Encounter the Truth

Jonathan Griffiths: Jesus is himself the great confirmation that God is a promise-keeping God. He promised a savior, a deliverer throughout the Old Testament and in Christ, the deliverer has come just as God said he would come. And because those promises have been fulfilled, we know that the unchanging God is faithful to all that he says, to all the promises he has made.

Steve Hiller: You’re listening to Encounter the Truth with Jonathan Griffiths, and there’s really something comforting about what we just heard, Jonathan. When we understand that God is an unchanging God and he has made these promises, there’s a comfort in knowing that we can rest in the fact that those promises will be fulfilled.

Jonathan Griffiths: So often when we make plans and commitments, when organizations, when governments make grand plans and commitments, those plans change over time. The situation changes, people's minds change, priorities change, and so things shift.

But the wonderful thing about our God is that the purposes and the promises that he set out in his word so long ago, promises to do with our salvation, the goalposts have not moved. His interests have not changed, and he is committed to those promises as much today as the day he spoke them first of all. And that gives us a bedrock of assurance as we trust in those promises.

Steve Hiller: For the person who maybe has been struggling to believe that they can really cling to those promises of God, I think today’s message is going to be one that you’ll find encouraging, one that you will find comfort in. So glad that you are with us as we continue our message, The Unchanging God. Here is Jonathan.

Jonathan Griffiths: Your word, O Lord, is eternal. It stands firm in the heavens. Your laws endure to this day. See, our God is immutable. His standards are unchanging. Next, our God is immutable, and so his purposes are unchanging. Human planning is always subject to change. Here in our church family, we have an unusually large number of folk who serve in government, in the civil service and so on.

And if you have been around government departments long enough, you know something of changed plans and changed policies, changed priorities, changed strategies. One government may have a grand plan for health or defense or education or something else, and you work away at it in line with government policy for a few years, then another government comes in and the priorities are completely reversed, the project is canceled, and something new is dreamed up.

It happens all the time. It’s the beauty of democracy. It’s just the way things work. Different leaders have different views, circumstances change, the experts revise their advice. But how different it is with the God of the universe. When it comes to his plans and his purposes for the world and the church, nothing ever changes with him.

There are a number of statements in the scriptures that give us very deep insight into God’s big-picture plan for the universe, and many of those are actually found in the writings of the Apostle Paul. One such statement is found in Ephesians chapter 1 and verse 22, where Paul says that God placed all things under his feet, that is, under Jesus' feet, and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.

What’s Paul saying there? He’s saying that God’s purpose has always been to exalt Christ and make him head over all things. Paul makes a similar point in Philippians 2 at verse 9: "Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father."

God’s grand plan for the universe is to bring all things under the headship of his appointed king, the Lord Jesus Christ, to cause all knees to bow to him, either in grace or in judgment, but every knee to bow. Now, that is the grand divine purpose for the universe. That’s what God is doing. And his purpose has not changed one jot. It’s what he promised all along. It’s what he’s been doing all along, and it is what he is doing now.

You and I change our plans and our purposes all the time. We’re fickle creatures. But God is not like that. Numbers 23 and verse 19: "God is not a man that he should lie, nor a son of man that he should change his mind. Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfill?" And the answer is no, of course not. How could he?

The other day the BBC published a little essay on the Armenian community of Metsamor and the nuclear reactor that the Soviets built there in the 1970s. The plan was to build a model town around this gleaming new plant. But a major earthquake in 1988 led to safety concerns and then to the rapid closure of the plant, and the grand construction plans for the town were canceled, leaving it literally half-built.

Well, a few years later, roll forward to the mid-90s, and there’s a major energy crisis, and the government is then prompted to reopen part of the plant out of a sense of need and desperation, and that continues to this day. It continues to operate. And so now there are 900 workers living in a half-built town in an earthquake zone next to a potentially unsafe reactor that the government says it might refurbish one day.

It’s a fascinating picture of flip-flopping plans and unfulfilled promises. And as I read about that and saw the photographs, it struck me that the story of Metsamor captures so much the reality of human planning in every place. Chaotic and ever-changing plans and purposes. But how wonderful it is against that backdrop that God’s purposes and God’s plans are entirely constant.

How reassuring that the eternal God does not change his mind. And for us, for you and me here today, that means that we know for certain what we should be investing our lives in, what we should be living for each day. We know that God’s purpose for the world is to exalt Jesus Christ as King and to bring all people into a place of submission to Jesus.

And so that means that my main priority for me personally is simply this: it is to submit myself to Jesus Christ and to live for his honor and glory. If I’m pursuing that each day in the power of the Holy Spirit, then I know that I’m heading in essentially the right direction. I know that I’m investing my life well.

And given what we know of God’s plan for the universe, my main priority for others around me is simply this: I want them to know Jesus, and I want them to submit to him as King. At the final day, I want them to be able to bow to Jesus in a position of grace and salvation and not of judgment.

