Teaching and Preaching the Unchanging God

It is vitally important for the contemporary Christian to spend time meditating on the unchanging nature of God and His attributes. This can be greatly facilitated by soundly theological teaching in the churches. In an era when human subjectivity has been nearly deified, or at least elevated to be the basis of personal religion, it is deeply important that the believer in the God of the Bible know some essential truths about just Whom he or she has believed in.

Theological words like omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience, transcendence and infinitude may not be very popular these days in evangelical bodies that continually stress “practical” or “relevant” preaching and teaching, but these words must be utilized to help Post-Moderns understand the absolute uniqueness of the Christian Deity. We cannot properly worship a God who we do not understand to be God and these absolute attributes must be made known to foster that understanding in a culture that constantly seeks, whether consciously or unconsciously, to recast God in the image of fallen man.

For instance through the Christian centuries the chief intellectual comfort afforded Christians has come through a proper grasp of the unchanging nature of God. The doctrine of immutability is what gives meaning and reality to all the other aspects of our Lord’s holy nature. We can rely on His goodness, mercy, grace and love to always be there for us only if we believe that these cardinal characteristics are forever unchanging in the fundamental nature of God.

From immutability we can go on to take hold of both a mind and heart understanding of the other things we know that divinity, by nature, must possess and possess without shadow of change. By learning of His changeless character we come to the conviction that God must be all-powerful, all-present, all-knowing and so on and that he always must be so.

In fact each absolute attribute tends to re-enforce the others, and for believers who begin to know this through the use of the logical mind our Creator has gifted us with doubts about the absolute trustworthiness of God start to fade.

So much of the confusion that plagues professed Christians today has its source in simple theological ignorance. If we live in a time when people do not know quite what to make of the Lord they say they follow it behooves us to ask if part of the problem is found in churches that are either unwilling or unable to put across basic understandings about the nature of that Lord. Understanding that was gleaned from Holy Spirit-empowered reason in the minds of the great saints who participated in the great counsels of the first few centuries of Christianity are seemingly ignored in far too many congregations today. These counsels simply took the words of God Himself in the Scriptures and drew elementary truths about His nature from those words.

Confusion about who God really is can become absolutely deadly to authentic Christian faith. In a time when so many sub-Christian religions and philosophies are vying for the hearts and minds of human beings and when people’s convictions about the nature of God are often formed by memories of abusive human authority figures we must strive to show people who God is by an understandable, yet uncompromising, return to sound theological training. Only in this way will human subjectivity not overwhelm struggling Christians who desperately need to know objective truth about their God, and be set free to worship Him in Spirit and in truth.

Note: The author is grateful to A.W. Tozer and his book “The Knowledge of the Holy” for inspiring the main theme of this meditation.