Isn’t God the Same Yesterday, Today, and Forever?
By W.R. Selvig
I agree with the heart behind this objection. If God shifts with the wind, He’s not worth trusting. Scripture insists on constancy: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.”(Hebrews 13:8) We should cling to that. Stability matters.
But here’s the real question we’re afraid to ask: which “God” are we talking about? The Bible contains multiple portraits. One voice thunders law, curses, blood, and sanctioned violence. Another voice steps into Galilee and heals the very people the law would have condemned. If immutability is true—and I believe it is—then the unchanging One has to look like Jesus or we’ve anchored our doctrine to the wrong image.
Jesus makes this painfully clear: “You have neither heard His voice at any time, nor seen His form.”(John 5:37) That’s not a small statement. He is telling Torah-faithful leaders that the Father He embodies had not been seen or heard by them. And then He demonstrates that Father’s character on repeat: forgiving freely (before any cross is in view), touching lepers, raising the dead, blessing enemies, breaking Sabbath taboos to set people free. When He contrasts the old formula—“You have heard that it was said…”—with His own voice—“but I say to you”—He’s not polishing the law; He’s revealing Someone beyond it. “The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life.”(John 10:10) If killing, stealing, and destroying show up under a divine label, Jesus marks that as not the Father.
Immutability belongs to the Father Jesus reveals, not to a legal system that morphed through redactions, reforms, and temple politics. The constant is the Father’s heart—mercy, healing, enemy-love, table fellowship with sinners. The variable is the human record of God filtered through lesser powers and a covenant of law that was, by its own admission, provisional and fading. “In that He says, ‘A new covenant,’ He has made the first obsolete.”(Hebrews 8:13) Obsolete things are not the measure of the Unchangeable.
And look at priesthood. Jesus doesn’t come from Levi, the enforcement arm of law. He arrives in the order of Melchizedek, whose signs are bread and wine—communion, not condemnation. That’s not a tweak. That’s a transfer of jurisdiction. If you want to know the Father’s “yesterday, today, and forever,” watch Jesus break oaths (“let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes’… whatever is more than these is from the evil one.”(Matthew 5:37)), dismantle retaliation (“turn the other [cheek]”(Matthew 5:39)), and collapse clean/unclean boundaries by touching the untouchable. That is the fixed point.
So yes—God is unchanging. But immutability is not a hostage to every ancient depiction that contradicts the Son. The Father’s nature is perfectly, finally revealed in Jesus. If a portrait doesn’t look like Him, it isn’t the Father. The One who never changes is the One who looks like Christ—forever.
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