God Is Eternal and Unchanging

1 God is eternal

Firstly, we’re going to look at God is eternal. God is eternal.

So if you want to turn to Hebrews chapter 1, from verse 10. Hebrews chapter 1, verse 10. It’s God’s Word:

And you, Lord, laid the foundation of the earth in the beginning, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you remain. They will all wear out like a garment. Like a robe you will roll them up. Like a garment they will be changed. But you are the same, and your years will have no end.

Amen.

And so firstly, we’re looking at again the aspect that God is eternal. So firstly, we’ll see that God is uncreated. This is a big aspect. If God’s eternal, then that means he had no beginning.

We saw last time in Job, as Job was questioning God and praying and mourning his life, and God responded and said, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Have you commanded the morning and caused the dawn to know its place?” Like we just read in verse 10, he says, “You, O Lord”, similar words, “laid the foundation of the earth in the beginning, and the heavens are the work of your hands.”

And so Hebrews is quoting Psalm 102 here. But what do we see in verse 10? We see God again created the foundation of the earth, that the heavens are the work of his hands. But we see something else. What else did he do? It’s sort of implied in the passage. God created a beginning. He created time for there to be a beginning. He had to make it.

So that’s what we see when time began, the beginning. We see God was already there. God was already there. He was before the beginning, before time began. We looked at the fact again that God is independent in his being. God is independent from creation. But at the same time, God is independent of time. So he’s the Lord of the heavens, Lord of the earth, and even Lord of time and space. So again, this means God had no beginning. He was before the beginning, before time. He himself had no beginning.

Now if we think about it for a minute, what if this wasn’t the case? What if, for talk’s sake, God did have a beginning? Well, that would make us think, wouldn’t it? What would that look like? Who was there before God? What was there before God? Does that mean something caused God, something created God? Clearly, if it was before God, it would be greater than God. And if that’s the case, then we’re not really dealing with God anymore. It’s not really God at all. But Isaiah 43, where God speaks, says, “Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me. I, I am the Lord, and besides me there is no other.”

So again, there’s no one, nothing before him, and there’s going to be nothing after him. And he will not have an after, as we’ll continue to see.

So God has no beginning, which logically then means he’s uncreated. You say uncreated, or you could say unbegotten, which is a term that’s used. When you look at the word begotten, it appears in Scripture usually in the sense of, you know, we read these big genealogies of this man begot this man begot this man, or David begot Solomon. My dad begot me, I begot my son, that kind of thing. That’s usually how it’s used. But God is not begotten in that sense. He was not born or reproduced by something else. So God is uncreated and unbegotten.

If you’re clued in, you might be thinking, if you’re smart, that, well, wasn’t Jesus begotten? And Jesus is God the Son. How was Jesus begotten? So we’ll put our thinking caps on. I know it’s late on a Wednesday night, but we’ll put our thinking caps on for a wee minute. It’s great to see this nature of who God is, how he exists within the Godhead. John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.” So Jesus within the Godhead is the eternal Son of God. He also had no beginning.

One way that Jesus is begotten is the obvious way. Jesus condescended, he humbled himself, he came to the earth. He entered time and space as a baby. He was born physically to the Virgin Mary and by the Holy Spirit. So he was begotten in that sense. And it’s incredible really to think about it. We’re talking about the fact that God is not and was not born, yet God was born in this incredible, mysterious way, physically in humanity, through God the Son. And we sing at Christmas about Jesus, “very God, begotten, not created”. I can’t remember what that one is. I think it’s “O Come, All Ye Faithful”, if I’m right. Great theology for a Christmas carol, but it’s really true. He’s begotten, not created. So that’s one way, the obvious way, Jesus is begotten.

But I could just leave it there, and I feel like I wouldn’t be giving the whole picture. Just to complicate it a little bit more, another way that the Son is begotten is that even within the Trinity we talk about the eternal Son being begotten. Even the Holy Spirit is begotten of the Father. So it’s more than just in his humanity. The Son, Jesus Christ, again, he’s eternal. He receives his divine life from the Father, without being created, without a birth, without any beginning. That’s very important.

