The Immutable God: In a changing world, God is always the same
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Because I was raised in Austin and lived most of my adult life in West Texas, I have been blessed with friends and acquaintances that spread across the entire political spectrum, including the extremes. I don’t spend a lot of time on Facebook, but Wednesday morning I thought it would be interesting to see the differences in reactions to the election results across the spectrum from my various friends. Boy, was it diverse, but everyone had something in common. Most responses to the election seemed to communicate a major shift in American politics. Something had drastically changed.
Our lives are fraught with change. In his novel The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis wrote, “(Humanity’s) nearest approach to constancy … is undulation — the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.” As humans, we find ourselves craving stability. We want something to depend on when everything else is changing. Especially when that change is largely out of our own control.
In response to this change, I might predictably offer God as the stable, unchanging anchor we can cling to. But you might object. You might not mind God in the New Testament, but you might agree with Richard Dawkins that “the God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” After all, God does seem to do a lot of smiting in the Old Testament. It seems a preponderance of Christians and non-Christians alike accept the idea of a harsh, judgmental, bad-guy God in the Old Testament ceding the universe to a loving, forgiving God in the New Testament.
Here’s the question we should ask about that, does the Bible support such an idea? If someone who knew nothing about the Bible sat down and read it straight through, would he walk away thinking that? I would like to argue he wouldn’t. And if not, the next important question to ask is where that idea came from.
Gnosticism. In the second century AD, various mystical cults and established pagan religions coalesced with the then-nascent Jesus movement to form a dualistic mystery religion. In a nutshell, the Gnostics believed there were two gods. The good one created spiritual beings to enjoy love and community with. The evil one created the material world in order to torture those spiritual beings. Therefore, the key to happiness was to reject the physical world and focus on the spiritual world. This pursuit required secret knowledge which only the initiated had.
To support its position, Gnosticism cherry-picked passages from both the Old and New Testaments and even tried to make its own contributions to the New Testament which orthodox Christianity summarily rejected.
Though Gnosticism as a theological system has been largely extinct for hundreds of years (excepting, of course, a short revival in the early 2000’s with Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code), the idea of a mean God in the Old Testament contrasting the loving God of the New Testament has persisted.
But if you read straight through the Bible, you would find that God’s nature, character and goals are the same from the first page to the last. In both the Old and New Testaments, God is the same eternal, triune creator whose character is perfectly holy, righteous, just, merciful, gracious and above all loving. In both testaments, he acts to judge, bless and redeem all of creation. Over the next several months, I will explore each aspect of this claim and support them by showing how God’s nature, character and goals are the same in the Old and New Testaments.
For now, though, take heart that as everything around us seems to be unstable and changing, God promises, “I am the Lord, I do not change” (Malachi 3:6). He “is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8), even when nothing else is.