 Well, I invite you to turn in your... Actually, I don't invite you, I command you in the name of Jesus to turn in your Bibles to the book of Psalm, Psalm 102. We're just going to read two verses as we look tonight at another attribute of God, the immutability of God, or the fact that God never changes. Psalm 102 verses 25, 26 and 27. Of old you laid the foundation of the earth and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you will endure. Yes, they will all grow old like a garment, like a cloak, you will change them and they will be changed, but you are the same and your ears will, your ears will have no end. There are other texts to which we might have referred in in Malachi 3, God declares, I am the Lord, I do not change. James 1.17 says that there is no variation with God, not even a hint of his turning away from what he is. And this is the doctrine of God's immutability. God does not change. In fact, God cannot change. Now that's only logical, you will agree. God is absolute perfection. He cannot be any greater than he already is in any of his attributes. I mean, there are no degrees of perfection. You can't say, well, he's kind of perfect. No, if you're perfect, that's it. If God were to change, it would have to be one of two things. It would have to be an upgrading of his nature, and that would mean that he's defective now. That would mean he's not perfect. And if it's not an upgrading of his nature, it would have to be a downgrading of his nature, and that would mean he wouldn't be perfect then. So God were to change at all. He wouldn't be God anymore. It's the mutability of man. The fact that man is capable of change that explains how he could sin. This is the question that's perplexed theologians for thousands of years. You think of Adam and Eve in the garden. Perfect man, perfect wife, no garbage to take out, no arguments about anything. They had everything they could possibly have wanted, and they did not have a sin nature. How could sin look good to them? I mean, when Satan comes along with his temptation, what in the world appealed to them? So everybody asks, how could man have sinned? It's because, as the Bible tells us, he was created holy and upright, but capable of change. Any change from a holy state would have to be to what? An unholy state, right? It could only be a downward slide, not an upward one. If you're created in holy and upright, and you're capable of change, and if there's any change at all, it would have to be to an unholy and sinful state. Now only God is immutable. God has no beginning. Every other being is a created being, so that's a mutation to go from non-being to being. To restate the doctrine, God, with all the perfections of his nature, is without any variation. He is now what he has always been and what he always will be. God is the same as he's always been. He will not change. Again, he cannot change. Now let me spend some time explaining this, because it is very important to our doctrinal foundation. God sees all things in continual motion beneath him, while he remains fixed, constant and unmovable. His wisdom and power, his knowledge and will are always the same. There's nothing greater than God, so no external forces or causes could affect change on him or in him. And he will not change himself, because that would mean he thought he could improve somehow. Which he cannot, or that he would desire to be less pure than he is, which he will not. God is eternally the same. Now immutability itself, and if the word immutable throws you, your kids know what that means, because they know about teenage mutant ninja turtles. That's the word mutation, change. Immutability itself is not a perfection apart from God's other attributes. For example, it's the greatest misery and imperfection of the fallen angels that they are immutable in their malice towards God. But God is infinitely good, and infinitely wise. He is infinitely holy, so it is a perfection necessary to his nature that he's immutably good. Immutably wise, immutably holy, along with all of his other attributes. God is immutable in all of his attributes. What I mean by that is this, God is as wise as he can be, and he'll always be exactly that wise. And this is why God never changes his mind, because God will never get new information that if he'd had before, he'd have made a better decision. And that's why we waste so much time praying as if God needed more information. I was in a church service in Pittsburgh some years ago where they asked one of the elders to pray before we took the Lord's Supper and he stood up and this is what he prayed verbatim. God, you may not know this, but my neck whipped up. I thought I was going to need a neck brace from the whiplash. You may not know this, but Mrs. Brown is in the hospital. He may not know. Who are you praying to? You may not know this. Who does he think putter there? God is as good as he can be and he'll always be that good. He's as holy as he can be and he'll always be that holy. He's as loving as he can be, etc., etc., etc. And this is true of all the divine attributes, his sovereignty, his self-sufficiency, his omnipresence, his power, his knowledge, his faithfulness, his anger towards sin and sinners, his grace, his goodness, and his love. The New Testament tells us that he is the ever-blessed God. In other words, God