testament, Malachi, I the

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Lord do not change, therefore you sons of Jacob are not consumed. Because He doesn't change, we don't perish.

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We should be very glad that He does not change. So, my heart is encouraged and warmed.

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I'm moved to persevere in the faith even through trials when

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I remember that the God who holds us is a God who in Himself doesn't change and therefore guarantees we cannot be separated from His love.

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So, this attribute of God, His immutability, intersects with every other attribute.

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A lot of the old writers talk about the immutability of God as something of a hub attribute, if you will, meaning

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His love is an immutable love, an unchanging love.

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His goodness, His sovereignty, so forth, He is unchanging in all of His perfections.

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What a comfort for a child of the King. How should we think of the nature of sin in light of God's immutability?

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Sin at the root is rebellion. It's a failure to accept and believe the fact that God is

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God. That is sin. So, the immutability of God, His changeless character, is something that we object to and we find offensive because it does mean that His holiness,

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His purity, His justice are unchangeable. That therefore means that if we defy

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Him and build up a character that is anti -God and anti -Christ and we live our lives in that way and die in that way, then the justice and the holiness and the purity and the judgment of God are changeless.

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So, there will be no second chance after death. There is no evangelical universalism here allowing people some second chance after death.

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We have to face God now and we have to change now and submit ourselves to Him now.

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That is what we are to do. We are to repent of our refusal to do that and remember that the

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God who doesn't change doesn't change in His holiness as well as in His grace. How do we see the immutability of God reflected in the person and the work of Christ?

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He had absolute confidence in His Father's purposes. As the

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Son of God, of course, He had come into the world as sent from the Father and He knew that what

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He was sent to do, the redemption of His people, would be unchangeable.

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That God the Father had planned it. He had come to carry it out.

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The Holy Spirit would apply it to the hearts of all believers. Our Lord was absolutely sure of that, confident of that, and He lived

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His life and went about His works and His ministry in that assurance. So, at the cross,

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He knew that He was doing the will of His heavenly Father and He knew that everyone for whom

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He died would be saved. He was sure of it. It was the buttress, if you like, the foundation, the rock of His whole ministry in life and then crucifixion and death and resurrection and ascension.

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He had come to do His Father's will. That will was immutable. Every one of the sheep for whom

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He died would be saved, and He strode onto the cross, setting

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His face like a flint to Jerusalem in order to fulfill that glorious and eternal and immutable purpose.

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Well, you know, the great thing about Christ is that when people met

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Him, they puzzled over Him. They couldn't quite understand

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Him. Even after a season with Jesus, it was clear that the disciples didn't fully understand

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Him. I remember when Jesus said, well, what are people saying about me? It was clear from the different responses that people couldn't see the whole of Him.

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Some thought He was John the Baptist risen from the dead, others Jeremiah, one of the other prophets.

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I think part of the reason for that is that we have never actually met anyone who is constant, absolutely constant.

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We're not able to grasp what that means. The immutability of Jesus, which means that everything

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He was in His character, He always was, that He was unchangingly so, was something that people found very difficult to grasp because they never really met anyone like this before.

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Jesus' immutability, in a sense, is part of the puzzle to unbelievers.

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I think possibly one of the reasons why unbelievers react to Him in such different ways.

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Eventually, to the disciples, it was the fact that Jesus was always the same as they came to know who

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He really was. That meant that they could rely on Him in every situation. During the gospels, it's very interesting and would be a great

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Bible study to look at situations in the gospel narrative during His ministry in which the disciples don't understand

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Him or don't trust Him. Then to look for analogous situations after His resurrection and after the day of Pentecost where they very clearly do, and they realize, for example,

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His immutability with respect to His promise to be with them. I sometimes in my mind think about Peter in the boat when they're going across the

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Sea of Galilee. He's in a state of panic, and Jesus is asleep. Then later on in the

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Acts of the Apostles, Peter is really on the verge of being executed, and he's in prison.

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There he is in the greatest crisis of his life, and the Lord sends an angel to rescue him.

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What's he doing? He is so trusting in the reliability of Jesus, which is

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His immutability, that he's doing exactly what Jesus was doing in the boat in the midst of the storm.

