You all know what this is, I hope. [Hold up my laptop.] Yep … it’s a laptop … a computer. It has an Intel Pentium NB 3540 processor … whatever that is. It has four gigabytes of RAM. It has 500 gigabytes of memory on the hard drive. Anyone here know what a “gigabyte” is? A “gigabyte” is a numerical value. A “gigabyte” is 109 … or a 1 with nine zeros after it (1,000,000,000) which is a billion bits … or bytes … of data. And that’s nothing. We’ve gone a long, long, long ways past gigabytes. We now have PCs and thumb drives with “terabytes” of memory space. A “terabyte” … is 1012… or a million, million bytes of data.
Don’t blink.
We now have “petabytes” … which equals 1,024 terabytes. I literally have no idea how much data that actually is. But I can use this [PC] to go on the internet where I can go on-line and “google” everything. Anyone know what a “google” is? A “google” is also a numerical value. It’s a 1 with a million zeros after it!
You know what’s just as crazy as all this technology is the fact that you all sort of have an idea of what I’m talking about. Who here hasn’t seen a laptop? Who here doesn’t own a laptop? Who here has never heard of a thumb drive? Own a thumb drive? Knows what a “hard drive” is? Imagine going back just a mere 50 years … 50 YEARS … and trying to explain to the people back then what this thing [laptop] does … or this [mouse] … and tell them that it’s a “mouse” … or this [cellphone]. The closest thing that we could imagine back then was Dick Tracy’s wristwatch or the “tri-corders” on Star Trek. Now that I have this [cell phone] there are times when I want to toss it into the middle of Lake Junaluska … amen? Am I the only one who feels that way? {I didn’t think so.}
Fifty years ago there was no “internet” or the dozens and dozens of “social platforms” like “Facebook” or “Twitter” or hundreds of computer applications that we call “apps” today. The stuff we’re surrounded by today and almost take for granted was the stuff of science fiction 50 years ago. I grew up in the time of punch cards. There are probably a few of you here who remember punch cards. Then came punch tape … and then magnetic tape. Computers filled whole rooms. The idea that we would all own our very own computers or that computers would be portable like this one wasn’t even on the radar 50 years ago. And yet, here we are … 50 years later … and we are not only surrounded by this stuff … I doubt may of our young people today could survive without it. We couldn’t imagine this stuff fifty years ago … and now, fifty years later … we have a couple of generations who couldn’t imagine a world without it, amen?
When this techno-revolution broke into our lives, we had absolutely no idea how fast this technology was going to change and how much and how fast it was going to change our lives. In 1965 … 1965 … gosh, that doesn’t seem all that long ago to me … but we’re talking about 56 years ago … Gordon Moore … co-founder of Intel … the company who created the processor in my laptop here … made an observation that is now known by his name: “Moore’s law.” Moore predicted that computers would double their computing or processing power every two years … and his prediction has held true. If anything, the rate of change has accelerated much more than we or Moore expected, amen?
According to Ryan Ashad, a writer for Forbes Magazine, our technology will be 32 times more powerful than it is now in 5 years … and a 1,000 times more powerful than that in just 10 years. Stop and think about that for a moment … thirty-two times more stronger in five years, a thousand times more powerful in 10 years, and a million times more advanced in just 20 years. We already have “petrabytes” … what will we have in 20 years? Ashad predicts that “singularity” will occur in approximately 30 years. “Singularity” is a term that was coined by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge to describe the point where technology will have become so complex and so intelligent that the human mind will no longer be unable to comprehend it. I … and I would guess some of you as well … attained “singularity” a long time ago, am I right? Change is happening so fast that our normal decision-making processes are struggling to keep up. “Blink,” warns Ashad, “and you might have missed a seismic shift [in technology] that could be cataclysmic.”