can never be anything but happy because that's what the word blessed means. God ordains everything that comes to pass and everything he ordains pleases him since he has ordained it. God obviously could never be displeased with something he had ordained to come to pass. Any theology that has God mad at himself is bad theology. Well, yeah, I ordained it but I wasn't happy about it. No. Now if you were to ask about the passage where it says, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked and ask how that can be reconciled with the eternal happiness of God, here's how I would answer that. Sometimes when we go to a passage in the Bible, we can't always say with certainty what it does mean. Not every passage is as clear as every other passage. And sometimes we just have to go to the continuum of Scripture to make sure we know what it doesn't mean. Well, what does that passage mean? Well, I don't know but I can tell you what it doesn't mean because the Bible doesn't say one thing in this verse and another thing three chapters later. Not the opposite. Now since God has ordained the death of the wicked for their sin and you know God can't be unhappy with his own decisions, the passage obviously means that God takes no morbid pleasure in the death of the wicked. No sinful pleasure in the death of the wicked. It's not with God like it is with us. There's some people we all know in our lives that they go to hell, that'd be okay with us. And we won't mind watching them squirm. That's not God. You can't have God at odds with himself. Someone else asked me one time how could God be eternally happy when it says he's angry with the wicked every day? The answer is it makes God happy to be angry at sin. God always is happy when he acts like himself, which is all the time. He never acts like anybody else, couldn't be otherwise. Any other response to sin would be a complete betrayal of his holy character. If God didn't hate sin, he wouldn't be loving his own purity. You can't hate A and non-A at the same time, at the same place. You can't love this and its exact opposite. You can't love fruit cocktail and steamed broccoli at the same time in the same place. Those two are exact opposites. If God changed for the better, he couldn't have an eternal pleasure in what he was before the change. If he changed for the worse, he couldn't be ever blessed in himself after the change. Because according to the diminishing of his state would be the decrease of his pleasure in himself. He could only then be the temporarily blessed God. Of course, then the Scripture is suspect, but God cannot add to his perfections because that addition would have to come from some external source. But God is the source of all that is, so there is nothing external for God. That is the doctrine of the infiniteness of God. God is everywhere and everything is in him. There's nothing outside God that could possibly affect change on him. And God can't decrease. Because any decrease would have to come from something contrary to the nature of that which is decreased and something that is more negatively powerful. That's why it's important to understand that God has all power. Now sin is powerful, yes, but it's not as powerful as God is. So sin can never detract from the perfections of God. So God cannot have anything added to his nature and he can't have anything subtracted from it. We have to be careful with the language we use in Christendom. You'll hear people say, well I want to give God glory. You can't. God is completely glorious in himself and he was completely and infinitely glorified before you were ever here. God receives glory from himself. You can't add water to a full glass. All you can do is pour it in and he keeps running over the top. What you and I can do is put his glory on display. But you can't give him something that he already possesses infinitely. Let's just run with that thought. If God is immutable, his word is immutable. Scripture itself testifies to this in Isaiah. The word of the Lord abides forever. Now its meaning does not change. The application of the meaning might. God's standards don't change as much as our politically correct society would like to think to the contrary. If adultery was wrong on Mount Sinai it's wrong in Oviedo. If homosexuality was a sin in the Old Testament it's a sin today. Regardless of what the president, the congress, whoever likes to say something to the contrary. I just read a quote from somebody. Why are we bound to standards by a book written 4,000 years ago? Because that book does not change. Well we need to make that book conform to our society. No, we need to make society conform to this book. God's law doesn't change because it's an expression of his character. And the immutable God has an immutable character. There are many things that we can see from this doctrine. For example, if God determined in his wisdom that the preaching of the gospel was the power of God for salvation, that's still the case. It's not puppet shows. It's not dramatic dance. It's not emotionally laden music. It is the preaching of the gospel. That is the power of God for salvation. You can't add to that. You can't alter it. You can counterfeit it, but you can't change it. That's why if someone you know needs to be saved, you need to bring them here to hear the preaching of the gospel