GOD’S WORD FOR AUGUST 19 ~ ~ John 8:12 ~ ~ “Then Jesus again spoke to them, saying, “I am the Light of the world; the one who follows Me will not walk in the darkness, but will have the Light of life.”

One of the more challenging concepts that students of the Bible sometimes run into is the seemingly contradictory nature of a changing, changeless God. As I mentioned earlier, God is immutable. He does not change.

We read in Malachi, “For I, the Lord, do not change” (3:6). And in Hebrews, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (13:8). so the question arises, if God doesn’t change, how can He change His mind, as He did with Jonah and Nineveh (Jonah 3:10) or Moses and the Israelites (Exodus 32:14)?

The best way I know to explain what happens when the changeless God seems to change His mind is to look at the verse in James that reads, “Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow.” (1:17)

As we see in this verse, and as we know through the revelation of Scripture, God is the Creator of the lights above—the Creator of the stars and the sun. The star in our solar system is the sun, which gets its source from the Father of Lights. The sun stays hot—it never needs to be heated back up. Over these thousands of years, it has never dimmed.

Yet, despite its changelessness, a shifting shadow is associated with the sun. We call it nighttime. When nighttime occurs, darkness covers half of the earth. As the other half experiences the light of the sun, the half that is turned away experiences the shadow of night.

As James wrote, there is no shifting shadow with the Father of lights. Yet you and I deal with shadows in our lives every day. We experience darkness even though the sun hasn’t changed because as the earth turns away from the sun, we enter into a shadow. The sun is consistent, constant, and regular, but the shadow comes because we move away.

We sometimes experience what we consider to be a change in His mind because as we turn, our distance from God casts spiritual shadows. He hasn’t changed; our experience of Him has just adjusted to our turn.

The Bible tells us that God repented of destroying Nineveh because the people stopped turning away form Him and turned back to Him.

He also repented of destroying the Israelites because Moses turned towards Him, appealing to the intimacy of their connection and voicing a plea based on God’s own character on behalf of the people he was shepherding.

When we adjust to or highlight God’s character and His way, light comes where there once was darkness simply because we’re turning toward Him.

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