Malachi 3:6
Things That Never Change
Introduction
There are many things that are changing rapidly all around us. We are living in a constantly changing world – and as the years go by the rate at which the changes occur are increasing more and more. Practically every phase of life changes. Travel has changed – from horse and buggy in our grandparents or great-grandparents time to auto and air today. We hardly even take notice when a space shuttle sends someone to space any more. Political methods have changed – from absolute monarchs to democracies. The entire medical field has changed – things that were once impossible are now routine, and what used to take weeks or months to heal is now outpatient. Brother Vaughn, who many of you have met, told me that he is having cornea replacement surgery. How in the world can they even handle something so delicate? Times have definitely changed!
I am thankful though that in our world of constant change there are some things that never change. Read with me Malachi 3:6.
“For I am the LORD, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed.”
God was referring to His own qualities of patience, long-suffering and mercy when He said, “I am the Lord, I change not…” The word LORD in our text is the Hebrew word Jehovah. We learned in our Wednesday evening studies of the names of God that His name Jehovah means that He is the eternal, self-existent, self-sufficient God who created and sustains it all. He never had a beginning and will never have an ending. God has always been, always is and will always be. If you understand all that then you can explain it to me sometime! God is more awesome than I’ll ever understand and infinitely more complex than I can ever hope to explore. He transcends all time, all space, all knowledge, and every other dimension you can come up with.
Psalm 102:25-27 says,
“Of old you laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you endure; they will all wear out like a garment. You change them like raiment, and they pass away; but you are the same, and your years have no end.”
God existed before the heavens and earth were made, and He will exist long after they have been destroyed. God causes the universe to change, but in contrast to this change He is the same. James said that our God is the “Father of lights, with whom is no variation, neither shadow of turning.” The writer of Hebrews said that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, and today and forever.”
Listen, God is unchanging – He is unchanging in His being, in His perfections, and in His purposes. God is the great “I AM.” He is eternally perfect in every way, and His purposes will stand forever. What is the great purpose of God? I have always said that God’s greatest purpose is to seek and to save those who are lost, but I am learning otherwise in my study of the Scriptures, and I’ll be sharing this with you in more detail in the future, but I believe the Bible teaches us that the chief end of God is to glorify God and enjoy Himself forever. Certainly our redemption is a part of that great pursuit, but it is only one part and not the whole. God has never changed and He is not going to change! More about that later…today I want to explore three things about which God does not change.
God is not going to change the way He feels about man.
God loves man and created him to have a relationship with him. He loved the first man Adam in the garden before He sinned, and He loved that man after sin entered the picture. How do I know God loves man? The Bible tells me that He does! 1 John 3:7 says…
“Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”
God loved man enough to send His one and only Son into this world to live and die for him. Romans 5:8 says that…
“…God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”
You ought to be thankful today that God doesn’t change the way He feels about you – He loves you just as much today as He has ever loved you and no matter what you do you won’t change that. You can’t make God love you any more – and you can’t make God love you any less. Some of you have wrecked your lives with sin and shame, you’ve thrown away your opportunities, you’ve walked on the grace and mercy of God, you turned your back on Him, and yet He stands there with open arms waiting to receive you to Himself! He loves you!
I’m thankful that when I was a teenager God saw through my stupidity and kept me safe. I’m thankful that when I didn’t know what to do with my life God was making and molding me into the man I am today. I am thankful that even today when I mess up, when my pride gets in the way, when my impatience gets in the way, when I don’t love people like I ought to, when I don’t take my calling as serious as I ought to, when I neglect His Word and prayer that through it all God loves me!
How can God love me through all of that? How can God love you through all of that? How can God continue to love man when man treats God with such contempt? He can love us this way because He does not change – His mercy endures forever!
Not only does God not change the way He feels about man…
God is not going to change the way He feels about sin.
Now as much as people and times change, God doesn’t change how He feels about sin. When Adam sinned in the garden, God was offended. Sometimes I think that we look at that incident and say to ourselves, “What’s the big deal? He ate a piece of fruit?” But it was a big deal, and why? Simply because God told Adam not to do it. Listen, the difference between God being the Lord of your life and you being the lord of your life is obedience.