on a regular basis. I have a dear friend in Scotland. He's a retired minister. His name is Eric Alexander. If you look up Gracious Faithful Minister of the Gospel in the Dictionary. It's pictures right there. And he told me a story one time. He was preaching expositionally through a book. And this particular Sunday, the scripture text was all the bigots. And before the sermon, one of the elder ladies in his congregation came to him and said, Reverend Alexander, my unsaved daughter is here. I sure hope we're going to hear a gospel message. So and so beget, so and so, so and so beget. And he just went through that. And afterwards the woman came up and just gave him the, Hey man, I told you man, man, man, man, man, all you did was look at him. The daughter got saved. You know, it's really not what we do with the text. It's what the Holy Spirit does with the text, right? I have preached wonderful sermons, magnificent sermons in my own estimation. Like I said, one of the first times I was invited to preach was in a Christian reform church in Warren, Ohio. And I gave, I knew it was a good sermon because I know how much I liked it the first time I heard RC Sproul give it. And so as full of myself as I could be, I went to the back of the church afterwards. And this little old lady comes up to me on a walker and she sticks out her hand and she says, Nice try, son. And then I've preached what I was sure were what I called dog meat sermons. And people fall all over themselves. That's the best I ever heard. It's what God does with it. Our job is to be faithful to it. His job is to make it work. And I don't want to do his job and he's not going to do my job. It doesn't matter if we live in a post-modern world or a prehistoric world. God still saves people by the preaching of the word. I get the biggest kick out of that word, post-modern. Can anything have less meaning than that word? Post means after. Modern means right now. Some people want you to believe that you're living after the world that you're in right now. I mean, talk about words that have no meaning. How about government intelligence? Government intelligence. Jumbo shrimp. My favorite. Rap music. Non-existent entities. If God inspired Paul to give us the method and the message which was to preach the word, preaches the method, the word is the message, then preaching the word is what we're still to do with it today. Ministers are not called to share. We're not there to give our opinions. We are not here to put our political views into the pulpit. We are here to be the mouthpiece of God to his people. God saved people by faith in the Old Testament and he saves people by faith in the New Testament and nothing but faith. And that's how he does it today. If works couldn't save anybody a thousand years ago, they can't save anybody today. I mean, how could God have made it any clearer in the book of Jude when he called it the faith that has been once for all delivered to the saints? There's nothing that needs to be added to it. You don't need any new special revelation. You need to find out what the original revelation is. True doctrine doesn't change. What was true then is true now and it's a once for all thing. So our job is to learn the old paths not to be seeking new revelation. Again, application may be new but meaning is not. There was a cartoon some years ago in Christianity today and for some time the cartoons have been the best part about that magazine. There was a group of people sitting in a semi-circle and it constitutes for most people what a modern Bible study is. Somebody reads a verse or two and then everybody gives their opinion about what the verse means. As if it mattered what your opinion about what the verse means is. And so the verse the leader read was this, Paul said, I am in chains for the sake of the gospel. What do you think that means, Frank? Frank says, well, it makes me think of Aretha Franklin. Chain, chain, chain, chain of fools. I don't know. How interesting. You can't say you dimwit. Then you might offend somebody. Mary Ann, what do you think it means? Well, it makes me think of my addictions because I'm in chains. So they go all the way around the half-circle and then the last person says, well, Pastor Bob, what do you think it means? And he says, well, I think it means exactly what it says. Paul's in jail because he won't shut up. He's in chains for the sake of the gospel. And one person leans over to another and says, I told you he wasn't relevant. No, no, no. The application may be different, but the meaning never changes. I mean, if in Leviticus 16 the atonement was for the people of God and not for the people who were not the people of God, then the atonement today is for the people of God and not for those who are not the people of God. If God said in Leviticus 10, by those who come near me, I will be treated as holy. Then today when anyone comes into his presence, he will be treated as holy. So worship is not a common, ordinary, casual thing today any more than it was not a common, ordinary, casual thing a thousand years ago. This also means that God will never change his decrees because those decrees are based upon his eternal purposes and those will never change. I mean they are his eternal decrees. What God has determined to do from all eternity past, he will do it and it will come