We live in a world that is changing every single second. We can’t keep up. But the consequences of not keeping up are frightening. Business leader Jack Welch predicted that if the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near. In other words, if the world keeps changing faster and faster, it will reach a point where we can no longer keep up with it and we could find ourselves in a situation like the movie “Terminator” where the machines and the people who build them and control them will rule the world, so to speak. He may be more correct than he realizes. I think we’re already beginning to see that happen, amen? According to the Prophet Daniel, the last days will be filled with people running to and fro seeking knowledge … not realizing that we’re rushing headlong into the last days (Daniel 12:4).
All of this could be quite overwhelming … frightening even … if it weren’t for … say it with me … God. Our stability in a world filled with instability is this … “Deus semper idem” … “God is always the same.” God is immutable. He never changes. When astronaut Alan Shepherd was getting ready to go into space for the first time, a reporter asked him: “What are you depending on in this flight?” I love his answer! “I’m depending upon the fact that God’s laws will not change.”
The poor poet of Psalm 102 would agree that Alan Shepherd is spot on. I say “poor” because Psalm 102 is, as it says at the top of the psalm, “a prayer of the afflicted, when he is overwhelmed and pours out his compliant before the Lord.” Can you relate? Ever been there? Afflicted … overwhelmed … ready to pour out your complaint to the Lord?
This poor soul begins his prayer by asking God to hear his cry in the day of his troubles. He is very ill. His bones burn with pain (v. 3). His heart is stricken and withered like grass (v. 4). He is alone in his suffering. He compares himself to an owl in the wilderness. An odd comparison but owls are solitary birds who hunt at night. An image of solitude. He compares himself to a lonely sparrow on a roof top, who usually fly in flocks (v. 6-7). Again … an image of loneliness … of being abandoned. He can’t sleep. His enemies are circling around him, ready to take advantage of his weakened condition and attack him at any moment (v. 8). His misery and suffering are so great that he can’t stop crying. Death, he fears, is knocking at his door.
But in verse 12, his tone and his attitude change. He reminds himself that the One he is praying to is the immutable, unchangeable God of Israel. “But You, O Lord,” he rejoices … rejoices! … “shall endure forever.” In verses 25 to 27 … the ones we read earlier … he speaks about how the earth may pass and everyone living on it, but God, “Deus semper idem” … who is always the same … from everlasting to everlasting … will always be the same and His years will have no end.
In other words, what the psalmist realizes is that he changes but God does not! When we are afflicted …. overwhelmed ... complaining … unable to sleep … and surrounded by our troubles … we must turn our eyes and our hearts to God, who is “Deus semper idem” … God, who is always the same … whose years have no end.
Last week we spoke about God’s eternal nature. Eternity has to do with time. Today I’m speaking about God’s immutable nature. “Mutable” is where we get the world “mutation” from. “Mutable” is something that is mutating, changing. But God is “immutable.” His promises … His purposes … His provision … His personality … cannot and will not change.
The great preacher R.C. Sproul says that the Lord is “immutable” … that it is impossible for His character or being to undergo any mutation. “His power cannot be augmented or diminished,” says Sproul. “He never learns nor forgets. And He cannot be anything other than perfectly holy.” Author and evangelist A.W. Pink put it this way: “This is one of the divine perfections which is not sufficiently pondered. It is one of the excellencies of the Creator which distinguishes Him from all other creatures. God is perpetually the same … subject to no change in His being … attributes … or determinations.” Or, as God puts it in Malachi 3:6: “For I am the Lord, I do not change.”
God’s promises are “semper idem” … always the same. The Bible is packed with promises. Would you like to know how many? A school teacher by the name of Everek R. Storm did, so he carefully went through the Bible and counted all the promises he could find. He came up with … drum roll, please … 7,487 promises. That, my brothers and sisters, is a lot of promises, amen? That’s approximately 20 promises a day for a whole year. Pretty amazing, eh?
In one of his books, author Robert Morgan described hiking up a steep mountain trail with a sharp rock wall on one side. The park service had installed large eyehooks into the stone wall and had run a thick rope through them. All along the way the rope was knotted. By grabbing the knotted rope, sometimes with both hands, Morgan was able to ascend to the top of the mountain. It inspired him with this vision of God’s immutability. “The knotted rope of God’s promises runs throughout the length of the Bible,” he wrote, “attached by the eyehooks of His watchful concern and bolted into the rock of God’s unchanging faithfulness.”
