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.
