Hebrews 1:12

THE UNCHANGEABLENESS OF GOD

‘Thou art the same, and Thy years shall not fail.’

Hebrews 1:12

As against our feeling that we have made our own fate, that our sins have laid such hold upon us that we are not able to look up, the redeeming entry of God upon His disordered world is above all the manifestation of His invincible and unchanging love, not to be diverted from its purpose, from the triumphant achievement of the will of love, by any failure of man, by any apparent impossibility of raising man from the pit into which he has sunk himself beyond the reach of human hope.

I. This redeeming power of God to recreate good out of evil is not merely an idea; thank God it is an experience. We know in the history of our own souls how God can renew the life, out of the materials in which our own sins and failings have left it to Him to work, can rebuild the story of our hope. We know enough to know with absolute assurance that there is nothing we can have done or left undone which can have carried us beyond the range of the renewing power of His forgiving and recreative love. The broad lesson of the redeeming love of God, which is writ large for us in the Christmas mystery of God coming down into a world of sin, is reflected in our own experience of its truth and confirmed to be the ground of a future and immediate hope.

II. The invincible power of the unchangeable love of God is in this revelation of experience made more abundantly plain when we consider the unchangeableness of God’s love in relation to our sense of a fate that binds us to be what we have always been. For the unchangeableness of the love is shown in its unfailingly progressive manifestation. At each step in the lesson of life and of experience we see that God is the same, because His compassions fail not, they are new every morning—the same love which we have known all along unfolds fresh glories of hope. The unchanging love of God shows itself in a perpetual surprise. Always it achieves something far beyond what we hoped for or desired. The unchanging love of God says always, ‘Behold, I make all things new.’

III. The crowning wonder of His Redemption is that in the redemption from sin, whether it be the redemption of the world or of our own individual character, the result which we see wrought out of the materials of our failure and our sin attains a revelation of love so perfect and complete, a progress so unfailing, so unchecked, that we cannot conceive or imagine that it could have been greater or more glorious than it is. We cannot conceive it, and we are right. God cannot change. Nothing can change Him, nothing can defeat Him.

—Rev. Wilfrid Richmond.

Illustration

‘From moods of moral depression we rise to a real and living hope as we come face to face with the master truth of the unchangeableness of the Eternal God. He is the same. For it is not mere unchangeableness with which we are face to face. We misconceive the attributes of God whenever we isolate them from one another. It is the unchangeableness of the invincible and eternal love of God with which we are face to face. This is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end of the Creation of God.’