The Unchangable

Intro

This morning we saw the total faithfulness of Jesus in three areas:

(1) Compassion; (2) Forgiveness; (3) Remembrance

Put a little differently, we saw that the person of Jesus didn’t change, despite his circumstances.

He still preached the good news

He still promised forgiveness of sins

He still provided hope

This is because Jesus, God in the flesh, is not persuaded to follow the passions of this life.

Jesus is truly the Changeless One, who was in the beginning, is, and ever shall be.

Numbers 23:19 — God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it?

And God's Changeless Character is the Basis for Repentance, Blessing, and Hope, according to Malachi.

These three things point us to Jesus. We saw this morning a man on a cross next to Jesus repent. We saw Jesus bless the man, and in doing so gave him this hope: that once his eyes closed in death, he would be in paradise.

So it’s worth looking at these three aspects as grounded in God’s unchangeable character.

So first, God’s Unchanging Character Makes Repentance Possible

Read Mal 3:7 with me once more: From the days of your fathers you have turned aside from my statutes and have not kept them. Return to me, and I will return to you, says the Lord of hosts. But you say, ‘How shall we return?’

Here, God offers the people of Israel yet another opportunity to repent. He says “Return to me, and I will return to you.”

Notice this is the same promise repeated again and again in the Bible.

This reminder stresses that the only reason repentance is still an option at all is because of God’s changelessness.

I guess it was just a few years ago now that LL Bean changed their return policy.

Honestly, I am not sure if I own anything from LL Bean. I can tell you I’ve never ordered anything from there.

But apparently in 2018 they changed a pretty famous return policy of accepting, from what I understand, basically any reason for the return of any product, no matter how long you’ve owned and/or used it.

They’ve now capped that at a year.

God’s policy, however, is far more reliable—and a bit more deadly. There is no cheating God like many people cheated LL Bean.

You see, God never has to revisit his repentance policies. He never needs to write over previous mistakes with the help of a publicist.

His unchanging nature creates a spiritual environment when we sin to invite us back to him in repentance.

Just the other night, I remember praying for Madeleine and our baby, and just before I prayed I thought, “Well, hang on. You can’t ask God’s blessing for your child! You just sinned against him today!”

I’m decently confident he caused me to preach this text to rebuke my attitude!

How often do you think you do the same? When considering your position or relationship toward God, do you get scared off from him because of your sin?

Look again at verse 6: For I, Yahweh, do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed.

This is an incredible word against this attitude of “I’m not good enough to pray.” God indicates he’s already given grace by not causing me to vanish, to perish because of my sin!

And I love that he calls them the children of Jacob. Most times in the Bible, that’s just a synonym for Israel, since God renamed Jacob to Israel. But here it serves a really ironic function:

You swindlers. You cheaters. Remember, Jacob means to supplant. He sought to take his brother’s birthright by swindling him out of it—and it worked!

God is declaring the children have acted no differently, and yet God’s unchanging patience has not caused them to be blotted out.

So friend, if you find yourself too afraid to pray, too afraid to approach God because of your sin, please hear this word from Malachi: God does not change. He is not tossed to and fro by your decisions. Friends, he’s not even surprised by your actions.

Instead, he is immovable. He hasn’t changed in giving you grace. He hasn’t switched from loving to hating you.

After all, Jesus invited the women on the road, and even implicitly the mockers and revilers, in addition to the dying man on a cross next to him in repentance.

And that brings us to the natural outcome of this:

God’s Unchanging Character Makes Blessing Inevitable

Alright, so I don’t want to lose you here. This isn’t a tithing sermon, so let me just take one second to suggest to you that you should tithe, because that’s clearly the message of Malachi 3:8 and following.

But, I want to understand that tithing is simply an example. The book of Malachi is filled with legitimate complaints God has against the people of Israel.

You see, their disobedience in tithing was simply their disobedience in general.

And as we’ve seen, God invites us back into a right relationship with him despite our previous attitudes of disobedience.

And so I want you to really focus in on verse 10 and see how it answers this question: What happens when I repent?

There we are told to test God.

This makes sense. If God is unchangeable—and we are ever-changing—then it seems entirely too good to be true that God would invite us into repentance and much less actually give us a blessing!

This is what we call an incommunicable attribute: an attribute not like goodness or mercy, things we can do and participate in, but an attribute which we cannot possess ourselves.

And this, among the other incommunicable attributes, makes God very, very different from us.

Sin seizes upon this difference and tells us to be afraid of this God. So it’s truly unsurprising that we would doubt God actually wants to bless us.