And living for these things, that’s something I can do with certainty. We don't need to fear that we might invest in following Jesus all our lives and proclaiming Jesus throughout our days, only to discover at the end that God has actually changed his mind and he’s got another purpose. The purposes of the immutable God, they never change.

Steve Hiller: You’re listening to Encounter the Truth with Jonathan Griffiths and a message called The Unchanging God, part of our series, Who Is Like Our God. Encounter the Truth is able to be on this station because of your financial support. Thank you for praying for and thank you for giving to this ministry.

As you give a gift of any amount this month, we want to send you a copy of Jonathan’s new book called Wisdom and Knowledge: God’s Grace in the Life of Solomon. It's a devotional commentary that looks at Solomon’s life from the book of 1 Kings. It invites you to receive the bountiful grace of God and the great King coming behind Solomon’s story.

Again, we’d love to send you a copy of Wisdom and Knowledge as our way of saying thank you for your financial support. You can give online at encounterthetruth.org or when you call 1-833-99-TRUTH. That’s 1-833-998-7884 or encounterthetruth.org. Let's get back to the message. Here is Jonathan.

Jonathan Griffiths: The purposes of the immutable God never change. And finally, the promises of the immutable God never change. We human beings, we’re great at making promises. We’re not always very good at keeping them. That’s true of all of us, but our politicians are particularly famous for making outlandish promises that are a little bit hard to keep.

Former Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke famously promised in 1987 that by 1990, so in three years, no child in Australia would be living in poverty. That was a very grand promise, but of course he couldn't begin to keep it. The problem persists 30 years on.

On a more lighthearted note, Newt Gingrich campaigned for the US presidency with the promise of establishing a colony on the moon by 2020. It would have been quite interesting if he was elected to see what would have happened there. A colorful figure in US politics by the name of Vermin Supreme—legal name, I kid you not, Vermin Supreme—he’s run regularly for various offices since the 1980s, campaigning on a platform of a variety of very interesting promises, including giving every citizen in the United States a pony and offering every sick person a free bus ticket to Canada. That was my favorite.

We make promises, sometimes reckless ones, and we’re prone to breaking our promises. And because we know how bad we are at keeping promises ourselves, we’ve grown accustomed to doubting the promises that others make to us. We take them sometimes with a very big pinch of salt. But the unchanging God is entirely unlike us in this. God is not a man that he should lie, nor a son of man that he should change his mind.

The Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians chapter 1 and verse 18 says this: "But as surely as God is faithful, our message to you is not 'Yes' and 'No.' For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who was preached among you by me and Silas and Timothy, was not 'Yes' and 'No,' but in him it has always been 'Yes.' For no matter how many promises God has made, they are 'Yes' in Christ."

You see, Jesus is himself the great confirmation that God is a promise-keeping God. He promised a savior, a deliverer throughout the Old Testament, and in Christ, the deliverer has come just as God said he would come. And because those promises have been fulfilled, we know that the unchanging God is faithful to all that he says, to all the promises he has made.

Now, that is a very great truth. But it has both a negative side and a positive side to it, and we need to think about both of them. On the negative side, this means that God’s warnings of judgment are inescapable. We needn’t look too far in scripture to see that God has given many warnings of a judgment to come.

Proverbs 11:21: "Be sure of this: the wicked will not go unpunished." Ephesians 5:5: "For of this you can be sure: no immoral, impure or greedy person—such a man is an idolater—has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God. Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of such things God’s wrath comes on those who are disobedient."

Whenever we hear warnings of judgment or warnings of punishment, we always hope that the warning will be worse than the reality. The cop will never give me a ticket for just going 20 over the limit. My parents would never ground me for doing that. Bylaw enforcement will never fine me for that infraction. The CRA will never penalize me over that little bit of creative accounting.

That’s the way we think, and often it’s true. Often the bark is worse than the bite. But how often that logic is transferred to God. The God of grace would never actually condemn me for that. The God of love would never send sinners to hell.

The Scottish divine from the 18th century, John Dick, writes that "The divine immutability has a dark side as well as a light side. It ensures the execution of his threatenings as well as the performance of his promises, and destroys the hope which the guilty fondly cherish that he will be all lenity to his frail and erring creatures, and that they will be much more lightly dealt with than the declarations of his own word would lead us to expect. We oppose to these deceitful and presumptuous speculations the solemn truth that God is unchanging in veracity and purpose, in faithfulness and in justice."

That is the negative side of the truth that God’s promises are unchanging and unchangeable. And we need to hear that negative side. Let me say that you need to hear it if you somehow imagine that God will never carry through on his promises to judge sin. If you imagine that he doesn't really have it in him to deal with sin, that ultimately his grace will somehow just extend to everyone in the end. Well, no. God’s promises are unchanging, and he promises to judge sin.