If God’s chief purpose is to glorify Himself, then we can rightly reason that our chief purpose is to glorify Him too. I’ve been reminding you for two years of Revelation 4:11, which says,
“Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power, for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.”
If you never learn anything else from me, I hope that you learn that your sole purpose for being on this earth is to bring honor and glory to God, to please Him, to make Him happy. But sin doesn’t make Him happy. Your sin is offensive to God, it repulses Him, it is loathsome to Him.
Now our world and even you might call sin by some other name but sin is sin. What was sin 10 years ago is still sin today. If it was sin 50 years ago it is still sin today. If it was sin in Jesus’ day it is still sin today. You might change the label on poison but it remains the same. Poison is poison and sin is sin, no matter what you call it.
· You might call it an alternative lifestyle, but the Bible calls it homosexuality and it is an abomination to God.
· You might call it cohabitation, or experimentation, or love, but the Bible calls it fornication and it is sin.
· You say you can’t help the way you feel about someone when you harbor resentment or bitterness or hatred, but the Bible says you are sinning and being unmerciful, unloving, impatient, or hateful.
· You say you have the parents from hell and you can’t obey or honor them, the Bible says you’re a disobedient child.
We make some of the sorriest excuses for our sin as though we’ve got to convince people that what we’re doing is alright, and most of the time I think what we’re doing is trying to convince ourselves, but listen, God has never changed the way He feels about sin and He’s not going to.
The cause of sin has never changed. From Adam till today, every one of us has an inherited sin nature. I didn’t become a sinner; I was born a sinner. You were born a sinner. You were born with a sin nature that you inherited from Adam, and the only one who can do anything about that sin nature is the second Adam, Jesus.
Romans 5:12 says,
“Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.”
Because of one man’s disobedience were we made sinners. Because of one man’s sin we were all made sinners. You may not like that, you may not agree with how that works, but you don’t have to like it – you don’t have to agree with it, that’s just the way it is, and the very fact that you don’t agree with the way things are is evidence that you are a sinner. We don’t like to admit something is wrong with us. We don’t like to admit when we are wrong. But the Bible says that “all have sinned.”
Just as the cause of sin has never changed, the results of sin have never changed. “The wages of sin is death.” God told Adam that in the day he ate of the forbidden fruit he would surely die. Death simply means separation, and Adam would experience two kinds of death. First he experienced spiritual death, or spiritual separation from God. He hid himself in the garden hoping that he wouldn’t have to face God. He experienced physical death at a very old age as well, but had he never eaten the fruit he would have lived forever.
Listen, the Bible tells us that because of your inherited sin nature, you were born spiritually dead, spiritually separated from God, and only a personal relationship with Jesus Christ changes that. You can’t do anything to prevent the physical death. Hebrews 9:27 says, “It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.”
This is the law of the harvest found in Galatians 6. Because of sin we die, and if you don’t allow Jesus to do something about your sin you’ll not only die physically, but you’ll experience eternal spiritual death, eternal separation from God in hell. That’s not pretty, it’s not pleasant, but neither is sin, and if there’s one thing you can count on, God’s not going to change the way He feels about sin or the results of your sin. If God were going to change the way He felt – if He were going to overlook your sin somehow, He would have done it on that terrible day 2000 years ago when His only begotten Son was crucified! And why was God’s son crucified? Because…
God is not going to change His plan of salvation
There’s only one plan of salvation. It’s the plan He used in the garden with Adam. It’s the plan by which Moses was saved. It’s the plan by which Noah was saved. It’s the plan by which every man or woman has ever been saved or ever will be saved. Salvation is “by grace through faith.” Salvation is by “confessing with your mouth the Lord Jesus, and believing in your heart that God has raised him from the dead.” Salvation is by “believing on the Lord Jesus Christ.”