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He's actually fast asleep. There are these ways in which the changelessness of Jesus and His absolute reliability is a puzzle to the unbeliever, because we're not used to people like this.

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Yet the more we come to know Christ in this way, the more we find that our lives are anchored and stabilized in Him.

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Oftentimes, we make a dichotomy between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament.

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But Jesus clearly said, the law, the prophets, the Psalms, your Old Testament is about me.

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And the gospel writers constantly refer back to the

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God of the Old Testament, for example, the God who met Moses in the burning bush,

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I am, I am who I am. Eighteen times in John's gospel, we find that Jesus is this

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I am. He is this constant, immutable, unchanging God.

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One of the most striking of the I am statements in John's gospel about Jesus is not one of the most common, the seven main

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I am statements, but it's actually one of the last statements. In John 18, just before His crucifixion,

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He was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane. If you read the footnote on your verses in John 18, you'll find that the people who came to arrest

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Jesus were a multitude. So you had some stragglers who came along, you had

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Malchus who had, you know, his ear cut off by Peter with the sword, but you also had a

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Roman cohort, 600 soldiers. The footnote tells us that.

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Jesus said, who are you looking for? Whom do you seek? They said,

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Jesus, the Nazarene. His response was two words. Ego I me.

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I am. John 18 tells us they all fell on their back. When they got up and the conversation continued, it turned 180 and Jesus said, let these go their way and I'll come with you.

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Now you tell me who's under arrest. Are the 600 arresting

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Him or is He arresting the 600? The unchanging God leveled these men and accomplished our redemption.

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So the writer of Hebrews, who's laboring to show us the majesty of Jesus, His unrivaled superiority goes in detailed form through the priesthood of Jesus and the sacrifice of Jesus.

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And at the end of the book, he says, He is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

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He's immutable. He is the God that scripture reveals to us from first to last.

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Praise God. How is the holiness of God a terror to those outside of Christ and a comfort to those inside Christ?

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Yes. If you're outside of Christ, then eternity beckons, judgment beckons.

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You must change or it will be a lost eternity.

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If you're in Christ, you're secure. The security of believers in the hands of an immutable

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God does not, of course, exclude the fact of our perseverance.

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There are two sides to every truth, I suppose. The eternal security of the believer is our confidence.

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But for our daily living, the final perseverance of the saints is what ought to really occupy our attention as well, so that we are confident, but not cocky.

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We are humble and trustful, not proud. We fulfill our own responsibilities, but also thank

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God that He enables us to do so and that His immutability doesn't excuse us from our own responsibility to persevere.

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For those who are in Christ, for those who've turned from their sins and thrown themselves on the mercy of the risen

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Jesus, we're the

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Psalm 9 people. We're the those who know your name will put their trust in you.

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That's what Psalm 9 says. So, for somebody who's in Christ, you think about the way the biblical authors teach us to relate to God.

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The Psalms would teach us to cry out, the Lord is my rock. The Lord is my fortress.

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The Lord is my refuge. We're talking about strong, immovable, safe, secure, kept, impenetrable.

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Nobody can bother you. Nobody can hurt you. That's who He is.

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So, for the believer, we say, the Lord is my fortress.

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So, the believer takes all kinds of comfort and courage from the truth of God's immutability, and we find that I have loved you.

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How have you loved me? With an everlasting love. With a never -changing love.

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Praise the Lord. Jesus would say, as the Father loved me, as the

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Father has loved me, so also I have loved you. Wait a minute. You mean to the degree that the

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Father loves the Son, the Son loves us like that. How does the

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Father love the Son? In an infinite and unchanging way, in an immutable way.

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That's how the Son loves us. Well, there's all kinds of comfort for a Christian in this truth.

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And the deeper we go, and the more we experience this God, the more our hearts will want to honor and please and glorify

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Him. When the Lord says, I, the Lord, do not change, therefore, you sons of Jacob are not consumed,

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He's talking to a particular group of people. That's His redeemed. That's His choice possession.

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And with the New Testament application, we can say that's the people who've given their life to King Jesus.

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What would He say to people who have not met Him in Christ? What would

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His immutability scream to us and say to us?

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How would the immutability of God rightly understood affect somebody who's not yet a

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Christian? They would hear something like this, I, the

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Lord, do not change, therefore, you will be consumed.

