John H. Paterson
For I am the Lord, I change not;
therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed.
Malachi 3:6
THE other day, I was driven to the dictionary, as most of us are at times, to check the spelling of a word. It was 'changeable' -- that 'e' in the middle was the difficulty! After I had looked it up I was led, by a train of thought that any Bible reader can share, to recall various Scripture references to people and things that are changeable, and others that are not. One such reference is the verse in Malachi which stands at the head of this article.
It is one of the Bible's surprise verses; that is, it is one of those verses that take us by surprise because they say the opposite of what we probably expect. There are plenty of others; indeed the Lord Jesus, when He was here preaching and teaching, constantly surprised His audiences with these opposites "Ye have heard it said ... but I say ..." [86/87]
So, if you have read Malachi's prophecies up to this point, with their almost continuous denunciation of God's remnant people for their short-comings, you would not expect what you read here. You would, I am sure, expect Malachi 3:6 to read something like this: "I am the Lord, I change not; therefore as long as you go on behaving like this I shall go on punishing you, as I have done in the past." But that is not what it says!
Now I must be frank with you, and recognise that scholars are not absolutely sure what it does say. The all-important word "therefore" is not actually in the original Hebrew. But the Authorised, Revised and Revised Standard Versions all translate it this way, not to mention several modern versions. And if they are right to do so, what a tremendous "therefore" this is! It is because the Lord does not change that His people are secure. The converse of that is, obviously, that if God ever did change, the people would be consumed.
All believers are familiar with Bible assurances that the Lord does not change. How often we have comforted ourselves with those reminders: "Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today and forever" (Hebrews 13:8). But this verse in Malachi stands a little apart from those other references. Their message is consoling: "How wonderful that God doesn't change; He's always there to help me when I need Him!" The message from Malachi, on the other hand, is challenging: "What a good thing that God doesn't change, for our security, our very survival, depends on His not doing so!"
Let us now relate this verse a little more closely to its context in Malachi's prophecy. Throughout an incredibly up-and-down history as a nation of God's people, Israel had been preserved by one thing alone: God's unchanging character and His refusal (I almost wrote "His inability", but that might sound strange) to act in any way out of keeping with it.
Not that Israel understood this: on the whole they preferred to think of themselves as being owed favours by God, and they paid little attention -- and that hostile -- to the prophets whom He regularly sent to remind them of the true situation. They regarded themselves as privileged people -- which indeed they were, though not in the sense they imagined. They traded largely on the way in which, time and again, He had apparently let them off, and still held out to them the same promises which He had made to Abraham and the Fathers long ago. Little did they realise how fragile was their ground of confidence, how delicately-balanced their status, for the slightest tremour of change in Him and they would all have been consumed.
Now the clearest evidence that they did not understand their true position is contained precisely in this same prophecy of Malachi. You will see this at once if you notice the points on which the prophet condemns them. For we find them assuming, in fact hoping, that God had changed. They were saying to each other, in effect, "God won't mind if we do things our way rather than His way."
The God of their fathers had been very particular about how He was to be worshipped: after all, several books of the Pentateuch were required for His detailed instructions. But here they were, several hundred years later, saying to each other, "He can't really be that fussy!"
So, it would be all right to offer "polluted bread" on God's altar (Malachi 1:7), and to bring blind, lame, sick or injured animals as sacrifices (1:8, 13) instead of the perfect and unblemished offerings of past years. It would be cheaper, too. The governor might notice if they tried to fob that kind of thing off on him (1:8). But God would, they felt sure, have relaxed His standards with the passing of time; that very particular Being their fathers had worshipped had now become Someone more tolerant, who didn't expect too much of people -- particularly people scraping a living in a country from which they had earlier been deported as slaves to Babylon.
Nor was this all. The rituals of worship for priest and people were one thing, but the moral standards by which God called them to live were [87/88] another. Some of the most remarkable verses in Malachi (2:17; 3:14-15) are those in which God accuses them of actually believing that He -- He, not they -- had reversed those standards; that He had turned the moral world upside down:
"... ye say, Every one that doeth evil in the sight of the Lord ... He delighteth in them. Ye have said, It is vain to serve God and what profit is it that we have kept his ordinance, and that we have walked mournfully before the lord of hosts? And now we call the proud happy; yea, they that work wickedness are set up; yea, they that tempt God are even delivered."
God had, they suggested, changed sides!
Fancy wanting God to change, when their whole hope of survival depended on His not doing so! Imagine them telling themselves that He is not so particular as He used to be; that He has mellowed with time, and that He is consequently a different God from the One who made Moses "exceedingly fear and quake" (Hebrews 12:21). They would have done better to fear and quake lest He did change.
He did not, and has not. This surely, is the message that comes through in the well-known verse (Malachi 3:10) which promises that there may yet be blessing: "Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse ..." The "all" speaks of an unchanged demand, an immovable standard. A God who was prepared to change His standards might change them again and again, and then where should we be? How could anyone hope to find, much less to satisfy, a changing God?
Put like that, it all sounds obvious, does it not? How could anybody make such a grave mistake? Well, the answer to that question is less obvious, maybe, but equally simple: this is a mistake that many of the Lord's people are making, this minute! The reason why they make it is, in most cases, because they are confusing God's methods with God's character . You hear them say things like, "I'm glad that we are dealing with a New Testament God and not an Old Testament God", or, "I like to think of God as loving not vengeful", or, "How could a God who sent the Lord Jesus order the killing of nations, or, for that matter, allow deformed babies to be born?" In particular, as we sense a certain growing maturity in the minds of men -- that is, a change in ourselves -- we assume that God, too, is changing, and becoming more reasonable in His demands!
We need in this case to distinguish very clearly between methods and character. It is true that God's methods of dealing with men and women have changed, each change marked by what the theologians term a new "dispensation." That word, once a great source of debate and distress among believers, simply means "a way of dealing with people: a basis of behaviour". We can apply it, if we wish, to other areas of our life-experience. When we were young, for example, most of us went through a period which could be called the dispensation of the rod: for doing wrong, we got smacked. Later there was a dispensation of penalties: too big for smacking, we were subject to stoppages of pocket-money or privileges. One day, our parents recognised that we had grown too old for such treatment: they said, "You are on your own; you must take responsibility for your own actions," and we entered the dispensation of personal accountability. The goal was the same in every dispensation, and there was no change in the parent's character, whatever their method of dealing with the problem.
And so with our heavenly Father: His methods have been many and varied, but woe betide us if we get the impression that, behind the changes in method, there is a changing God! We are blessed because we live in a dispensation, during which we enjoy both a power to enable us to meet His demands and a means of atonement for our failures to do so. But above us, and around us, and in us, is an unchanging God, and in that fact we rest secure. [88/89]
No comments:
Post a Comment