The Immutability of God 

No one knows who wrote this psalm

It has variously been attributed to Daniel to Jeremiah to Nehemiah
or to some of the other prophets during the time of the captivity

The psalmist is afflicted / he’s pouring out his lament before God

In the first 11 verses / he tells us that he’s been brutally afflicted:

v.3 / his days pass away like smoke / his bones burn like a furnace

v.4 / his heart is struck down / it has withered;

   v.4 / he’s not eating        

v.5 / his bones cling to his flesh

v.8 / his enemies taunt him and he is cursed 

v.9 / he eats ashes like bread

v.10 / he feels like God has taken him up and thrown him down

He compares himself to the pelican / the owl and the sparrow / v.6
Both the pelican and the owl are solitary / mournful birds
Spurgeon said they are emblems of gloom and wretchedness
Their habitat are places symbolic of ruin / desolation and destruction

Then he says something most dreary
v.7 / “I am like a lonely sparrow on the housetop”
Sparrows are gregarious creatures / always found in groups
So a lone sparrow on a rooftop tells us / it is bereaved
of its mate / a picture of distress / heartache and sorrow

But he’s not done with lamenting
      v.11 / “My days are like an evening shadow I wither away like grass”
Grass / here today / gone tomorrow / transient
He realizes his life will soon be cut short

And he knows it's none other than God / Who’s breaking him

V.23 “He has broken my strength / He has shortened my days

So the psalmist is depressed / He’s down in the dumps

And yet by the end of the psalm / he buoyant / lively and cheerful

How does he get from despair to hope? 

When we trace his steps it is clear how he gets from one end to the other

He recounts the character of God / He recalls the attributes of God

And there is one particular attribute that he dwells on

Notice / when he pleads with God / not to take away his life

how does he address God?

v.24 / “Take me not away in the midst of my days

you whose years endure throughout all generations!

Notice he’s homing in / on this one particular attribute of God

Look with me at vv. 25-27 

“Of old You founded the earth and the heavens are the work of your hands 

  They will perish / but you remain

  They will all wear out like a garment

  Like clothing you will change them and they will be discarded.
  But you remain the same / And Your years will not come to an end”

        This afflicted man understands / that in a world of flux 

where everything is wavering
one thing does not change / Someone does NOT change

 

That Person is God 

and this divine attribute is called the “immutability” of God 

We’ve heard of “mutations” genetic changes in the molecular cells

If a thing is subject to change in any degree / we say it is “mutable”

God is immutable 

He’s unchanging / unchangeable / not susceptible to change

Now / if dwelling on this attribute / pulled the psalmist 

out of despair to hope / we need to take a look at it

So / before we come back / to the psalmist 

We need to understand in what ways / is God immutable

God is immutable in at least four ways 

First / God is immutable in the essence of His Being

You know / for decades no one believed 

that you could improve on the traditional mouse-trap

but the traditional mouse-trap has been improved many times over

But just how / could you improve on omniscience!

Just how / do you upgrade omnipotence! 

       how do you fine-tune omnipresence!

Just how do you purify immaculate holiness 

       how do you refine perfect righteousness

God is omnipotent / He cannot be any more powerful 

God is pure perfection / and perfection cannot be perfected

God cannot be any more holier than He is / nor any more righteous

God / in the essence of His Being / is pure perfect Being

See / because God did not evolve / He cannot devolve

In His being / He always has been pure perfection

Nothing caused Him to come into existence

There was never a time when God did not exist 

and then / in time / He came into existence

God never “began” to exist / He always has been

        And there will never come a time / when He will cease to be

Look at v.27 “you remain the same and your years will never end”

It should not surprise us / that when God gave Himself a name

He called Himself: Ehyeh asher ehyeh “I am who I am”  / Ex 3:14

Before anything was I AM / Before time or space came to be / I AM

God simply IS / He is the only Being who just IS / “I am who I am”

God is pure existence / and pure existence is self-existence

God is not dependent on anything for His existence

We / the birds / animals / and in fact the entire universe 

are dependent on God for our existence

The palmist: “When you take away their breath / they die” 104:39

Only God exists / solely of Himself / and by Himself

All that God is / He has always been / and is / and ever will be

“Before the mountains were born

or you brought forth the earth and the world

       from everlasting to everlasting you are God” / Ps. 90:2

So firstly / God is immutable in His being

Secondly / God is immutable in His character / His attributes

As human people our temper may change / sometimes radically

- a pleasant person may turn bitter or crotchety

- a good-natured person will may grow ruthless cynical spiteful 

J.I. Packer reminds us that “strain / or shock / or lobotomy

can alter the character of a person”

