God Is Immutable
God’s
Incommunicable
Attributes
PART FOUR
“I am the Lord, I change not.”
The objective of Bible Doctrine is to stir the heart to appreciate God as He Is. When the soul is caught in the storm, your knowledge of God will hold you fast. God always was what He is now. He will always be what He always was, and always will be; Love, Life, and Light. He always hated sin and always will. The immutable attribute of God is the foundation of our assurance of Salvation and Inheritance.
Thus God, determining to show more abundantly to the heirs of promise the immutability of His counsel, confirmed it by an oath, that by two immutable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we might have strong consolation, who have fled for refuge to lay hold of the hope set before us.
— Hebrews 6:17-18 NKJV
The Apostle Paul wrote to the Ephesian church and told them how he prays for them. In the third chapter we can read part of his prayer.
“I pray that out of His glorious riches He may strengthen you with power through His Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith…And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”
— Ephesians 3:16-19 NIV
The fact that God does not change, is the ground of our faith. When the Bible speaks of being rooted and grounded, it means that the roots of our being are twined and interwoven around these fundamentals of God Himself. The immutability of God holds us safe and secure in the knowledge of Him; and lends His very life and strength to those who believe. Through this experiential knowledge of the sureness of His love, we may drink to our fill of the fullness of God.
The benefit of doctrinal study helps us to not handle the Word of God carelessly. One begins to understand how God is righteous in all His ways and how all the attributes of God work together, to bring forth the perfection of His Word.
In What Sense Is God Immutable?
I encourage you to read these verses and consider how God describes Himself and what this means to you personally.
God Is Immutable In His Essence and In His Attributes:
Mercy, Compassion, Love, Faithfulness, Righteousness, Justice, Kindness…
Your mercy, O LORD, is in the heavens; Your faithfulness reaches to the clouds. Your righteousness is like the great mountains; Your judgments are a great deep; O LORD, You preserve man and beast.
— Psalm 36:5-6 NKJV
I will not remove from him my steadfast love or be false to my faithfulness.
— Psalm 89:33 ESV
For I the LORD do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed. From the days of your fathers you have turned aside from My statutes and have not kept them. Return to Me, and I will return to you, says the LORD of hosts.
— Malachi 3:6-7a ESV
But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; His mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness.— Lamentations 3: 21-23 CSB
God Is Immutable In His Purposes and Counsels:
That which God has purposed in the Eternal is spoken of in the Bible as being “before the foundation of the world.” They are things that pertain to our redemption and the restoration of God's Edenic plan.
“Father, I desire that they also whom You gave Me may be with Me where I am, that they may behold My glory which You have given Me; for You loved Me before the foundation of the world.”
— John 17:24 NKJV
Just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love.
— Ephesians 1:4 NKJV
…who has saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace which was given to us in Christ Jesus before time began.
— 2 Timothy 1:9 NKJV
Him, being delivered by the determined purpose and foreknowledge of God, you have taken by lawless hands, have crucified, and put to death.
— Acts 2:23 NKJV
…to the intent that now the manifold wisdom of God might be made known by the church to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places. This was according to the eternal purpose which He accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord.
— Ephesians 3:10-11 NKJV
As surely as God never changes, His eternal plans have not changed, nor can they be changed.
This is because they are fixed according to His Eternal Attributes. They are sure and will come to pass. They are based on absolute perfection.