Attributes - Part 2

We bought a house in Romania that was built in the early 1800’s while living overseas. My husband said it had a lot of potential. That was a nice way of saying it was a real “fixer upper”. God is unchangeable. In His very nature He has no potential for change. He has no potential to become a better God or a worse God. He is what He is and cannot diverge from His unchanging character. “He who is the Glory of Israel does not lie or change his mind: for he is not a man, that he should change his mind.” I Samuel 15:29.  In Malachi 3:6 it says, “I the Lord do not change. So you, O descendants of Jacob, are not destroyed.”

To be sure there are figures of speech used in the Bible that put God in human terms to be understood better or to make a point, but usually there are several more verses throughout the Bible that explain or support God’s true character. When the Bible speaks of God as being a rock or having wings, eyes, repenting and forgetting we know that these are anthropomorphisms, a way of putting God in human terms, for us to better comprehend. In Genesis 3:9 God asks Adam, “Where are you?” and yet we know throughout the scripture that there is no place we can go that God is not already there. Doctor Norman Geisler wrote, “When the Bible says God ‘repents’ it is speaking anthropomorphically, that is in human terms. God appears to change, when actually humans do, just as the wind appears to change when we turn in the opposite direction. God has unchanging anger at our sin and unchanging pleasure in our repentance. When we repent, we simply move from under one unchanging attribute of God to another. When a person moves in relation to a pillar, the pillar does not move.”

God is eternal. God is beyond time. Just think about the fact that God created “time”. In Genesis chapter 1 verses 3-5 it says, “And God said let there be light and there was light. And God saw the light that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light day and the darkness He called night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.” God existed before time began. He is outside of it and it does not affect Him in any way. Time is a succession of moments, days and years which are measured by lights in the sky, tides and seasons which were also created by God. Everything in time is continually changing because of entropy. Everything has a beginning, grows old and then decays and dies. It stands to reason then if God cannot change, He is not in time. God is IN the past, the present, and the future. It’s not just that He knows what is going to happen, He’s already there! I’ll let you chew on that for awhileJ