So here’s God’s response to that: test me.

Don’t hear this in a challenge sort of way. This isn’t a contest wherein an athlete or a boxer says, “Alright yeah. Come at me and see what happens!”

Quite the opposite, God says: I will actually bless you repent! If you turn aside from your old ways of thinking and acting, I will make this so, so much better for you.

As an example, I was just reading from a guy named Dan Darling that his church is preaching through Jonah and it hit him that Jonah ended up with less money and with more hunger and exhaustion at the end of the book than if he had just gone to Nineveh right away.

So at the end of the book, Jonah is poor, hungry, exhausted from running and then doing the work of preaching, and now he’s angry that God’s being gracious.

If only Jonah would have put God to the test and said “Alright, I’ll do this, even though I don’t want to,” he would have ended up in a much better position—and disposition—than being mad at a worm.

But here is where we need to introduce faith, isn’t it?

Because let’s say you guys say, “Alright Jim. Deal. I’ll put God to the test.” and then tomorrow something bad happens, isn’t that immediate proof that God lied?

Well, not quite. Take a look at verse 11: I will rebuke the devourer for you, so that it will not destroy the fruits of your soil, and your vine in the field shall not fail to bear, says the Lord of hosts.

Notice that it takes faith to plant crops, to wait on a vineyard to produce.

Yahweh’s promise isn’t a short-sighted, instant gratification promise. Nor is it a promise entirely indiscriminate of your actions—indeed, the thief on the cross admitted that his death was the just reward of his deeds!

What God promises here is actually better: a long-term stability, a less topsy-turvy, upside-down right-side up, lasting blessing. A blessing which matches his character.

And notice that he takes it further: while he doesn’t even have to do it in this life, he gives us a continual taste of that stability in the Church!

But we have to get to my favorite part of the sermon:

God’s Unchanging Character Makes Hope Palpable

Verse 12 says, Then all nations will call you blessed, for you will be a land of delight, says Yahweh of Hosts.

God’s unchanging nature brings about an unchangeable blessing, resulting in an unchangeable promise: rest. Delight.

But do the math here:

God says he does not change.

God invites us to repent.

God gives blessing freely.

And now he’s showing the end, end, end result of it all: a land of rest and delight.

So it God is unchanging and he promises such a reward… you see where I’m going.

Let’s put it this way: recall that famous definition of faith from Hebrews 11

Now faith is the assurance of things hope for, the conviction of things not seen

Well, allow me to respectfully dissent from that translation, noting that the Greek word used is very, very tricky.

Here’s the sense that I don’t think the word “assurance” captures:

It would literally be: Now faith is the substance of things hoped for

But you can tell easily that’s not quite right either, is it? What does substance mean?

But if we put it into the broader context of Hebrews 11 and the “Hall of Faith,” we see stories where Abraham trusted God’s promise so completely that his faith took for granted that God’s promise was already fulfilled!

Let me put it this way: the faith spoken of in the Bible is a faith that is based on God’s unchanging character.

This means that God’s promise is so certain—because he doesn’t change—that the men and women of faith in the Old Testament, in the New Testament, and indeed even throughout Church history treated both the promise and the thing promised as the same reality.

This means that when God promises something, you can live your lives as though it’s already come to complete and full fruition.

Why? Because with God we can count our chickens before they hatch.

Once we view faith this way, we come back to verse 12: Then all nations will call you blessed, for you will be a land of delight, says Yahweh of Hosts.

Friends, we can live this way now!

And our life can be a life of repentance and blessing, as we taste in the Supper, in the repeated promises of the Bible, in our continuing love for one another and for Christ!

This final fulfillment of the promise of God is, in a sense, already ours. Right now. God is so utterly faithful, and so totally unchangeable that nothing can shake this away.

In this, then, we can truly taste the everlasting life in Jesus, the rest offered in a land where we shall be made to lie down, buy without money, and have no wants or needs forever more.

Conclusion

So here’s the thing. That faithfulness of Jesus from this morning?

It’s to be expected. It’s normal at this point. It’s repeatedly been who God is, and will always be his disposition.

This means then you can fully repent without fear of having sinned one too many times. There is no straw which breaks Jesus’ back.

It means you can know blessing is coming. Test God! Give it a 30 year free trial and see what happens.

And it means that you can fully know the new life of Jesus Christ, today.

All because Jesus was unwaveringly, unswervingly, unashamedly, unchangingly faithful. And He is now. And as we sang this morning, he forever wilt be.

Let’s pray.