The author of that curious letter to the Hebrews wrote,
“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.”
- Hebrews 13:8
If there’s one thing we can say about humanity, it’s that human beings are immensely complex creatures. Each of us is an intricate bundle of potentiality, a network of relationality, and a crucible of desires.
We are seeded in the wombs of our mothers - the first in a long cycle of ongoing dependencies that makes our lives possible. We are born into bodies, families, contexts, and cultures we didn’t choose. We are fed, we grow, we learn, we mature, we adapt, and we change. We are gradually metamorphosed from childhood into adulthood - whatever those categories mean - through the graces and vicissitudes of the lives that are thrust upon us. We are prone - somewhat arbitrarily - to love, and to sin; to appreciate and to abuse beauty; to experience pleasure, and to suffer; to develop and to decay.
Human existence is not so much “progress” as we tend to deceive ourselves into thinking. Heidegger called the experience of human existence one of geworfenheit, that is, our “thrownness” - to be is to be thrown into life.
Being human is a messy affair because humans are so changeable and complex.
But, unlike us creatures, God is simple. God simply is.
God is simple. The creator has no potentiality, there is not some point in the future when God will not be what God already is. The name of God disclosed to Moses in Exodus chapter three (the Tetragrammaton; YHWH) is not revealed as “I was who I was”, nor as “I will be who I will be.” No, the great “I AM WHO I AM” has no potential. God has and is only actuality. God just is… this is what theologians mean when they talk of God’s simplicity.
God’s simplicity means that God is not at the mercy of his emotions as we are. God simply does what God is. God does not react, God presides. The attributes or characteristics of God - first and foremost God’s steadfast love and faithfulness - are not what God does, they are what God is, what God always is. God simply is what God does. This means that God’s judgement and wrath, for example, are always intertwined with God’s love and mercy. As George MacDonald put it,
“God’s wrath is nothing but the furthest reach of his love as we’re resisting it.”
So God is simple, not dim-witted or slow, but simple in the finest sense; not partite, not divided, but wholly one with Godself. God has no potentiality, God has only actuality.
To say that God has no potential is to stake a claim that God does not change. The theological term for this is “immutability”; God cannot - God will not - be moved, or changed, primarily because God is not limited to physical space as we are, nor is God ravaged by time as we are. We can only ever react to time, but God presides over and in it.
For God - pretty much every religion agrees - is eternal.
But what on earth do we mean by saying that God is eternal? Is eternity just the incessant unfolding of time? Is eternity simply yesterday oozing into an endless tomorrow - a past and a future that will never meet but instead just tumble into oblivion? Is it just one damned thing after another? If this is how we are to understand eternity then we may as well just conflate God with time itself. Eternity in this view is just nihilism; it is, in a nutshell, simply the brute fact that “shit happens.”
But for the Christian this is not so. God is not time, because time is not eternal. Time, like us, is a creature - it is made as part of creation. And, as part of creation, it is not made arbitrarily, for it is imbued with a future hope. As one of God’s creatures, time has a telos, it was made for a purpose, a goal. Time is a story, with a plot and characters, it is every kind of comedy and tragedy and history rolled into one with a perfect ending, a last future, a fulfilment; and space is the amphitheatre in which time’s play is acted out. Time’s script begins with the divine utterance, “Let there be…” and ends with the same protagonist’s invitation to be with Him… “Come”, He says…
“Let everyone who is thirsty, come…”
- Revelation 22:17
So the question remains, if time is not eternal and, as such, time is not God, then what is eternity? I defer here to Robert Jenson for clarification,
“Eternity is the embrace in which past and future come together in the present rather than tearing it apart”
- Story & Promise, p105.
Jenson delineates two ways in which the present embrace of eternity can be understood. The first is a “law-eternity” in which eternity is a closed circuit, in which there is no real future fulfilment because everything is bound to the past, everything is determined as it already should be. Many conceptions of God, and even popular Christian conceptions of God fall prey to this ruse, and perhaps it’s easy to see why. This is a predictable model with measurable outcomes. If we can predict and measure it, we can control it. We can resist the unknown future by reasserting the past. We can reject the “other” who does not conform to our interpretation of the given situation as somehow sub-human. It assumes that “heaven”, just means “living forever” in a mode we are familiar with. It misinterprets certain sins and abuses as just “part of God’s plan.” The “law-eternity” is appealing, but it’s false.
The proper way to understand eternity’s present embrace is as what Jenson dubs “promise-eternity” which is…
“…the eternity of openness to the future: it is the triumphant temporality in which past and future cohere because the future endlessly overcomes all bondage to the past, and finds the possibility of doing this in the past itself; it is the eternity in which all things are free, exactly in and by what they already are, for what they are not yet. The God of Israel and of Jesus’ resurrection is eternal in this way.”
- Story & Promise, p106.
This eternity embraces the present in the womb of Mary, on the Mount of Transfiguration, at the last supper, on the cross of Calvary, and out of the empty tomb. It is always present to the freedom of the future, when we shall be with Him, when we shall slake our thirst on His living water and he shall wipe every tear from our eyes.
Note however, that in these instances - in fact, in every instance of God’s inbreaking eternity - it is not God that changes, it is us. Does Jesus change at the Transfiguration? No. But for a moment His complete glory is disclosed and He is seen by the disciples as He truly is; a foretaste of that last future. Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever. And note that Jesus is not alone in glory, He is with Moses and Elijah, who had both previously only seen God’s back as he passed by, but now enjoy His presence and His countenance with unveiled faces.
It is this same eternal God who embraces the present to scribe the tablets of the law with His finger. It is this same eternal God who presides over space and time that wrestles with Jacob at the ford of Jabbok.
But what of those instances in scripture when God does appear to change? Take, for example, the ostensible affect of Moses’ intercession in Exodus 32. God has witnessed the idolatry of His people who have set up a Golden Calf in Moses’ absence, and he intends to destroy them. But Moses implores YHWH, praying…
“Turn from your fierce wrath; change your mind and do not bring disaster on your people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, how you swore to them by your own self, saying to them, ‘I will multiply your descendants like the stars of heaven…”
- Exodus 32:12b-13
To which YHWH responds…
“And the LORD changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.”
- Exodus 32:14
This appears to indicate a change in God. But what has really happened here is that Moses has changed, and God, whose past, present, and future are one reality, has not. God is inviting Moses to appeal to God’s own immutable character, God invites Moses to think again, and think again still. God invites Moses to remember who God is. God invites Moses to partake in God’s steadfast love, faithfulness, mercy, and grace. God’s mind was “changed” to what was already God’s purpose and plan, which was to transform Moses into an intercessor, one who stands in the gap for his people, a pre-figuration of the Christ who was to come.
Does prayer change God? No. It changes us. If we pray in the hope that God will change, we’re praying for an empty cause. After all, God is simple, God has no potential, God has only actuality. But if we pray in the hopes that God will change us, appealing to God’s own divine simplicity, we begin to allow God to unlock something deep within us, we begin to realise that God’s eternity has embraced even the divided and broken hearts of human beings, for, as the author of Ecclesiastes put it,
God has set eternity in the human heart.