to pass. This also means that God is never reacting to circumstances. Rather, God has already decided what his will is and will carry it out without changing his mind. God could never will himself to change. Before anybody changes, they have to want to change, right? I mean wives, you know that. You've got to give your husband some reason to want to change. So don't do this one. Don't give him the silent treatment. That's not punishment for men. I mean if he says, well honey, what do you want to watch tonight? It's Independence Day. But whatever you do, like writing Bible verses and limb stick on the mirror or John 3.16 on the refrigerator, you might make him want to change. But until he wants to, that won't happen. It's a famous skit of Jack Benny and only a few of you are old enough to know who that is. He's standing in Central Park waiting for the bus and a man with a gun walks up and puts it to Benny's head and says, your money or your life? And Benny just stands there. And he said, I said, your money or your life? I'm thinking, I'm thinking. Now, the will cannot be forced. It is your will. But the will can be changed. It's impossible though that God could ever be dissatisfied with himself at any point in his existence. He could never find anything in himself that needed improvement. And he could never wish himself to be less than he is now. Now the implications of this doctrine are staggering. For both saint and sinner alike. Although those implications are alike. To the saint, to the believer, this doctrine should be of the utmost comfort. For the impenitent sinner there, this doctrine is of the utmost misery. Let's look at the sinner. For the impenitent sinner, it means that God's hatred is unchangeable as long as the sinner remains impenitent. And it's not degrees of anger. John 3.36 says, if a person does not believe in Christ, the wrath of God abides on him right now. And the word wrath, the Greeks had seven words for anger and this is the most intense one. It is the word orge from which we get orgy, which means unbridled passion. If you do not believe in Jesus Christ right now, God's hottest anger is not coming down the future. It's hanging over your head right now. Perry Miller was a scholar who taught at the Yale Divinity School, which was ironic because he was an avowed atheist. But he had a great respect for Jonathan Edwards. And in 1953 they started the Jonathan Edwards Project which had as its goal to have everything Edwards ever did republished by 2003, which was the 300 year anniversary of his birth. They didn't get anywhere close. I mean they had to stop with about half the material. Well, in fact in volume one, which was the freedom of the will, in his preface to the book, Perry Miller said, I'm so glad we no longer live in a day when people believe this stuff. My mentor, the late John Gerstner, was working in the Beinecke Rare Book Room at Yale, which is where all the Edwards manuscripts are kept. And they were working and talking about sinners in the hands of an angry God. And what brilliant imagery that was. The arrow with the archer with the arrow pointed at the sinner's heart. And Dr. Gerstner says to Perry Miller, Perry, if Edwards is right, that arrow is pointed at your heart. To which Perry Miller replied, I know. And Dr. Gerstner says, I don't know how you sleep at night. And Miller says, sometimes I don't. I just hope to God he's wrong. You're going to stick with that? That's your hope? Your hope is wrong? What if he's right? But as long as the sinner remains impenitent. It's not God is just displeased. It's not God is annoyed. God hates you. With the utmost anger that an infinite God is capable of. And get this. An infinite God is capable of. And get this. And then Paul warns sinners in the New Testament to flee from the wrath to come. You're not only under God's abiding wrath, His hottest anger right now. Wait until your father gets home. I never understood double punishment for sin. We'd get a spanking from my mom and then she'd say wait until your father gets home. There's no double punishment for sin. That's God. This house is different. The sinner will be tormented forever in hell because God's anger against sin is unchangeable. The sinner will not be annihilated because that would be to end the eternal, which is an impossibility. And the scripture speaks of eternal punishment. Punishment that ends can't be eternal. So to annihilate a person under eternal punishment would be a contradiction of terms. That would be like speaking of temporary eternal life. You know there are evangelists who tell people, come forward, walk the aisle, sign the card, pray the prayer, and receive eternal life. But they also believe that salvation can be lost. It should be sued for false advertising. How can you get eternal life if it can be lost? Jonathan Edwards once remarked that it was this attribute of God, his immutability, that made sinners hate him the most. They hate him because he's holy, but they hate him more because he will always be holy and he'll never be anything but holy. Another thing that the immutability of God means is this. It means God will never lower his standard just so more people can get saved. We have a tendency to think that God would receive more glory if more people got saved. So we make it as easy for them as we can. The problem is that God's way of saving people is unchangeable. So if God requires repentance and faith, we have absolutely no right to take repentance out of the formula. We have no right to tell them they don't have to give up their sin. When God tells them, they do have to give up their sin. We have no right to tell them they can have Christ as Savior now and make him Lord of their life later. That's not an option the Bible ever offers. Nowhere in the Bible are the words Savior and Lord used in that order. Nowhere. 