People today do not understand the nature of God. They take issue with the clear Bible teaching that God is unchanging in His nature. This is a central aspect of our Christian faith, as it promises a consistency we depend upon to assure our eternal reward as He has promised. They declare Him to be inconsistent, and take issue with such passages as James 1:17, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning”; and Malachi 3:6, “For I am the Lord, I do not change…” What these passages and others actually indicate is that you can depend upon God. It doesn’t mean that He can’t change His mind depending upon circumstances (cf. Exodus 32:14; Jonah 3:10), or that a change in covenant indicates a change in character or any wavering in His dealing with mankind.
So, let’s point out a few truths that are established clearly in God’s word. First, God determined before the foundation of the world how He would save mankind. In Ephesians 1:3-4 Paul wrote, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love.” This means that God intended to redeem mankind through His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, before He created mankind.
But, there are consequences to this truth. The first has reference to the Old Covenant. It was never intended to be the way God redeems man. It was created by God for a specific people, to prepare for the coming of the Messiah. It is referred to as a shadow of things to come! (cf. Colossians 2:17). Once Jesus came, things changed (cf. Galatians 3:24-25), but that was God’s plan all along.
The second is the many changes that are found in the New Covenant. It is a change of law. It confirms knowledge that is revealed in the Old law: like the nature of God, the abomination of immorality, and God’s treatment of disobedience. However, there are great differences between the Old and New Covenants. The Old Covenant was established to instruct a people in holiness. As a national, physical law for a physical nation, it had attributes that do not apply to the spiritual kingdom that Jesus established.
For example, God’s restrictions on food — what is clean and unclean — served two purposes. It kept the people healthy, and it taught the important principle of holiness. One who was determined to be unclean was not allowed to worship God until time and sacrifice removed the uncleanness. In the New Covenant, however, the prohibitions against uncleanness in diet were removed. God told the Jewish Peter in a vision, “What God has cleansed you must not call common (unclean)” (Acts 10:15). The change in law revealed God’s whole plan, which has been determined from eternity. Through the sacrifice of Jesus all nations: Gentiles (who the Jews thought were unclean) and Jews would receive salvation. Jesus Himself established God’s view of what is truly clean and unclean when He said, “Are you also still without understanding? Do you not yet understand that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and is eliminated? But those things which proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and they defile a man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies. These are the things which defile a man, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile a man.” (Matthew 15:16-20).
Second, immorality has always been abominable to God, but through the ages, depending upon the circumstances,
there were things that God “overlooked” or “winked at” (cf. Acts 17:30) until the “fullness of the time” (cf. Galatians 4:4) was come, and Christ established His New Covenant. It is similar to what we might refer to as exigent circumstances. While we do not deign to express a knowledge of why His actions toward some sins were mitigated for a time, we do know that it is in keeping with His plan, and such times have come to an end in the establishment of the New Covenant of Christ. Read the full passage in Acts 17:30-31 to see the validity of this truth, “Truly, these times of ignorance God overlooked, but now commands all men everywhere to repent, because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead.”
An example of the change is shown in Matthew 19 regarding divorce. Note Jesus’s words to the Pharisees when they objected to any prohibition against the practice of divorce, “He said to them, “Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, permitted you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so” (19:8).
God established the home in the beginning. Men, because of the hardness of their hearts, had their rebellious practice of divorce regulated by Moses in Deuteronomy 24. Jesus reestablished God’s intent as He said, “And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery; and whoever marries her who is divorced commits adultery” (19:9).
None of this indicates any change in God or His inviolate will to redeem man through His Son. He always intended to bring men to Christ, and to finally bring salvation through the Son. We can count on Him. He is consistent! He is unchangeable!