Whenever you are troubled … distressed … under pressure … anxious … angry … or in need of guidance … the proper God-given strategy is to turn off the TV, the computer, the cell phone … open your Bible … prayerfully read it … and ask God to give you a promise upon which you can stand … amen?
Perhaps some of you are wondering: “Aren’t there times in the Bible when God changes His mind?” For example, Genesis 6:6, which says that when God saw the wickedness of the world He was “sorry that He made man on earth” and said that He would blot out from the earth the human beings that He had created – people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air … but then He spared Noah and his family so that earth could start over again. When the Prophet Jonah delivered God’s message to Nineveh … “yet 40 days and Nineveh shall be overthrown” (Jonah 3:4) … God spared Nineveh when they repented. In Numbers 14:11-12, God declared that He would destroy the Israelites and make a mighty nation of Moses … but He didn’t. He spared them.
Proverbs 19:21 says: “There are many plans in a man’s heart … nevertheless, the Lord’s counsel, that will stand.” God reminded His exiled prophet, Ezekiel, that nothing about His divine plan for Israel had changed, despite the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem. “I, the Lord, have spoken it; it shall come to pass, and I will do it; I will not hold back” (Ezekiel 24:14). In Isaiah, the Lord was equally emphatic. “My counsel shall stand, and I will do my pleasure. I will also bring it to pass. I have purposed it; I will also do it” (Isaiah 46:10-11).
If we find that one of God’s promises in the scripture was suspect, well … good-by scriptures, amen? We’d start to wonder about the others, wouldn’t we? When I turn to God’s Word, I don’t find that the Bible is “yes” one day and “no” the other. It doesn’t promise today and deny tomorrow. The Gospel is “yes” and “amen” to the glory of God.
Has this ever happened to you? You read a psalm or a passage of scripture one day and “pow!”… it hits you between the eyes … right in the heart. And yet, you read the same psalm or scripture a few months or years later … eh … nothing. Has God changed? Has His Word changed? The reality is this: while you may have been shaken while standing on the Rock, the Rock that you’re standing on isn’t shaking. We’re like the shipwrecked sailor who clung to a rock all night until the tide went down. After he made it back to safety, a friend of his asked: “Weren’t you shaking with fear while you were hanging onto that rock?” The sailor simply smiled and said: “Yes … but the rock wasn’t.”
God’s promises are as firm as a rock. Life and its uncertainties may shake but God … who is our Rock …does not, amen? The Bible does not promise that we are always going to be healthy … or rich … or successful. But there are promises that God will make all things work together for our good … that He will make all grace abound … and that His grace is sufficient ... that nothing can or will separate us from His love … and that He will supply all our needs richly in Christ. These promises will never change throughout our lives … throughout the ages or generations.
Whatever the perfections of God were before the world was called into existence, they are exactly the same at this very moment. Was He powerful? Was He God, the Almighty, when He spoke the world into existence? Was He the Omnipotent One who separated the sky from the earth … the sea from the dry land? Was God wise when He made the sun and placed it at the precise distance from our planet … which is tilted at the perfect angle … rotating at the perfect speed … covered by the right layers of gas? Yes! He was wise and powerful then and He’s wise and powerful today. He is the same giant in His might. There is no weakness, no sign of age in His arm today. The great colossus of the universe is no less wise, no less skillful, no less knowledgeable today than He was then. He is unchanged in His wisdom … knowing as much as He ever knew … neither more nor less. “There never was a time when He was not,” A.W. Tozier wrote, “and there will never come a time when He will cease to be. God has neither evolved, grown, nor improved. All that He is today,” Tozier says, “He has ever been, and will ever be.”
God’s promises are unchangeable. God’s purposes are unchangeable. God’s nature is “semper idem” … always the same … and His provision is “semper idem” … is always the same. Because God is semper idem … immutable … unchangeable … His outpouring of grace never diminishes. From His hand come blessing upon blessing after blessing. The same God who provided a spring of water for Hagar in the desert created streams in the wilderness for the Israelites. The same God who brought bread to Elijah by ravens provided daily bread for His children on their way to the Promised Land. The same God who provided oil and flour for a widow and her son during a famine provided food for the widows in the Book of Acts.