So this way that the Son and the Spirit are begotten by the Father, it’s like an eternal relationship. It’s not an event. There was no thing that occurred. It’s this incredible eternal relationship that the Son and the Spirit were begotten in with the Father. So the Son is the Father’s eternal Word, his eternal radiance, his eternal image. And again, we see the Holy Spirit is also begotten. He proceeds from the Father and the Son, depending on your view there, in John 15. But even though the Son and the Holy Spirit are begotten of the Father, it’s so important that the Father is not superior. Again, he wasn’t there before. They are all co-equal and co-eternal. And that’s important.

And you can maybe relax a wee bit. Our minds boggle a little bit when we think about these things, and that’s okay. We should, when we’re thinking about this great, wonderful God that we serve. This Trinity, these three persons in the Godhead, co-equal, co-eternal. Son and Holy Spirit, eternally begotten by the Father. Yet these three distinct persons share the same divine nature and the same attributes that we’re looking through in this series. All of them are without a beginning. All of them are uncreated, eternal.

So the next sub-point. We’ve looked at the beginning, he’s uncreated, but he’s also imperishable. On the other side of that, God has no beginning, which means he will have no end if he’s eternal. So if you want to look at verse 11, it’s talking about, again, the heavens, the earth, creation. “They will perish, but you remain. They will all wear out like a garment.” They will perish, but you remain. So we see this, that nature perishes.

I remember, well, I wouldn’t need to, it was only two weeks ago. Two weeks ago I went to the shop and I bought a really cheap ham that you get. I just like it now and again on my toast, that pork and onion one. And I’d been eating this for a couple of days and it started to taste a wee bit funny. So I went and looked at the packet and it was nearly three weeks out of date. And I just remember, I just bought this two days ago, so it wasn’t even from the reduced section. But I remember thinking, yeah, that’s not good. I’m clearly going to get sick. But thankfully I didn’t, somehow. I must have a stomach like a cement mixer. But I need to check my sell-by dates.

But basically food is perishable and we should check sell-by dates. Even food that we call non-perishable, tins and things that last, eventually they still wear out, they still rot, they still expire. But as we’ve seen here in creation itself, all of the earth and the heavens will also expire. They will one day perish. They are also perishable. And we ourselves are perishable. Again, we see all these incredible works: space, the sky, planets, the animals, the birds, all living creatures. But even, think of all the world leaders, the world events, political parties, all of it. He’s going to roll it up like a garment. It’s going to wear out like a robe. He will roll them up. They and we will perish.

But again, what does it say in verse 11? But you remain. But you remain. Everything else will perish. We will perish, but he will never perish. He’s imperishable. It’s amazing to think that God isn’t going to die from natural causes. He’s not going to be destroyed by his enemies. Even God, he will not fade. He will not disappear. I mean, we think of this great God over all of the span of eternity. God doesn’t even weaken in the slightest. He doesn’t lose out on some of his power or his wisdom or his knowledge. God doesn’t even weaken. He’s imperishable. While everything else fades away, he will remain. He will remain.

So another way you could say it is that God is immortal. We are mortal, he’s immortal. And we read that in 1 Timothy, where Paul praises God and says that he is the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, God only wise. So he’s the one that lives forever. He cannot die and will not die. Yet we do die, because of the curse of sin.

If you ever watch Ray Comfort, if you know him, he talks to people in the streets and one of the things he asks people is, what is death? And people usually give either physically what death is or some nice philosophical answer, but he has something he’s looking for. He says, well, what death is is wages. Death is wages. We’re told in Scripture the wages of sin is death. That’s the consequence of sin. That death is in the world because of our sin. And because of that, we read that God’s Word compares our lives to a breath. Again and again it says our lives are but a blink of an eye, they’re a vapour. Psalm 103 is one I like to share. For some reason it comes up and I like to share it at New Year. We get a new year. But it says:

As for man, his days are like grass; he flourishes like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more. But the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting.

See, this is the difference, the contrast between us and God. We see in Scripture this idea of immortality or being imperishable, that it’s something that’s really only attributed to God. It’s something that only God possesses. It’s his possession, immortality, being imperishable.