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When Jesus spoke, for example, in the

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Gospel of Luke to people who died unexpectedly, a tower fell on them, and I think 18 people died.

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Jesus didn't say, oh man, God couldn't have prevented this, I wonder where He was, or I wish

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He could have prevented this. Instead of that, the Lord Jesus looked with unflinching face to those people and said, did this happen because they're more sinful?

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No, unless you repent, you will also perish.

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Jesus in effect is saying, you see, God is the same, and He deals with people all on the same terms, and unless you repent, you will perish.

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His immutability demands it. He requires that His honor be upheld in welcoming sinners into His presence.

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How can that happen? He's not going to change. That's why the

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Gospel is so precious. So, I'd say to an unbeliever, because God will not change, you must repent, you must turn from your sin, and you must throw yourself on His mercy, and if you will,

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He will give you His favor, and He will give you His unveiling love. He'll never turn from you.

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He makes extravagant promises like, I will never leave you, I will never forsake you.

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All these are bedrock promises for His people, and only for His people, and He's not going to change.

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How has God's immutability impacted you personally? Yes, I think when

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I became a Christian, it was probably that truth that brought me to a saving faith in our

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Lord Jesus Christ, the fact that He had promised that all who trust in Him, all who come to Him, all who call upon His name will be saved.

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I had pretended to be a Christian. I thought I was a Christian. I believed because I ought to believe, rather than because I believed.

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What really brought me face -to -face with that, and the kind of pretense that I was going through, and led me to saving trust in Christ, was the immutability of His promises.

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He had said, He had said, all who come to me I will not cast out.

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He had said, whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. So I trusted

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Him. I believed His word. I believed His promises. I believed His purposes. I believed that His character stood behind His words.

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My assurance, therefore, was not in what I was doing. My assurance was in what

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He was and what He is. Ultimately, that is what faith is.

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Faith is coming out of ourselves, and not looking to ourselves, and not relying on ourselves, even our faith and repentance, but relying on His unchanging purpose.

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In the Christian life that has followed that, it has been the thing that has kept me and held me fast.

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I love that hymn of Toplady's, A debtor to mercy alone, of covenant mercy

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I sing. Then he goes on to talk about the way in which he would endure to the end because of God's unfailing purposes and God's trustworthy character.

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That's really what gives us assurance, looking not in the mirror anymore, though that's a good thing to do from time to time, but looking out to Him and resting upon His character,

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His character, the immutable, wonderful, merciful

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God. I think it's a very natural thing.

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It's certainly a natural thing for human beings who believe in God. I think it's a common thing among Christians that when things change for the worse in our lives, we tend to extrapolate from that to the fact that either

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God has changed or the promises have changed, or His reliability has changed, but something

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He Himself has changed. The Psalms are full of this, these complaints that come from the

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Psalms. Why did you say you were this, and now you seem to be that?

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For myself, I think the immutability of God with respect to His promises and especially with respect to the way

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He has proved His immutability in giving us His Son for our sins on the cross.

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I mean, for me, probably the deepest moment that happened, I had an older brother who died very suddenly, and I remember as a young man, as I had to do all kinds of things and make arrangements,

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I found myself driving here and there in Scotland, and I found myself singing psalms and hymns about the changelessness of God as I was going.

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It wasn't as it were, you know, this is a mark of special theological knowledge. I think it was an expression of a deep instinct in me that where the whole world had moved and the platelets had been shattered, that my security rested entirely in the absolute certainty that He had not changed.

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I remember particularly thinking about Paul's words in Romans 8, 32, that if He didn't spare

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His own Son but gave Him up for us all, then if that's what He is like, which is

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Paul's logic, if that's what He is like, you can be sure that He will freely with His Son give you all things.

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Actually, the logic of that argument, it is a certain kind of argument from the greater to the lesser, but the logic of the argument depends on the principle that God never changes.

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And, you know, for me that was a...you know, I've looked back on those days for most of my life now and thought

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God really met with me in those days in that particular way. One way the immutability of God does encourage me in a practical daily life, not only pastoral ministry but certainly including that, is

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I remember my own redemption. And truth be told, I'm the least likely candidate that I think would have ever been redeemed.