If the Lord is our shepherd, we have everything we need, right? (Psalm 23:1). If we seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, all these things will be given to us as well (Matthew 6:33). Our God will supply all our needs out of “His riches in glory by Christ Jesus” (Philippines 4:19). The same God who provided for the heroes of the Bible is caring for you. And His giving heart hasn’t changed one iota over the centuries. The God who hears my cries for help is the same God who heard the poor soul’s cries for help in Psalm 102.
God may never change but thank God that we can change. Because of God’s immutable promises … God’s unchanging purposes … and His unchanging personality or nature … we, God’s people, can change! It’s great that God is “semper idem” … always the same … but wouldn’t it be awful if you and I were “semper idem” in our sin? It is precisely because God is immutable that you and I can experience the hope of everlasting change from the inside out.
The greatest change we’ll ever experience is the one that happens when we place our faith in Jesus Christ for forgiveness, pardon, and eternal life. The Bible says, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ” they are what? They are a new creation. “Old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new” (2nd Corinthians 5:17).
Talk about change! When we come to Christ, we are redeemed from the inside out and made new in the light of the Word of God. We pass from death to life. We are born again!
Change is also at the heart of our growth as Christians. The Apostle Paul said: “But we all, with veiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of God, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2nd Corinthians 3:18). As we live in Christ’s presence, worship Him, behold Him, and study the scriptures, the Holy Spirit unleashes a process of change within us. We are constantly being transformed from one degree of glory … or Christlikeness … to another. We are being conformed into the image of His Son.
We also have another great change coming in the future. According to 1st Corinthians 15:51, when Jesus comes again “we shall be changed.” Our mortal bodies will be snatched up to meet the Lord and “in a moment … in the twinkling of an eye … at the last trumpet … we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruptible and this mortal must put on immortality” (v. 52-53).
Thank God we have been change … are being changed … and will be changed. Change is at the heart of redemption … and that’s very encouraging because, if you’re like me, you can clearly recognize things in your life that need to change. Thank God we have this precious promise: “He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6).
I would like to be able to tell you there is no ominous side to the immutability of God … but that is not true. His justice and judgment are unchanging too. At the beginning of the Bible, He told Adam and Eve that if they disobeyed Him they would what? Surely die (Genesis 2:17). In the middle of the Bible, we read: “The soul who sins shall die” (Ezekiel 18:4). Jesus warned us in John 8:24 that if you reject Him you “will die in your sins.” In Romans 6:23, Paul writes: “The wages of sin is death.” Near the end of the Bible, the Apostle James describes how sin “… when it is finished” … brings forth death (James 1:15). And the final pages of Revelation reveals how … at the final judgment before God’s great throne … “anyone not found written in the book of Life will be cast into the lake of fire” (Revelation 20:15).
But here’s the good news. The Lord will ever declare Himself to be the God of repentant sinners … so I am safe … you are safe! The whole message of the scriptures is bound up in God’s wonderful plan to reconcile humanity to Himself … and it is based on His immutable grace … the same now as it has always been. When we trust Jesus as our savior, our names are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life … insuring our eternal destiny with Him in Heaven.
As we enter the future, we’re apt to be afraid of the changes we face. We ask ourselves, “what’s coming next?” When will the next shoe drop? When will the next terrorist attack come? The next war? The next plague or pandemic? The next economic or political crisis? What will happen to our nation? To our children? Our grandchildren?
One thing is sure. Everything is going to change and the change is going to come faster and faster. Some of these changes will shock us. Some will encourage us. Some we’ll feel deeply. And we won’t even recognize some changes while they’re happening. While everything around us changes and the rate of change accelerates to warp speed … in the center of it all is and will be our Almighty God who never changes. In a world of change and decay, take hold of God’s unchanging hand. “Deus sempre idem” … God is always the same, amen?
