Immutability

[Apologiaphoenix]

Is God changing on us?

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Does God change? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

In Malachi 3:6, God says that He does not change. This has also been a position that the church has held historically. God is the same from ages to ages. Now I know at the start there are some objections people are going to have. Doesn’t the text say God changed His mind? Didn’t God become a man? Doesn’t that count as a change?

We will get to those.

Right now, I just want to establish immutability, which means that you cannot change. This means that any change whatsoever in the nature of God does not take place. God’s nature will always stay the same.

One reason we can say this is a change is from something else to something else. We are talking about changes that change one’s nature as well, but ultimately, I would say this means no chronological change in God. God is not moving along the timeline from not being a creator to being a creator, for example. God is doing all things eternally and not moving along the timeline.

After all, God does not age. I realize some people are open theists and would disagree with my position and I plan on speaking about God and the future. For now, this is just an articulation of my position as I have said and a defense in the face of criticism will come later.

Some who are theologically inclined are wondering probably if I will say anything about impassibility. That will be a later set of posts as well as I think there are some differences there, but at the same time it is something that I hold to.

If we do hold to simplicity, immutability will also follow. God does not have several parts that can change from one thing to another. Also, if God’s very nature is to be, then that being is not changed by something else. How can what it mean to be really change? Can a limitation be put on God that wasn’t there before?

The ultimate point of much of this is to show that God is not like anything else. He is not a creature. He is not the superhero God like the Greek gods and others who are pretty much really powerful humans with superpowers. It’s also hard to say how some of this is pagan thought since no pagan gods in a polytheistic sense would be immutable or simple.

This also means that God cannot be changed by anything else. That will be either good news or bad news depending on how you see Him. If you see Him as all-loving and all-compassionate, then that is a good thing since He will stay the same and not change. If you see Him as wicked and destructive as His immutability will mean that He will stay that way.

But what about prayer? Don’t we pray to God? What about God changing His mind? What about the incarnation? Again, questions about emotions and God will come along later.

Hopefully, next time we will be able to speak on this topic.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

[NorrinRadd]

The problem with a lot of these egghead theoligizations is that they rob Scripture of anything resembling reasonable comprehensibility, and they are especially piss-poor when used as mandatory markers of orthodoxy.

[Christianbookworm]

I really want to learn theology from Jesus one day. He can correct sny misunderstandings.

[Apologiaphoenix]

What is God doing in Genesis?

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How do we read these texts? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Sometimes in the book of Genesis, it seems like God doesn’t know what’s going on. Now some of you might be thinking I’m referring to the creation passage and using that in this debate. No. I am not. I am instead referring to passages where God asks some questions or indicates He needs to investigate a matter.

Let’s start with Genesis 3. God comes walking through the garden at one point asking Adam where he is. While some might question if God knows the future, right now, this is asking if God even knows the present. Did God know where Adam was? Absolutely. He knew what had happened already. So why ask the question?

It’s asked to give Adam a chance to respond properly. As we know from the text, he didn’t. He played the blame game and blamed God and Eve both. Eve did the same thing and blamed the serpent. Unfortunately for the serpent, he had no one else to pass the buck to. God doesn’t buy any of it and punishes all of them.

Why phrase it this way? God is being presented in a way that we can understand. We will see this more when we get to impassibility. This is the language used especially in the Psalms when God is described as a rock, a shield, a hen over her young, or being told to wake up and bring about judgment. It’s not as if the Psalmist thought God was literally sleeping.

Another place to go to is Genesis 11. In this, the people decide to build a tower to the heavens. The problem with this is the flood came and the people were told to go throughout the Earth and fill it. Instead, they say they will stay in one place so that they can avoid another flood. God says “Let us go down and see what is going on.”

Why say this? It’s actually meant to be sarcasm. Here the people are trying to build something to reach to the heavens and God is in the heavens and saying “I think I see some tiny smidgen of something down there. Let’s go see what this thing is.” Consider it like Goliath talking smack to David about how insignificant an attacker he was. The text is speaking in mocking language of what God is doing to the people.

Finally, when Abraham barters with God, God seems to reason within Himself what He should do. Of course, this would mean that God would be ignorant of something. This again is not just the future, but the present. It is also God asking what the right thing to do is, which would mean God has a moral requirement and that laws of morality are above Him.

What is the purpose of this text then? It is to show Abraham as a mediator. After all, mediating is somewhat important in the Bible. Yes. God really does heed what men say. How that works will be something talked about later on. God is in charge of this deal the whole time. He sets the standards. Once a limit is reached, God says no more.

He also already does know what’s going on. It’s not as if God literally has to go and investigate. (And for what it’s worth, God is never seen going through the towns.) God is acting in a way we can relate to.

Now immediately, the objection pops up of, “But you’re not taking the text literally!” I am taking it literally in the sense that I think this is what the author intended. I am not taking it literalistically in the sense of reading it as a wooden text much like I don’t read in Deuteronomy of God being a consuming fire and think that He’s a giant cosmic bunsen burner.

All this sets us up for another such occurrence in Genesis in a passage with a lot of debate about it so we will save that for next time.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

[Apologiaphoenix]

What's going on with the sacrifice of Isaac?

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Why does Abraham get told to sacrifice Isaac? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

In Genesis 22, God calls Abraham to go and sacrifice his only son to Him. What is going on here? Nothing in the text has indicated that God accepts human sacrifices. Sure, the gods of Canaan and others do, but not YHWH. The fact that we see that should strike us right at the beginning. This is supremely out of character.

It’s interesting that this is one rare state where we don’t see Abraham giving some pushback, but we can assume there was some. If he gave pushback on every other incident, why not this one? What was it that was making this request so hard? Was it just the sacrifice of the son?