The men and women who lived before Jesus looked ahead by faith believing that Jesus would come and be the sacrifice for their sins, and those of us who live afterward look back believing that Jesus did come and die for our sins. Either way, looking forward or looking back, the look is a look of faith. God’s plan of salvation has never been complicated. In fact, He’s made it so easy that most people stumble right over it. I almost always explain the following way, and some of you are familiar with it, but I want to repeat it again and again and again.
Before Adam sinned, he and God enjoyed a wonderful, intimate relationship with each other, but when Adam sinned, he in essence turned his back on God. God found Adam’s act so repulsive that He turned His back on man. They were at enmity with one another. The Bible tells us that “no man seeks after God,” and had God never acted, man never would have turned to seek out a relationship with God again. But God, who is rich in mercy, made a way whereby man’s relationship to God could be restored. The book of Ephesians tells us that when we were far from God He made peace possible through Jesus Christ. He broke down, destroyed the enmity and hatred that existed between God and man, so that what we have now is God turning back to man with outstretched arms offering a restored relationship. Man stands with his back turned to a seeking and saving God.
Now, what does man have to do to receive what God is offering? He must turn around and face God. In other words, man must repent, turn from that life of independence from God and admit to God that he can’t do what he’s trying to do on his own. When we turn to God we are admitting to Him and to ourselves that we need help. When we turn to face God in repentance and confession we trust Him to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, receiving the gift of salvation and eternal life.
It’s just that easy! You don’t have to be good, you don’t have to pay up, lay anything down, clean up or turn anything over. Like the preacher said this past week at camp, when you turn over a leaf, you’ve still just got a leaf! That plan of salvation is the only one God will accept – and it’s the only one that will work. If you would be saved, then you must repent of your sin, confess it to God and trust or believe on the Lord Jesus Christ – and you will be saved!
Conclusion
Now it may not seem that big a deal to you to consider the unchangeableness of God. The idea is so foreign to us that we may not realize its significance. But if you’ll stop for a moment, I want you to imagine what it would be like if God could change. When something changes, it either changes for better or for the worse. If God could change to be better, then He was not the best – and how could God not always be the very best? He would not be God. If God could change for the worse, then what kind of God would He become? Would He become just a little evil rather than wholly good? How could you trust a God that could change?
I am thankful that God’s love for me never changes. I am thankful that I have a perfect standard of right and wrong to tell me what sin is today and every day of my life – God doesn’t change how He feels about sin. If God changed concerning sin, then He would be an unjust God. I am thankful also that God’s plan of salvation never changes. It is the same today as it was yesterday and it will remain the same. If God is not the same; if God could possibly change in these things, then my faith in Him would crumble and He would not be that solid rock upon which we are to build our lives.
If you have experienced all of these unchanging characteristics of God before, then you have great reason to praise the Lord today! His work in your life is so wonderfully great! God’s magnificent love for you caused Him to look upon your sin and do something about it, and He deserves more than a passing yawn or a passive interest on Sunday mornings! His unchanging nature should cause you to leave from this place rejoicing in the greatness of your God! Rejoice, and again I say rejoice!
Rejoice because…
· The Lord endures forever (Ps. 9:7)
· His name shall endure forever (Ps. 72:17)
· His truth endures forever (Ps. 100:5)
· His glory endures forever (Ps. 104:31)
· His mercy endures forever (Ps. 106:1)
· His righteousness endures forever (Ps. 111:3)
· His praise endures forever (Ps. 111:10)
· His righteous judgments endure forever (Ps. 119:160)
· His dominion endures forever (Ps. 145:13)
Have you ever experienced the great love of God? When men and women fail you and forsake you, you can count on God’s love. When you sin and fall short of what God wants you to be, when your life is a mess and you don’t have a friend to turn to, you can count on the love of God. God loves you in spite of your sin, hating the sin, but loving the sinner. Have you ever accepted that love in salvation? Have you ever turned to God in repentance and faith? If you haven’t, would you today?
Perhaps today you need to move past that first step of faith and follow the Lord in baptism or church membership – maybe it is service that God is calling for. Is He speaking to you about His great desire to enjoy intimacy with Him in prayer and Bible study? How will you respond to that invitation today?