But the amazing thing is that we can attain this through the death and the resurrection of the begotten Son of God that we looked at. Even though we are his creation, he can make us a new creation, so that we can become immortal and imperishable. We can share that with him, not in the same way as he is, but very much immortal and imperishable, through the hope in Jesus Christ. We saw the wages of sin is death, then it goes on to say, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. It’s amazing to know that though we will die physically, yet shall we live. We shall live forever.

It’s just amazing hope and confidence that we have that God shares this eternal, imperishable nature. Though unlike him we do have a beginning, in him we also will have no end, through the hope of the gospel. So God is uncreated, he’s imperishable, he’s eternal.

2 God never changes

Secondly, God never changes. God never changes. He’s unchanging.

So again, you want to look at verses 11 and 12. It says, “They will perish, but you remain. They will all wear out like a garment. Like a robe you will roll them up. Like a garment they will be changed. But you are the same, and your years will have no end.”

So technically you could argue that something could potentially be eternal but it could change. If you think about it, though there’s nothing to compare it to, hypothetically something could be eternal but it could be constantly changing, always developing or evolving or whatever way you want to call it. Something that’s constantly changing. God’s not like that. He is eternal but he’s also unchanging. Even in our terms, you could think of a billion years ago or a billion years from now, not an ounce of God has changed. Nothing about God has changed.

The theological term for this is that God is immutable. Immutable. It’s from a Latin word, they usually are, mutabilis, which just means change. So immutable means not to change. Cannot change. So we’ll talk about God’s immutability, but we’ll stick with unchanging. It sticks in our heads a bit better. God’s unchanging, that’s what it means.

But we talk to people all the time, and all we really talk about is how things change. Everything is changing. Our lives from one week to the next. If we knew last year what would be happening in our lives this year. Or I go to family gatherings and see cousins, and I’m going, whose child is that? And it turns out it’s a child that I’ve met loads of times. You just don’t recognise them. Things are constantly changing. Even a town you visited and haven’t been to in a while, you just see changes everywhere. You may not even know what room we’re meeting in for the prayer meeting every week, because sometimes it changes. Everything changes. It’s constant.

Yet one Greek philosopher, I didn’t take his name down, said one thing in life is constant, and that is change. For him, the constant thing in his life was change. But that’s true. That is the human experience. That’s true. But God doesn’t change. What God’s Word teaches us is that God’s character, his nature, basically who he is, does not change. James 1:17 says that God is the Father of heavenly lights who does not change like shifting shadows, or, no variation or shadow of change.

So he doesn’t change. But in one sense, God can and does change in his relationship to us, and how he deals with us, how he deals with sinful, mutable, or changeable humans. We know this. We know God acts differently towards humanity depending on our behaviour and our beliefs and how we live. So even though he’s not just indifferent, he’s not just, I don’t care, unresponsive. He’s not just like a big never-changing boulder that doesn’t respond to anything. But he does respond. He is personable. He is relational. He is a being. So he’s not just apathetic. He does respond differently to how we act and how his creation is behaving. What you see is that he changes in his actions and responses, but he himself doesn’t change, if that makes sense.

So it’s precisely because he is unchanging that God has to change how he deals with us, because we’re forever changing. In other words, the way God responds is consistent with who he is. He applies the same standards and principles, the same holiness, the same justice, no matter what the circumstances are, because his nature is unchanging. His character is unchanging.

Another way you could look at this, God actually says explicitly in Malachi 3, as he’s speaking to his people there, “I the Lord do not change. Therefore, O children of Jacob, you are not consumed.” So we see those two things in Malachi. God doesn’t change, but what we also see is that because of that, he says, I do not change, therefore you are not consumed. Because he doesn’t change, they receive mercy on this occasion. So for us, we think about the mercy we receive. Our salvation is directly linked to his unchanging nature, his character.