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And I laugh so I don't cry. I'm just so embarrassed about who

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I was before Christ. And as I remember those things,

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I take heart actually because I remember that though I was far off and I was separated from God and I was without hope, things that Ephesians says about non -Christians, the immutability of God encourages me because I remember, okay,

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He can redeem anybody. I have family members, friends, and neighbors for whom

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I have prayed for decades that they would know the Lord. There are people that I've evangelized and shared the gospel with many times, and it seems like there's no movement.

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But then I remember they're not the final determiner of what will be.

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But the God who doesn't change, the God who redeemed me, has the capacity because He doesn't change to rescue and redeem anyone.

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We find those stories in Scripture by the dozens, the most egregiously offensive and depraved people, the

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Apostle Pauls of the New Testament. The Lord just loves to make trophies of His grace, and He's the same today.

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So if you have lost heart and you find yourself given up or you see other people experiencing fruit in their own life or in their ministry, then

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I would say reacquaint yourself with God in His immutability and take heart again that He doesn't change and that the

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God who saved you, the God who saved me can still work in ways of great mercy in the lives of others.

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That would apply also in broken relationships, maybe in your marriage, your family.

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You have shrapnel all over the place. Maybe there's a lot of carnage and hurt and damage and looks irreparable, irredeemable, looks like there's no way out of the mess.

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Well, if there's not, then God's no longer God because He puts

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His own faithfulness on the line. God is faithful, and He won't allow you to be tempted and tried beyond what you're able, but He will provide ways of escape.

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Our God is able is what I would say to somebody who's burdened and disheartened by the troubles of life or ministry or lostness.

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He doesn't change. He rescued you. He can rescue me. One final thing

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I'll add to that is the greatest promise of Scripture is synthesized.

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It's said other places, but really crystallized in Romans 8 where God says,

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I did not spare my own son, but delivered him over for you all.

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Therefore, with him, I'll freely give you all things. This is a

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God who is committed to proving Himself totally faithful to His unchanging character.

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He demonstrated that at Calvary. Hebrews says, if anybody goes back on the cross, it's as if you're trampling underfoot the

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Son of God and regarding as unclean the blood of the covenant. Well, God's already given His Son.

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He's already given the blood of the covenant. He's not going to trample Him under His feet. He doesn't change.

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So much comfort there for the saints. Where do you see evidences of a refusal to apply the holiness of God even within the church?

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Well, yes, there are those who say that God can change His mind and that somehow or another

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His immutability includes that and involves that, which

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I think is to demean His character and probably to misunderstand verses in the Bible that speak about God relenting and not bringing judgment upon people whom

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He had threatened judgment with. You have such a verse in Joel, for example, that then

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God gives us the opportunity to repent, and He knows the end from the beginning.

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So it isn't that He changes His mind. It is rather that He is merciful and compassionate and that He gives us opportunity to turn to Him and to repent and believe and trust in Him.

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Many people today, I think, take another view, and I think that is a dangerous view and one that demeans

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God's character and somehow or another brings Him down from the position that He deserves and should have to a level that is lower than the reality.

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There's a theological area in which questions and doubts and denials of the immutability of God have been raised related to other theological considerations, but when it comes down to the doctrine of divine immutability, that God changes all the time and by necessity, that if He's going to engage with us,

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He's got to change with us, that if He's going to have compassion on us, then that's going to change

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Him. And I think in response to that, which has had a huge influence in our world,

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I think we've got to say two things. First of all, that by divine immutability, never in the

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Christian church did Christians mean that God was just like a frozen block.

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They always meant that God is all that He is, and it's because He always is all

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He is that He is always able to engage with us without Himself changing.

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And I think that that particular view has spread rather fully into the church, and the result of it has been the diminishing of God, that God is like us, only better or nicer, that He changes with us and that He is therefore unreliable.

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And I think that has added to this natural and sometimes sinful response that people have to difficult situations that leads them not to rely on the unchanging nature of God and the immutability of God, and so they feel about for other things, and so they become fodder eventually to a great deal of false teaching that means at the end of the day they cease to live

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God -centered lives. I remember many years ago, I think it must have been 1981,

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I was visited by the senior editor of the

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British publishing company Hodder & Stoughton. It was a really major British publishing company, published a lot of Christian books.