631 times the word, phrase Lord and Savior is used. 631 to zero. On anybody's scoreboard, that's a slam dunk whitewash. In the history of college football, the greatest victory was in 1925 when big, powerful Georgia Tech played little Cumberland College of Kentucky in football and beat them 222 to nothing. How about 631 to nothing? How dare we offer Christ to people in a way that God never did. So whatever God was, he must always be. Whatever his standards are, they must always be. If Christ was ever the only way to God, he will forever be the only way to God and that will never change. Mary can't save anybody. Now with regard to the sinner, if God is immutable in his holiness, the sinner is immutable in his sin. Even God can't change himself and the sinner cannot change himself. No one has the power of self-creation and no one has the power of self-alteration as far as the essential nature is concerned. I mean, Jeremiah says that when the leopard can decide he doesn't want spots anymore and that happens and when a black man can decide simply by an act of the will that he'd rather be a white man then you can do what is right, oh man. Now don't bring up Michael Jackson to me. That was not an act of self-alteration. But either change would have to be the act of a greater power. For God, that's impossible. For the sinner, it's an absolute necessity. On the other hand, God being incapable of change, the sinner can rest secure in the unchanging love of God. He says, I have loved you with an everlasting love. How long does an everlasting love last? Forever. It lasts forever. And if that's not enough, the Bible keeps using this phrase forever and ever. Wouldn't you think forever was good enough? Well, when forever runs out, we've still got ever to go. A Christian can know that his salvation is secure because the God who loves him does not change, cannot change. In other words, God cannot but love the saint whom he has once chosen to love. And for salvation to be lost, God would have to stop loving the believer, which means he would have to change, which means he would no longer be God. It means after saying in the Bible in Isaiah that he would see what Christ did on the cross and be satisfied, that's not enough anymore. What Christ did was okay for the first 2,014 years. I'm not satisfied anymore. You're going to have to do something better. You're not God anymore. God's immutability is seen in his statement that his covenant is an everlasting covenant. He says that his faithfulness endures to all generations. He is unchangeable in his love. His love is everlasting. We looked last time we were together in the book of John that he loved his own to the end. To the end of his infinite ability to love. The life that he gives is eternal life. His kingdom is everlasting and shall have no end, Isaiah says. Isaiah 26,4 says, Trust in the Lord forever, for in the Lord Jehovah is an everlasting strength. In the Hebrew it is literally a rock of ages. In other words, God's strength is perpetually unchangeable. Ultimately all of our hopes rest on the unchanging nature of God. What if tomorrow he could change and that what Christ did was no longer enough and we had to make up the difference? What if our standing with God no longer depended on Christ's righteousness but on our good works? That frightens me. We can rest all our hopes on him because he's the same yesterday, today and forever. If he's trustworthy, he is eternally trustworthy. He is forever the same. That should terrify sinners. Well, I'm just hoping that God will chill out and he'll be more merciful by the end. It's impossible for God to be more merciful. He'll never be more merciful than he is this minute. And while it should terrify the sinner it should give the true believer every reason to smile and to thank God that he's exactly what he is and he'll always be just that. God never changes. You and I might. You and I will. Thankfully he won't. He cannot deny himself. You know God's got a lot more at stake in your eternal destiny than you do. And he will always be true to himself, his covenant and his nature. That's security. People mistakenly say, well, women need security. So do I. I need to know that I can trust God that even though I mess up tonight, tomorrow morning his mercies are new every morning. I need to know that every morning I start with a clean slate that the sins of today will not be piled up as the sins of tomorrow. You know there's no rollover sins like there are rollover minutes with your cell phone. His mercies are new every morning, the slate is wiped clean and that will never change. Pretty nice being a Christian isn't it? Let's pray. Father we thank you for being secure in your unchanging nature and may our confidence grow leaps and bounds because of it. We thank you in the name of Christ. Amen.