Divine Unchangeability will Change your Life
Preacher: Revd Dr Jared Michelson, Lead Pastor, Cornerstone Church, St Andrews (and honorary Cornerstone Chaplain)
Readings: Jonah 3:1-5, 10; Mark 1:14-20
Jonah 3:10 is a shocking passage. God changes his mind. This seems to contradict other passages, such as:
19 God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind. Nu 23:19
What is going on here? Straightforward contradiction?
Before we address this question directly, I want to outline why I think quite a lot at stake here. It is not a mere academic matter. “There is no avoiding the fact that we live at the mercy of our ideas. This is never more true than with our ideas about God.” — Dallas Willard.
Willard seems to be suggesting that who we think God is, and what we feel God thinks about us, will have a profound impact on our day to day lives and sense of self. This might initially strike us as implausible. Surely this isn’t true, at the very least, for those who do not believe in God?
There is a long tradition of critics of religion, suggesting that religious belief is the result of subconscious desires which implicitly motivate religious people towards belief. For example, for Nietzche, religion is a ‘crutch’ for those on the lower rung of the economic ladder. The oppressed subconsciously desire the things they do not have, and they invent the idea of a God who guarantees that the meek, the weak, and the lowly will inherit the earth. Religion, on this understanding, is a form of false or alienated consciousness, in which religious people are being motivated and enticed towards belief by sub-conscious desires they are not explicitly unaware of. This sort of charge is very common in modernity, one finds similar allegations that religion is an expression of sub-conscious desires in Durkheim, Freud, Feuerbach, and Marx.
But before religious people are too offended, we should remember that the Apostle Paul got their first. In the first chapter of Paul’s epistle to the Romans he says those who reject God ‘suppress’—using this psychological sounding term—the truth of God. He seems to suggest we have some sort of desire for God, perhaps a desire for recognition and affirmation, for consolation and hope, and when that desire is unfulfilled—when it is suppressed or repressed—we turn to creaturely things thinking they can fill that void. This is referred to in the Christian tradition as idolatry. Martin Luther said: ‘A ‘god’ is the term for that to which we are to look for all good and in which we are to find refuge in all need.’ The idea is that looking to something for ultimate good and for security is inevitable. When we don’t look to God, we don’t escape this subconscious yearning, we just think that we will be secure or good ‘enough’ on the basis of what something else ‘says’ about us. Maybe we look to what other people say about us and become endemic people pleasers. Maybe we look to the ‘marks’ we receive at Uni, and we live at the mercy of what our academic success says about us, or our professional success, or a romantic relationships, and so on.
Perhaps there is more to what Willard says than we might initially suppose. Perhaps we do live at the mercy of what we think our god says about us, be that ‘god’ a mark, a promotion, or a person whose love and affirmation we long for.
The problem with idols is they are variable. It was true of ancient idols, and of modern ones. No matter how well you do at Uni, one day you won’t be the smartest person in the room. No matter how conscientious and kind you are, shocking as it may seem, one day, someone won’t like you. This is why there is so much at stake in this question about whether God changes. The question is whether the God of Israel is any different from the changeable idols which leave us mired in uncertainty and self-doubt. Is God changeable, such that when you do what he wants, you can bask in his favour, and when you turn from his way, he frowns upon you in displeasure?
Interestingly though, if you read the bible as a canon, a far more interesting picture begins to emerge. If the bible is a canon, than out of the various diverse traditions which were compiled over long periods of time to make scripture, then one seeks to discern the voice of a divine author who employs the plurality and multiplicity of scripture to present a relatively unified picture of himself. And in this context, something much more interesting than straightforward contradiction begins to emerge. For example, in 1 Sam 15, in a single context, the author denies and affirms that god relents, repents, changes his mind, using the same term as in Numbers 23 and Jonah 4. The Hebrew bible scholar from Durham, Walter Moberly, claims this sort of analogical, dialectical way of speaking about God is meant to affirm both the unchanging disposition and character of God, which underlies nonetheless his responsiveness and genuine interactivity with us. God doesn’t change, what we need does and thus God’s responses to our needs change even if his loving character and disposition is immutable.
This is a major theme of the book of Jonah in fact. The prophet Jonah is disappointed that God has ‘changed God’s mind’ and is willing to forgive the Ninevites after they repent, even though a few verses prior God had seemingly been unconditionally set upon judging Ninevah. Yet Jonah should have known this is what God is like, the book of Jeremiah for example explicitly says, and it is the person of God speaking; If at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, and if that nation…turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I intended to do to it. Je 18:5–8
The point is that whether God says it explicitly or not, every warning or promise of judgment in scripture is conditional, because it is not signalling a change in God’s loving heart, but a particular way in which God’s unchanging love responds to the needs of his creatures in a given situation. God’s judgment is his loving attempt to steer us away from destruction.
While every analogy is inadequate because of how different God is from us, I think of it this way: I’ve lately found myself doing quite an embarrassing ‘dad’ thing. I’ve found myself shouting at our children “Don’t shout at one another! We do not shout in this house!” Is it always wrong to shout at a child? Much of the time it is. But what if your child is about to run into a street filled with traffic? What if they are about to touch a hot kettle? What if they are about to make a catastrophic decision whose repercussions will echo through the rest of their life? There are times when shouting is wrong, and times when it is not. When a good parent shouts at a child for a good reason, why do they do it? Love. When they punish a child, why do they do it? Love. When they forgive a child, why do they do it? Love. The change is wholly in what the child needs in a given situation, not the parent’s love. Is a parent more loving when hugging their child after the child has hurt their knee, or shouting at them not to run in front of a car? It’s an impossible question, it’s the same love in both circumstances.
The greatest depiction of this in scripture, is the prodigal son. Retell the story. Everything changes for the Son in the story. The Son goes from having everything in the house of his father, being wealthy, beloved, and honoured to being in the muck with the pigs having lost everything, destitute, lonely and ashamed. Everything changes for the Son. Everything but one thing. One of the most understated, beautiful aspects of the story is that when the Son decides to make the long journey home, back to the Father’s house, while he was still a long way off the text says, the Father saw him. He was waiting the whole time, even when the son was spending all of his money and living a shameful life and rejecting his Father’s house. The whole time, the Father was longing for the beloved son to return. Everything changes for the Son, but one thing. The Father’s love. That remains utterly fixed, immutable and sure.
So to return to where we began: What if you knew that every failure, every misstep, every stupid thing you’ve done and every foolhardy, unforgivable thing you will do can have a huge impact on your life. It can mess up your career, it can cost you friendships, or hurt your academic prospects, but what if you knew that even your worst moments were impotent to change the one thing that matters most of all, God’s love for you.
God’s unchangeability will change your life, if you’ll let it.