Isaac was the son of the promise. God has had a habit in Genesis of keeping His promises to Abraham. His wife wound up giving birth at 90 and he was there to witness the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Nothing in the text then indicates Abraham was mentally ill. Being mentally ill doesn’t make a 90 year-old woman pregnant.

Isaac wasn’t just the son of Abraham. He was the promised son of Abraham. Abraham had been told that it was through Isaac that his offspring would be reckoned. Isaac would be the one through whom Abraham’s legacy would continue.

Kind of hard to do that if the son is dead.

Nevertheless, Abraham does obey. Notice also what he tells his servants. He assures them that he and his boy will return to them. Abraham is confident even here that somehow, Isaac will be brought back.

Now what about Isaac? Was this child abuse? No. Isaac at this point would have been a strapping teenager with a Dad nearly 100 years older than he was. Had Isaac wanted to, he could have easily taken down Abraham in a fight. In our world, we often think of Isaac being psychologically scarred, but in his world, survival everyday was a part of life and death was always just around the corner. You could say Isaac would do this for an afterdeath experience, but at this point in Biblical history, very little if anything had been revealed about such a state.

We know the story. Abraham is about to sacrifice Isaac when the Angel of the Lord stops him, the Angel who I take to be an early appearance of Christ Himself, and tells him not to sacrifice Isaac and reveals a ram with his head in the thicket. (Yes. A male lamb with its head caught in thorns. That should sound familiar.) That ram is sacrificed.

Then the Angel says “Do not lay a hand on the boy,” he said. “Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.”

Was God ignorant of the state of Abraham’s heart?

Of course not. We already know through Scripture that God knows the hearts of men. God knew that Abraham’s descendants would be captives for 400 years in another year and mistreated there. The position that God doesn’t know the future would prove too much. Based on other events in Genesis, we would have to say God doesn’t know the present either, such as how many righteous people are in Sodom and Gomorrah or whether Adam had sinned or what was going on at Babel.

So what is going on? God is speaking in a way Abraham can relate to. He is not speaking to teach deep theology or metaphysics. What is going on is a review of sorts. Abraham had proven his faith to be true. He had proven that he believed God could even raise the dead, quite astounding at that point in time.

It is also a reminder of the faith we are to have. If Abraham can believe God can raise the dead even long before Jesus, how much more should we believe in what God can do after the resurrection? There is no reason none of us can have faith in God like Abraham had.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

[Littlejoe]

So Nick, you are ok with a 100% fixed future? Fatalism becomes your default position. Omniscience defined as "God knows all things, including all future decisions and actions" then everything must come to pass as God knows it to be...it cannot be changed one bit. Isn't that the very definition of fatalism?

[Apologiaphoenix]

So Nick, you are ok with a 100% fixed future? Fatalism becomes your default position. Omniscience defined as "God knows all things, including all future decisions and actions" then everything must come to pass as God knows it to be...it cannot be changed one bit. Isn't that the very definition of fatalism?

No. It's not that those things happen because God wills them. We will and God knows what we will will and what we will do.

[Littlejoe]

No. It's not that those things happen because God wills them. We will and God knows what we will will and what we will do.

God's knowledge may not "cause" a person to take a certain action, but that is irrelevant. If God knows everything, then it's not possible to deviate from what he knows. ergo, fatalism. Logically inescapable.

[Cerebrum123]

God's knowledge may not "cause" a person to take a certain action, but that is irrelevant. If God knows everything, then it's not possible to deviate from what he knows. ergo, fatalism. Logically inescapable.

Technically in an exhaustively foreknown universe God being the cause of everything that happens is a necessity of the system as He sets the initial conditions knowing what they will produce. The universe in said system is nothing more than an elaborate set of dominoes that God puts in place to knock down. It's deterministic from start to finish.

[Apologiaphoenix]

God's knowledge may not "cause" a person to take a certain action, but that is irrelevant. If God knows everything, then it's not possible to deviate from what he knows. ergo, fatalism. Logically inescapable.

Except our freedom is stiil intact and since God works all things for good to them that love Him, that is a very relieving idea.

[Littlejoe]

Technically in an exhaustively foreknown universe God being the cause of everything that happens is a necessity of the system as He sets the initial conditions knowing what they will produce. The universe in said system is nothing more than an elaborate set of dominoes that God puts in place to knock down. It's deterministic from start to finish.

I certainly agree with you. I was simply trying to point out to even classical Arminians the logical conclusions of EDF.

[Littlejoe]

Except our freedom is stiil intact and since God works all things for good to them that love Him, that is a very relieving idea.

The freedom is an illusion though. God already knows, so it happens exactly as he knows it regardless. You are fated to do what you do because God already knows that. Again, you haven't really addressed the charge of theistic fatalism the is inherent with EDF (exhaustive divine foreknowlege)

[Apologiaphoenix]

The freedom is an illusion though. God already knows, so it happens exactly as he knows it regardless. You are fated to do what you do because God already knows that. Again, you haven't really addressed the charge of theistic fatalism the is inherent with EDF (exhaustive divine foreknowlege)

God knowing what I will do does not mean I do not freely choose to do so.

[Littlejoe]

God knowing what I will do does not mean I do not freely choose to do so.

Sure it does. Simple logic Nick.

Necessarily, if God foreknows that I will do X, then I will do X.
God foreknows infallibly that I will do X.
Therefore, necessarily, I will do X.

[Apologiaphoenix]

Sure it does. Simple logic Nick.

Necessarily, if God foreknows that I will do X, then I will do X.
God foreknows infallibly that I will do X.
Therefore, necessarily, I will do X.

No. That assumes that God knowing is it the cause of my doing it.

Necessarily, if God knows that I will freely do X, I will freely do X.
God foreknows infallibly that I will freely do X.
Therefore, necessarily, I will freely do X.