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And the senior editor asked me in the course of the conversation, he said, how many copies of…they were publishers of J.

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I. Packer's book Knowing God. And he said to me, how many copies of that book do you think we had as our first print run?

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I can't remember what I guessed, but you know the book by that time had sold vast numbers, so I guessed a pretty substantial quality.

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He said, well, the truth is we had a print run of 2 ,000 copies because we weren't sure that there were 2 ,000 evangelicals in the

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United Kingdom who were really interested in knowing God. And I remember that because the figure shocked me, also because partly due to that book there has been quite a transformation in our evangelical subculture, but also because I thought publishers really know usually where Christians are.

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And I think this diminished view of God, part of which is the denial of His immutability, has slowly ground away at evangelical

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Christian instincts so that we turn into ourselves or we turn aside to other helps and agencies to get us through difficulties instead of being centered in God Himself.

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How could the faithful application of God's immutability change the culture of a church or the life of an individual believer?

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It gives us confidence in God. One of the things that I think is sometimes lacking today is a confidence in God.

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The result is that we become pragmatic. We think that somehow or another we can't trust

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God, that He isn't in control, He isn't in charge, He's not the

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God we read of in the Bible as He has made Himself known to us and that we don't trust

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Him properly. So we try to do things in our own strength and we lack confidence.

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We try all kinds of techniques and pragmatic solutions to problems.

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We do not pray as we should or look to Him to intervene as we know

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He can or to send His Spirit in glorious revival as He is able to do.

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We think that we somehow or another can do it ourselves. There's a lack of confidence in God today.

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One of the great things about Martin Luther was his confidence in the Bible, his confidence in the gospel, his confidence in God.

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He was able, because of those convictions, to be the man that he was.

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We really do need to believe God. It's not just about believing in Him. We really do need to believe

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Him and believe that what He has revealed to us about His will and the way in which we should proceed in church life is

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His will. It's what He has told us to do. So it's very simple really. We pray, we humble ourselves before Him, we preach the gospel, we reach people, we comfort the saints, and we do that in the confidence that God will bless.

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I did nothing, said Luther, the Word did it all. That's, I think, a tremendous help to us.

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Well, you know, one of the ways in which the immutability of God is a stunning doctrine, because it really underscores for us that God is not like us.

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We were made as His image and we've defaced that image, but we were never more than image -bearers, miniatures.

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And when we speak about the immutability of God, we're speaking about a God who has created and superintends the whole universe, everything that happens.

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The more we know about the universe, the more stunning that is. The more we know about the universe, the bigger it seems to be becoming.

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And to know that what you ultimately rest on is the knowledge that the One who has done all this has always been the same and ever will be the same,

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I think in many ways helps us to understand just how great

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God is. And, you know, one of our great needs, for example, if the

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Christian church believes in writing praise about God, then it should always be writing praise about God and not just resting in what was written in praise of God in the past, however much we use it.

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And I think it's fairly noticeable in the Christian church how little these attributes of God and the immutability of God feature in the words we are given to sing, and therefore how little it trickles down into the consciousness of Christian people.

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So here is an attribute of God to which Christians who have poetic, literary, and musical gifts need to give attention in order to help us.

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And that's a great need because there has developed in the

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Christian church an increasing form of worship that is far too centered on me and what

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I feel rather than on God and what He is. That would be true of many other, it would be true of all divine attributes, not just many other divine attributes, but certainly would be true of His immutability.

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I think you can see by the topics that are covered in seminars that appear in books, if you look at the best -selling books, you get stunning illustrations of the dethroning of God in the

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Christian church. And since most Christian books are produced by evangelicals, it's mostly seen in evangelical books.

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So the immutability of God is a truth about God that needs to be recovered in worship, in writing, in the way in which we encourage one another in the

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Christian life. When Christians suffer today and we write to them, even we write emails to them or tweet to them or whatever we do to them, we usually begin by saying,

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I'm so sorry you're going through this suffering. When Christians really believed in the immutability of God, they began their letters like 1

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Peter, praise to God, see what the unchanging

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God is doing in the midst of these difficult circumstances, that He's working for your glory.

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So this is a radical difference from where many churches are today.