        But nothing can alter the character of God 

God will never become less truthful / less righteous than he is 

In time to come / God will not be less merciful / less holy 

less wise / less faithful / less gracious Pink says: “His power is unabated 

His wisdom undiminished / His holiness unsullied”

        God will never cease / to be good to you and I

He may hide His face from you / but he will not stop loving you

        Isaiah 54:7-10 / “For a brief moment I abandoned you

but with deep compassion I will bring you back

In a surge of anger / I hid my face from you for a moment

    but with everlasting kindness / I will have compassion on you”

Though the mountains be shaken / and the hills be removed

yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken

nor my covenant of peace be removed”

says the LORD / who has compassion on you”

Gloria’s grandmother used to have a plaque by her bedside

It reads “Even when we abide faithless / He abides faithful”

And that’s 2 Tim 2:13 

So secondly / God is immutable in His character

Third / God is immutable in His plans and purposes for you

You know / the plans you’ve drawn up for your life can change 

by a single phone call that’s just come in

or by a meeting / your boss has just called

But God’s purpose never changes

In today’s language / He is not fickle

    From our finite limited vantage point / we only get to see 

a slice of what God is doing in human history

- a few of us here were alive during WW 2

- we’ve lived to see 9/11 / Christchurch earthquake

But those plans existed in the mind of God all through eternity

        One time when Gloria was in the hospital Emergency Room

over a heart problem / And lying there on the bed with all 

those tubes and wires all over her / she turned to me and said:
“God knows that on this day at this time I will be on this bed” 

Then she cited her favorite scripture: “All the days ordained for me 

were written in your book / before one of them came to be”

  Ps 139:16 

We will find our hope in nowhere else

than on the sovereign good purpose of God

Can you imagine / way before the first shaft of light / lit up the first garden

God already decreed what will come to pass

and in time / each one will come to be

* Isa. 46:9-11 “I am God / and there is none like me / declaring 

the end from the beginning and from ancient times 

things not yet done / saying: ‘My counsel shall stand, 

and I will accomplish all my purpose’”

I have spoken / and I will bring it to pass

I have purposed / and I will do it”

So thirdly / God is immutable in His purposes for you

Fourth / God does not change His word

We break our promises / like crusts on an apple pie / casually

We break our word / and we’ve got a thousand excuses for it

    But you may rely upon God to keep his word!

* Num 23:19: “God is not a man that he should lie 

nor a son of man that he should change his mind 

Does he speak and then not act / Does he promise and not fulfill?”

* “The grass withers / the flower fades 

but the Word of our God / shall stand for ever” (Is. 40:6-8)

    There is not a single word spoken by God that will ever be retracted

Isn’t this so reassuring!

We live in a society that’s plagued by relativism

But God says / “Until heaven and earth pass away

not an iota /not a dot /will pass from the Law” Mt 5:18

Now with all that truths about the immutability of God

let’s now return / to the psalmist

If you pay close attention to the text you’ll notice something significant

Let me put it this way:

It was only in the last century that cosmologists understand 

that the universe is expanding / and every galaxy 

growing further & further apart 

      and growing colder and colder / as its energy is used up

Eventually / all the stars will burn out 

and all matter will collapse into dead stars and black holes

There’ll be no light / There’ll be no heat / entropy - heat death 

There will be no life / only copses of dead stars and galaxies 

ever-expanding into the endless darkness 

and the cold recesses of space - a universe in ruin!

Now isn’t it incredible that the psalmist understands his cosmology

He saw it coming!

vv 25,26 “the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish”

But it’s what he says after that / that’s significant for us

After telling us / that the stars are going to burn out

and the mountains are going crumble / He says

“The children of your servants shall dwell secure;

their offspring shall be established before you” v.28

Now just imagine that:

when the stars and galaxies become nothing more than corpses 

floating in the cold recesses of space 

when all the mountain ranges have totally been worn down

you and I / as His children / will dwell secure in His presence

and you will inhabit His presence / for all eternity

The question is: How is this possible?

It’s possible because the psalmist spoken of here is no ordinary man

Many commentators believe / that the first eleven verses 

of this psalm are talking about Jesus

  How do we know / Well this psalm is quoted in great detail

in Hebrew 1 / and there / it is quoted as Jesus talking

In the psalm / the one in trouble and making the lament is Jesus 

It is Jesus Who is in agony / God is cutting His life short

He’s crying out to God 

“Don’t cut me off in the midst of my youth” v. 24

Yet the Father cut Him off / forsook Him

Jesus was divine and therefore immutable 

But He condescended to become human 

which made Him / mutable / and therefore mortal 

        He was mortally wounded on the cross

So that we His mortal children / may live before God forever

And that / is the note / on the last line of this psalm

So that ‘the children of your servants shall dwell secure;

    their offspring shall be established before you”

You might say / What! All that drama 

just so that we may “dwell secure” and “be established”?