And he tells us in his word that the only place of safety when the judgment comes will be to find refuge in Christ by trusting in him now. That’s the negative side. But it leads us naturally to the positive side, the wonderfully hope-filled side of the truth that God’s promises never change.

We need only glance at the Bible to see that it is filled with the most incredible promises to those who belong to the Lord, to those who have come to him through Jesus the Savior. We could spend all day actually looking at these, but just listen to a small handful by way of reminder and encouragement.

Deuteronomy 31 and verse 6: "Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the Lord your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you." Joel 2:32: "And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved." John 6:37: "All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away."

Matthew 11:28: "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest." John 11:25: "I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die."

The word of God is filled with very great and precious promises for the people of God, promises from cover to cover. And the fact that our God never changes tells us that we can trust each and every promise he has made. We can take them to the bank. We can stake our very lives upon them. The God who once made these promises is the very same God, not one iota changed, as the God we know and trust today, the God who will deliver us on the final day.

I think we all struggle with the whole question of trust. And perhaps we actually struggle more with the question of trust the longer we live. Children generally start life with a very high degree of trust, and that’s part of the beauty and the wonder of childhood. But the hard reality is that the longer we live, the more occasions we will have to see our trust violated, the more we will be let down, and the more times we will have occasion to let others down, too.

Some, of course, will live through terrible traumas, terrible violations of trust, situations of abuse, of marital unfaithfulness, of fraud in business, of betrayal by friends. Some here even as I mention these things will be feeling afresh the pain of broken promises, of violated trust. And part of our challenge in learning to walk with the Lord is to learn once more to trust, to learn once more to take someone at his word and to believe that he will be faithful to what he has said he will do.

At the core of our ability to trust God is to know God as the unchanging one. It is a vital and a glorious truth. Nothing in all the universe has the capacity to bring even the tiniest alteration to the eternal God. He is the same yesterday and today and forever. And so we know his word is true and his promises are sure.

The great English Puritan Richard Baxter summarized the importance of God’s immutability in this way: "Our houses may be burned, our goods may be consumed or stolen, our clothes will be worn out, our treasure here may be corrupted, but our God is unchangeable, the same forever. Our laws and customs may be changed, our governors and privileges changed, our company and employments and habitation changed, but God is never changed."

"Our estates may change from riches to poverty, and our names that were honored may incur disgrace. Our health may quickly turn to sickness and our ease to pain, but still our God is unchangeable forever. Our friends are unconstant and may turn our enemies, our peace may be changed into war and our liberty into slavery, but our God doth never change. Time will change custom, families, and all things here, but it changeth not our God. The creatures are all but earthen metal and quickly dashed to pieces. Our comforts are changeable, ourselves are changeable and mortal, but so is not our God."

Steve Hiller: You’re listening to Encounter the Truth. That is Jonathan Griffiths with the message called The Unchanging God. And we’re going to continue our series, Who Is Like Our God, next time. But glad you’ve tuned in today as we’ve been looking at what it means for us that God is unchangeable, how his character doesn't change, and how his standards, purposes, and promises don't change.

If you ever miss a broadcast in this series, come to the website. You can always listen online. Our website address is encounterthetruth.org. Encounter the Truth is able to be on this station and we’re able to make the podcast, the app, and all the ministry tools available because of your financial generosity. As you give a gift of any amount this month, we want to send you a copy of Jonathan’s new book called Wisdom and Knowledge. It’s a study of Solomon. Jonathan, there are a lot of books about a lot of different Bible characters. What makes this one unique?

Jonathan Griffiths: I think it’s special on a number of different levels. I’ve written it both to feed the heart of the believer, but also to inform the mind of the Bible teacher, for those who might want to be equipped to teach this portion of the scriptures. One of the things I love about studying the life of Solomon is that he points us to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Solomon was a very wonderful king in the Old Testament, but he was an imperfect king. In his strengths, he points us to the greater king who is yet to come, and in his weaknesses, he highlighted the fact that we need the greater king, the Lord Jesus Christ. And so this is a book full of gospel, even though it comes from an early age in the Old Testament and we might not expect to find gospel there. We’re pointed to the Lord Jesus Christ and I find that thrilling.

Steve Hiller: We would love to send you a copy of this book, Wisdom and Knowledge, as our way of saying thank you for supporting Encounter the Truth this month. You can give online at encounterthetruth.org or when you call 1-833-99-TRUTH. That’s 1-833-998-7884 or encounterthetruth.org.

You can also write us at Encounter the Truth, 2176 Prince of Wales Drive, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, K2E 0A1. Or in the US, at Encounter the Truth, 215 North Arlington Heights Road, number 102, Arlington Heights, Illinois, 60004. For Jonathan Griffiths and our producer Mark Barrett, I’m Steve Hiller. Thanks for listening and I hope you’ll join us next time.