I Change Not

For I am the Lord, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed. MALACHI 3:6

Spurgeon was twenty when he preached The Immutability of God, one of the first sermons of his London ministry and the one that opens the long series of his printed sermons. It is a young man’s sermon, full of energy and not without overstatement. But it shows where his confidence came from. Before he spoke of promises to be pleaded or of saints who would persevere, he wanted his hearers to look at God Himself — and in particular at the fact that He does not change.

The proper study of a Christian

He begins by adapting a famous line of Alexander Pope. It has been said that the proper study of mankind is man. Spurgeon does not quarrel with it, but he sets another beside it: “the proper study of a Christian is the Godhead.” No other subject, he says, so humbles the mind, because our plumb-line cannot sound its depth. No other so enlarges it. And no other so comforts it. “Would you lose your sorrows? Would you drown your cares? Then go, plunge yourself in the Godhead’s deepest sea.”

Thus saith the Lord, Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom … But let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me. JEREMIAH 9:23–24

That is worth pausing over, because it is not how most of us look for comfort. When we are troubled we tend to think about the trouble, or about ourselves. Spurgeon’s counsel is to think about God — not as an escape from the trouble, but because the character of God is the one fixed point from which the trouble can be measured.

Semper idem

The body of the sermon sets out what it means for God not to change. He does not change in His essence. Everything created is in flux: mountains shed their snow, the sea is drawn up into the clouds, the atoms of our bodies are replaced year by year. But God is spirit, and “there are no furrows on his eternal brow.” Even the incarnation, Spurgeon notes carefully, did not alter the divine nature; the Godhead was the same in the manger as when it stretched out the heavens.

They shall perish, but thou shalt endure: yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment; as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end. PSALM 102:26–27

Nor does He change in His attributes. His power, wisdom, justice and truth are what they always were, and so is His love, which, Spurgeon says, “stands like a granite rock, unmoved by the hurricanes of our iniquity.” “Take any one attribute of God,” he says, “and I will write semper idem on it” — always the same.

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. JAMES 1:17

He does not change in His plans either. A man may begin to build and find he cannot finish. God has boundless resources, perfect wisdom and endless life; He has no reason to alter His purpose and nothing that could force Him to. Spurgeon draws the personal conclusion with characteristic directness: if God has told me that His plan is to save me, then I am safe.

The bank that never fails

The most useful part of the sermon, for ordinary believers, is what he says about the promises. If any promise of God could be altered, he says, we would do better not to talk of them at all. “If I thought that the notes of the bank of England could not be cashed next week, I should decline to take them.” It is the same picture he would use thirty years later in The Cheque Book of the Bank of Faith, and it rests on the same foundation. The promises are worth pleading only because the One who made them does not change.

That by two immutable things, in which it was impossible for God to lie, we might have a strong consolation, who have fled for refuge to lay hold upon the hope set before us. HEBREWS 6:18

He then deals tenderly with a common experience. A promise that was sweet yesterday tastes of nothing today, and the believer wonders whether it has failed. Not at all, Spurgeon says: “You changed; that is where the matter lies.” The honey is still in the comb. And when a believer feels his house of hope blown down, it was only the little hut of wood, hay and stubble he had built for himself. “You have been shaken on the rock, not the rock under you.”

Not consumed

The last part of the sermon turns to the second half of the text. Why are the sons of Jacob not consumed? Not because they are good. Spurgeon is frank that God’s family is the most troublesome family in the world — unbelieving, ungrateful, forgetful and stiffnecked — and that any earthly father would long ago have given up. They survive because God’s love to them never rested on anything in them. “Since their good works did not win his affection, bad works cannot sever that affection.”

It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. LAMENTATIONS 3:22–23

He speaks, too, of times in his own life when temptation had dragged him to the edge of some great sin and a strong arm had pulled him back. He was still standing, he says, only because the Lord does not change. And he closes with a sentence that sums up the whole sermon: “Remember God is the same, whatever is removed.” Friends may cool, ministers may be taken away, health and property may go. There is one heart that never alters.

Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever. HEBREWS 13:8

Where he needs care

This early sermon has faults the older Spurgeon would have recognised. His treatment of the unchanging threatenings of God is fierce, and the lurid lines about the lost reading their sentence in letters of fire for a million ages are harder than the text requires. The warning is real — Scripture is plain that he that believeth not shall be damned (Mark 16:16) — but it is better spoken with tears than with relish.

His handling of Hezekiah also needs a word. To show that God did not change His mind when He added fifteen years to the king’s life, Spurgeon suggests that Isaiah had simply not finished his sentence before he left the room. That is an ingenious guess, not what the text says. Scripture does speak of God relenting when people turn (Jonah 3:10), and the better answer is that an unchanging God has always purposed to answer prayer and to show mercy to the penitent. His constancy is not the stillness of a stone but the faithfulness of a Person. Spurgeon’s own life of prayer shows that he believed exactly this.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. The next time you are anxious, spend five minutes thinking not about the problem but about one attribute of God. Write semper idem beside it.

2. Recall a promise that once meant much to you and now feels flat. Ask whether the promise has changed, or you have.

3. List the things in your life that you fear losing. Beside the list, write Malachi 3:6.

4. Read Lamentations 3:19–26, and thank God specifically for one mercy that was new this morning.

5. If you have been presuming on God’s patience with a known sin, remember that His warnings are as unchanging as His promises, and turn today.

A PRAYER

Unchanging God, everything I lean on moves: my health, my friends, my feelings, even my faith.

But You are the same, and Your years have no end. There are no furrows on Your brow and no shadow of turning in Your heart.

When Your promises taste of nothing, teach me that it is I who have changed, and bring me back to the rock.

I am not consumed only because Your compassions fail not. Great is Your faithfulness, through Jesus Christ, who is the same for ever. Amen.