Human Loss and the Immutability of God

We live in a world of loss. This is the lot of a fallen race living on a fallen planet. Nothing temporal, that is nothing that we possess only in this life, is permanent in this life. Our family, our friends, our material possessions, our health; none of these things in their present form go with us beyond the grave. Also, to one degree or another, we will lose quite a few of them long before that. This reality accounts for much of the existential anxiety that all human beings feel to some degree in life.

For those of us who are Christians the hope of an unchanging inheritance in Heaven assuages some of this angst. Yet even believers are not untouched by loss, nor are we untouched by the pain that accompanies it. Any Pollyanna Christian who tells you otherwise is either lying to themselves or has not yet sustained a profound loss in their earthly existence.

So until the restoration of all things occurs upon our arrival in the New Heavens and on the New Earth we need something to safely grasp now when the things we hold dear are always in danger of being wrenched from our lives.

The obvious “something” is, of course, actually a “Someone”. We can and must cling to our unchanging God if we are to keep our sanity in a world where the deep need for permanence that He Himself instilled in us is constantly frustrated by the curse of sin we have brought upon ourselves. Part of that “clinging” is cultivating an aspect of faith that derives from a deep intellectual grasp of a particular attribute of the divine nature. That attribute is God’s immutability.

Immutability implies a few things. For instance it means that our Lord is unchanging in His fundamental nature. He cannot be changed by any external force and he will not change Himself internally because innate perfection, by definition, requires no change. However it is a specific fact of immutability that we concern ourselves with here and that is the fact that nothing is ever finally lost from God that is intrinsically of God. He is never, ever permanently diminished in the essence of Who He is.

To come to the settled conviction that this is true can be deeply reassuring to we children of God who are also, if only temporarily, “children of loss” as well. Somehow there is a kind of vicarious comfort in knowing that our God Himself cannot be in any way lessened or reduced. It is good to know that the reality of potential human loss is not under any circumstances able to extend itself to that which is innate to God. Even the temporary separation of Father and Son in the atonement was just that, temporary. It was also divinely willed, not forced upon God from outside. Father, Son and Spirit cannot be finally lost to each other. Such is the immutability of the divine.

Admittedly this intellectual recognition that there is Someone in the Universe who cannot suffer permanent loss is not the be all and end all of our consolation. For one thing intellectual recognition must become heart recognition as well to be most fully effective. For another knowing this truth on both levels will likely still not result in our becoming impervious to all the pangs of personal loss.

But in coming to apprehend that God is unchanging and impervious to internal loss we can also come closer to knowing another shining truth. The God who cannot lose Himself will Himself see to it that what we have lost in this life will be fully made up for someday. If we belong to Him this will be one of the gifts of Heaven, and that gift will be immutable as well.