This gives us incredible confidence, incredible assurance, because you see, friends, because of God’s unchanging character, that means God’s Word never changes, God’s purposes never change, God’s plans never change, his love never changes, his promises never change. We see that he’s unchanging in his justice, his fixed judgment on the wicked. He is holy, he is just, he must punish sin. The guilty cannot go unpunished. But likewise, for those of us that are trusting in him, because he’s unchanging, we know that the confidence and hope of the gospel is sure, that for us his fixed position is love and mercy and justice, and that doesn’t change for those who are in Christ.

We all know people who break their promises. We know people who say one thing and do another, or even just outright lie and cheat or mislead. Even ourselves, we find ourselves agreeing to something and not being able to follow it up, or saying something and doing something else. Really, can we ever fully be trusted? The thing is, we can’t. We’re all sinful, we’re all fallen. And the same is true of God, if God could change. How could he be trusted? What would prevent God from revoking, in a sense, just the covenant promises that he’s given? How could we be sure all the promises he said yesterday, are they true for today? Are they true for tomorrow? What’s stopping God? If he could change, just go, I’ve had enough of all this. I’ve had enough of all this. I’ve changed my mind. Youse are all just too wicked and rebellious and hard-hearted. If he could change, then we would have no way of knowing. We’d have no confidence in any of his promises.

But thankfully, as our passage says, again, at the start, “They will perish, but you remain. They will be changed, but you are the same.” You are the same.

We know that the world is so changeable, isn’t it? It’s so changeable. We know it ourselves, that our own emotions, we’re up and down from one day to the next. We can be different, we can change, our finances, little things that we put our security in. The world outside us is unstable, and we know, whether it’s health or mental health or our spiritual condition, these things change all the time. And what this leads to is that tragically we look for stability and permanence in other things, whether it’s conscious or subconscious. We seek stability in what’s unstable. We seek things that are permanent in what’s constantly changing. We do, whether again we’re actively seeking it or not. Whether it’s relationships that we find stability in, or family, or our pension, or our bank balance, just familiar surroundings, whatever it is, we know in life that when these things can surprisingly be taken from us or changed, that really rocks us. It really rocks us. Because we’re seeking stability in what’s constantly changing itself, in what’s unstable.

So if we are to find true stability, we need to look beyond this ever-changing, vapour-like world. Our own lives are but a breath. Everything is changing. We need to look beyond that and look to our eternal and unchanging Creator. He is the one that we can find to be our stability, the one we can rest in, the one we can have our confidence in. Thankfully, God is not persuaded or swayed by outside circumstances. He’s not swayed by the economy, whatever it is. He is constant. He is unchanging. He’s the one then that we must go to, that we must rest in.

We can go to him knowing that because he is eternal, because he’s unchanging, all of these attributes that we’re going to look at are the same. He’s unchanging in his wisdom, unchanging in his power and his holiness and his goodness and his mercy and his love and his promises. His truth, they’re unchanging. He’s a God who keeps his promises.

So just to conclude, like I said, our lives are always changing, our lives are a vapour, they go by so fast. Yet Ecclesiastes 3 tells us he has put eternity into man’s heart. He’s put eternity into man’s heart. And we know every person originally, we were made to live forever. Adam and Eve were made to live forever and fill the world with generations and live forever with God. But like we said, sin entered the world, brought death, brought separation, and yet we still as humans have eternity in our hearts. But this is a great reminder to us tonight that this incredible God that we’re looking at, this God came down. He came and he entered time and space and he made the way for us to be right with him again, to have that eternity in our hearts fulfilled and met fully, restored again.

We talked about the mystery of how God can be not born and yet was born in Jesus. It’s the same truth that God cannot die, yet God did die in his Son. Jesus came into the world and he died for his own creation. So in him we too can experience this eternity.

God is so good. He shares so much of his nature with us, his attributes with us, and ultimately he shared with us his own Son, his only begotten Son. He gives us the Holy Spirit to indwell us, and we have this incredible hope that we also will share eternity with him. He shares his imperishable, immortal, eternal nature with us when we put our trust and faith in Christ and live with him as our solid rock and our stability.

I’ll just finish by reading 1 Corinthians 15. I think I read it a few weeks ago. It says:

For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality.

Amen. Amen.