God does not change. God does not need to change to have a “true” relationship with His creatures. God sets the standard, and the terms of His relationships, not man.
Some believe that God cannot know anything exhaustively until His creatures have exercised their liberty of indifference (libertarian free-will). To these persons, once God's creatures have acted, God changes because He discursively learns from the actions of His creatures. To them, God is the ultimate risk taker, playing the odds as a master chess player, while steering the ship of His creation in a turbulent probabilistic sea towards a potential final glory at some date in the future that God cannot fix with any certainty.
On the other hand, Scriptures teach us that God does not acquire new knowledge based upon the self-determined actions of His creatures, for God is omniscient, knowing the past, present, and future exhaustively. For example, the date of God’s realization of His and our eternal glory has been known to Him from eternity and our arrival at that fixed date is a certainty that cannot be thwarted by His creation.
The Scriptures tell us that God is indeed immutable, but that He nevertheless notices the obedience, plight or sin of His creatures.
God is always the same in His eternal being. In other words, God never differs from Himself. God’s nature and character are constant, as are His purposes. God will always act the same way towards moral evil and moral good. God will always will and act faithfully. This is immutability, and not the Greek philosophical notion of a God existing in an eternal frozen pose.
Indeed, despite the rhetoric of some about the immovable God, the Scripture's view of God’s behavior is clear—God enters into personal, loving, relationships with His creatures, and cares for their happiness. God is immutable but He is not immobile. In fact, God is always in action and He acts effectually.
Some will say, God created us because He needed others to love. The triune God had no need to create the universe in order to have something to love. The distinctive element in the love of God is self-communication. It is an error to say that God’s love is unconditional, for it is conditioned by His holiness of being and His love of Himself—i.e., by truth. God did not need a universe to possess a sufficient object of love. Before the universe was created there was in the Godhead no less to contemplate than there was after creation. Creation, providence, and redemption were not dictated by any necessities. In fact, the Trinity is the most rational of all doctrines, because only by the Trinity can God’s eternal independence, as the living God who acts, be maintained.
God loves mankind because we bear His image. God love is holy, designed fully to restore that image but also true, in that our sin is taken into account. God’s love is not only the grounding of proper human love (1 John 4:11), it is also the effective cause of human love, for “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).
God enters into many relations with His creatures and lives their lives with them. Indeed, change occurs all around God, the relations of His creatures change to Him, but, fortunately, there is no change in God’s Being, attributes, purpose, motives, or His promises.
In the ultimate act of God’s love, it was His eternal good pleasure to send the Son of His love to us. Everywhere and anywhere God’s creatures work, God is there as the One who has already loved the creature, who has already undertaken to save and glorify the creature, Who, in this sense, has already worked before the creature itself began to work.
God communicates Himself in the fullest and richest relational sense to His creatures that are in Christ:
John 16:27 for the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God.
Romans 5:8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
1 John 3:1 See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him.
And even to those that merit nothing but justice from God, we find God long-suffering (Hebrew 'erek 'aph, ‘long of face’ or ‘slow to anger’, Greek makrothumia), despite their sins. See Exodus 34:6; Psalms 86:15; Romans 2:4; Romans 9:22; I Peter 3:20; II Peter 3:15.
Lastly, we see the holiness and love of God poignantly meeting in, “For God so loved the world, that he gave His only Son”. In this verse the word ‘so’ does not mean ‘so much’, but ‘thus’ or ‘in this manner’. Hence, “For God in this manner loved the world, that…” Amen!
AMR