Big deal!

Well / big deal indeed! / Now stick with me / this is the home-run

Bottom line / there is a reality that most of us prefer not to talk about

Yes / we’re anxious about the brokenness we see all around us 

Yes / for the first time in my long years of ministry / people under 30
are openly sharing with me their uncertainties about their future

I’ve never had people this young / this afraid

Yes politicians fail us/governments short-change us/friends betray us

Yes / our civilization / is crumbling right in front of our eyes

But underneath it all / up close and personal / there is 

a darker / haunting reality that we sniff out hanging over us

that will not go away

Let me put it this way

You don’t have to be lying on a bed / in a sinking Titanic

and holding hands with the one you love / to sense 

that there’s something terribly ominous / brooding over you

        You don’t have to listen to the 6 o’clock news or visit a hospital ward

 or attend a funeral / to know 

that there is something grievously out of kilter

It’s the air we breathe 

Some people sense it more acutely than others 

but it’s everywhere around us 

The ancients called it “a vale of tears”

and we keep ourselves busy so we don’t have to face up to it  

On some nights in some seasons of your life 

you sense it more palpably

You know / that sometime / in some tomorrows of your life

people who are very dear to you / will be snatched from you

I once experienced it when I came across three very elderly Dutch women

sitting on a park bench in a public garden in Amsterdam

I approached them and began speaking with them

Now I don’t know if this is a good or bad trait of mine / blessing or bane

but I do know that within 7-12 minutes into a conversation

I can get people to go / into a rather deep place  

And speaking with them / I was overtaken by this profound sense 

of dreariness / of the despondency 

the melancholy of the moment

 

And it actually reminded me of a song by Simon & Garfunkel

“Old friends / old friends / Sat on their park-bench like bookends

 Can you imagine us years from today / sharing a park-bench quietly

 How terribly strange to be seventy

 Old friends / memory brushes the same years

 Silently sharing the same fears”

We all silently share the same fears / we don’t talk about it

But its the elephant in the room

What’s the silent fear?

- the fragility of life / and what's coming for us 

In ancient times / when someone in the village dies

the sexton will toll the church bell / so those working 

in faraway fields / could pause from work / and pay their respect

One time someone hearing the bell / asked John Doone

“For whom the bell tolled?” / And Doone perceptively replied

  “It tolls for you / and for me”

But the psalmist does not look at his frailty as an occasion for self-pity

He reflected on his mortality

He came to see / that because God is unchanging 

He could count on Him / to be totally trustworthy

God's immutability / guarantees His trustworthiness

and that / for him / was a source of immeasurable comfort 

But how comforting to know that / in the face of imminent death

we can face our mortality without fear / because God 

being an immutable unshakeable Rock / is totally trustworthy

He is not shifting sand / He is not a tumbleweed

When grief or tragedy or disaster pit themselves against us

We can count on Him to bear us up / and fortify us 

When everything around you is sinking 

God in Jesus is our only unshakable / unsinking Rock

Bryan Chapell / the president of Covenant Seminary 

tells us that years ago in his hometown there were two young brothers

who were playing where they shouldn’t have been playing

on the shifting sand banks by the river

They were frolicking there when the sand mounds began to sink

And the sand mounds were sinking faster than they could get out

And they were going down farther than their height

That night they didn’t come home / and everyone went out searching

They found the younger brother unconscious

with his head and shoulders sticking out above the sand

When they cleared the sand to his waist / he awakened

They asked / “Where is your brother?”

and he said “I’m standing on his shoulders” 

And Bryan Chapell in that sermon tells us the boy lived

      through the sacrificial love / the sacrificial death of his brother

This is the sacrifice that Jesus made for you and I

He died so that we may rise above the sinking sands of our sin 

See / when all around us is shifting and changing

There is only one immutable solid ground 

on which we may hope to stand 

In 1837 the beloved pastor and hymn writer Edward Mote 

wrote these words

“His oath, His covenant, His blood, Support me in the whelming flood.

When all around my soul gives way, He then is all my Hope and Stay.

On Christ the solid Rock I stand, All other ground is sinking sand.

Outside of Christ 

everything is shifting sand / everything passes away

My family / my spouse / my friends / my possession

There is only one Who will not leave me 

     only one Who alone is trustworthy  

and He is trustworthy because He is immutable

He is the only one Who will never leave me

And He will never leave you

__________________________   e   n   d   _________________________

c l o s i n g   s o n g :   On Christ the solid Rock I stand