Jesus
Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. (Hebrews 13:08,
NKJV).
There
is no ground quite as useless as shifting sand. This is true in
geology, and is metaphorically true in all spheres of human
experience. Consistency, solidity, and stability - not whimsy - are
the requirements needed in the realms of life and death, morality,
ethics, and religion.
Mere
mortals cannot achieve this goal, only Deity can. If we were to base
anything of substance on vaporous human opinion alone, we would
stumble through life as the blind leading the blind. Our views of
right and wrong, the sanctity of life, the value of marriage and
family, and the dignity inherent in being human would be blown about
with the wind of culture and popular opinion. These would be as
changeable and uncertain as shifting sand.
When
you remove the omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent Being from the
equation, all that is left is the miserable imagination and intellect
of fallen and depraved man. The inevitable result is chaos and
anarchy, the deadly slime upon which evil thrives.
Increasingly,
as “modern” civilization departs from God, we see this very
thing. When you decry the Standards-Maker as obsolete, standards
themselves become pillars of reed in the sand. Nothing of value can
be counted upon to survive the next gale of plebeian thinking and
Christ-denying rebellion.
That
is why the short verse above is so vitally important to understanding
the nature of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. This text, and
others like it, affirm and establish the unequivocal deity and
eternality of the One we serve.
It
is logically impossible to accept the mistaken concept that Jesus was
other than God in the flesh. If you accept Him at all, and understand
the things He said and what was written about Him, you MUST conclude
what perhaps C.S. Lewis said best:
“I
am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that
people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great
moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the
one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the
sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He
would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he
is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must
make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son
of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for
a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall
at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any
patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has
not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
Now,
at least on the surface, it does not necessarily follow that
eternality equates to immutability. Other religions speak of the
“whimsy of Allah”, or the “unknowability of God”, but if you
look only a little closer you will see that for God to be God -
infinite, and all-knowing - He must be immutable, unchanging. You
must see, even further, that “change” from that perspective is
antithetical to omniscience. Why would He alter an opinion, or
action, or plan? Did He not foresee all the contingencies in the
first place? Did His perception change?
Granted,
the Bible speaks of God's interaction with Creation in
anthropomorphic terms, “He regretted that He made man...”, “He
turned against them...”, etc., but that is only an accommodation
for human understanding; a way to describe the flow of events that,
for God to be God, He must have foreknown before the foundation of
existence.
What
this means for us is simply this: the fact that Jesus is unchanging
is surety that all His promises and warnings are true; that He is
faithful; that He will complete that good work that He has begun in
us; that He holds all of Causality in His hands and will fulfill all
that He has purposed and planned... for us.
It
also means that the doctrine laid out in the New Testament, inspired
by His Spirit, is unalterable. His precepts and truths do NOT evolve,
they are established in Heaven, and nothing and no one can change
what has been written.
So,
man's only escape from eternal judgement is by forgiveness through
faith in Him. We are immortal whether we like it or not. There is no
way into Heaven except through Him. We are saved not by works but by
grace through faith. We cannot please God without faith. All our
righteousness is as filthy rags. In Him is all fullness of joy
forever. He always lives to make intercession for us. In short:
...He
made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the
righteousness of God in Him. (2 Corinthians 5:21, NKJV).
Instead
of arrogantly denying the relevance of Christianity as old-fashioned,
we should glory in its stability, consistency and immutability. For
upon that rests our entire eternity. There MUST be some things which
cannot change in order for things to be at all.
While
His unthinkable judgment against sin is unchanging, so too is His
immeasurable forgiveness through faith.
Without
Christ as our rock, we could not rest, for without Him we are forever
on the shifting sands of our own powerlessness.
