God is “I Am”
Does God ever change?
Verse of the Day
‘God is not a man, so he does not lie. He is not human, so he does not change his mind. Has he ever spoken and failed to act? Has he ever promised and not carried it through?’
Today’s Devotional
Have you ever returned to a town where you used to live? I had this experience when I returned to the town where I attended college. It had been several years, and it felt as if everything had changed. I was having trouble fitting my memories of the past into the physical reality I was seeing. Things had changed. New buildings and businesses existed in places where there used to be nothing. Roads were wider. It left me feeling a little unsettled, as though my memories no longer had a home.
In human terms, most things must change in order to evolve. Your physical body is constantly changing and regenerating. The culture in which we live is constantly changing. The only truly consistent thing in human existence is change.
And then there is God. God does not change. His promise to us is “I Am”.
As I was researching this topic, there was a lot of debate about God’s nature and seeming inconsistencies that we find in the Bible. If God never changes, how do we make sense of verses like these?
‘So the Lord was sorry he had ever made them and put them on the earth. It broke his heart.’
‘So the Lord changed his mind about the terrible disaster he had threatened to bring on his people.’
‘Samuel never went to meet with Saul again, but he mourned constantly for him. And the Lord was sorry he had ever made Saul king of Israel.’
I read an article from Focus on the Family which described that within the Godhead there is a tension between justice and mercy. Here is an excerpt:
“God’s nature is unchanging. But this does not mean that it is static. On the contrary, it is living, active, and dynamic. Its energy and dynamism are expressed most memorably in the give-and-take and ebb-and-flow of relationship. And relationship, in turn, is the heart and soul of love.
The Bible expands on this idea by teaching that God’s unchanging nature contains within itself an ongoing conflict or dialogue. Within God there is tension between the apparently contradictory principles of justice and mercy or righteousness and grace.
This tension between “forgiveness” on the one hand and “not clearing the guilty” on the other is an important part of the “unchanging nature” of God. It’s the core and essence of His active and dynamic love.
God, then, has never changed. The ongoing struggle between judgment and mercy has always been fundamental to His character. Nor is this a merely academic or theological concept. Ultimately this tension within the divine nature becomes the driving force behind the central fact of history. We’re referring, of course, to the most decisive and determinative of all God’s acts: His entrance into the world in the person of Jesus Christ. For it is by means of that act that He has been able “to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness, that He might be both just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” (Romans 3:26). This, too, has been part of His plan and purpose from the beginning before the foundation of the world.“
God requires justices. But in His mercy, He has provided an avenue for us to be with Him that satisfies His need for justice.
Human language simply cannot encompass God. He is outside of our existence and understanding. Yet His longing for relationship with us is captured in the life of Jesus. God promises us His consistency. He simply does not and cannot change. And within that consistency is His desire for us to be with Him. To be loved by Him. To be known exactly as we are. To know His desire for us. And He will never change His mind about that. Just as Hebrews 6:17 says. “God also bound himself with an oath, so that those who received the promise could be perfectly sure that he would never change his mind.”
Journal Prompts
Answer only the questions that seem relevant to you today.
How do you reconcile things about your faith that seem inconsistent?
How have you mistakenly attributed human characteristics to God?
How has God shown you His unchanging nature?
How can you thank God today for being your “I Am”?