If you have your Bibles, I’d invite you to turn with me to Psalm 102. As you turn there, you’ll note that we are going to be reading from several passages. We’ll read from Psalm 102 and then from Malachi, and then we’ll come back later and read from a passage in the book of Hebrews. I want to meditate with you this morning on a single doctrine – the doctrine of God’s immutability. You’ve got this “Know the Truth” series on Saturdays that is going to be coming up this year, focusing on how doctrine informs the Christian life. Well let’s do a little bit of that together this morning. How does the doctrine of God’s unchangeability help us here at the beginning of the year in our Christian life? The sermon is titled, “New Year, New Storms, Same God.” We don’t know what we are going to face in the year to come, and the doctrine of God’s unchangeability is an unspeakable comfort to us as we consider these things.
So look with me at Psalm 102. Notice very quickly, the first verse, which is actually the heading. This is called – what? “A prayer of one afflicted when he is faint and pours out his complaint before the Lord.” So this is a prayer of affliction. The psalmist is in a time of trial and tribulation and he is pouring his soul out to God in prayer. And even before the passage we are going to read, look towards the end of the psalm. He says, Psalm 102 verse 24, “Take me not away in the midst of my days.” He thinks he is going to die. So that’s how bad it is. He thinks, “I’m about to die!” And so he is praying to God, “Lord, don’t take me away in the midst of my years.” So this affliction, whatever it is, is pretty serious. The psalmist thinks he is going to die. “Don’t take me away in the midst. I’m not ready to die yet, Lord. Don’t take me away in the midst of my years.”
And then comes the passage that we are going to read. So let’s pray and ask for God’s help and blessing as we read and hear His Word, and then we’ll read God’s Word together. And we’ll pick up in verse 25. Let’s pray.
Heavenly Father, we do not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. So speak, Lord. Your servants listen. We ask it in Jesus’ name, amen.
This is the Word of God. Hear it, beginning in Psalm 102 verse 25:
“Of old you laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you will remain; they will all wear out like a garment. You will change them like a robe, and they will pass away, but you are the same, and your years have no end. The children of your servants shall dwell secure; their offspring shall be established before you.”
And then turn forward with me to Malachi; Malachi chapter 3. And just look at the words and the logic of one verse – Malachi 3:6:
“For I the Lord do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed.”
Thus far, this reading of God’s holy, inspired, and inerrant Word. May He write its eternal truth upon all our hearts.
I’ve been thinking for the last few days about several January firsts that I have experienced with you over the years. January 1st, two years ago, I was getting ready to go with my family to New York City. I teach every January at Reformed Theological Seminary in New York City, and since I was going to be there, I thought this would be a great opportunity for Anne and Sarah Kennedy to see a few Broadway plays and have some family time together while I was teaching at RTS New York City. All the while we were there, we kept hearing about this virus that the World Health Organization was concerned about that had broken forth in Wuhan, China in mid-December. It had been identified in mid-December. You realize we are in the fourth calendar year of this pandemic. It’s really just been over about two years consecutively; it feels like twenty-five, doesn’t it? It feels like we have been in this thing forever. But New York City closed down soon after the time we were there. We did not know that this thing was coming. We were trucking along in budget season at RTS. We presented the budget to the Board of Trustees in early March, and by the end of March, everything had changed. I had completely changed my budget. My guess is, you had to do the same thing here, David and ruling elders. Everything, by the end of March, everything had changed. And I had no idea on January 1st of 2020 what was coming. No idea what was coming.
And that made me start thinking about another January 1st. January 1, 1992, exactly thirty years ago yesterday, I knew that I was supposed to marry Anne Harley at the end of the month. I didn’t know that I had eight months left with my dad. My dad would die at the age of 67 on September 3 of 1992. Joyful things; sorrowful things. I didn’t know it was coming.
Scroll forward four years later, twenty-six years ago, January 1, 1996. I didn’t know that Sarah Kennedy would be born that year. The fertility doctors at the University of Mississippi Medical Center had told us that they would give us about a 1% chance of ever having children. In fact, one of them said, “If you want to make an investment that has some return on your money, I’d recommend that you buy a used pickup truck and park it in the driveway.” In November of 1996, Sarah Kennedy was born. But the other thing was that on January 1 of 1996 I had no idea that I would be the pastor of First Presbyterian Church in September of that year. No idea whatsoever. I don’t think Otho Johnson called me until sometime in the middle of January. And by the way, when he called me, I laughed! “Yeah, right! Right! You want to consider me to be the pastor at First Presbyterian Church.” I had no idea. No idea what was coming.
We never know what’s coming, do we? We have no idea what’s coming. Life can change like that. So where do you find stability? Where do you find peace? Where do you find joy? Where do you find confidence? How do you not enter into a year paralyzed with anxiety? And by the way, the purpose of those stories is not to produce anxiety. I’m not trying to produce anxiety. “Oh no, what’s coming this year?” That’s not what I’m trying to do! I’m trying to point us to what it is that gives us stability in life. We don’t know what’s coming, but come what may, we can have peace and hope and joy and confidence. And the Bible gives us many sources for that. One of those sources is the truth that I want you to see in Psalm 102 verse 27, and also Malachi chapter 3 verse 6.
Just look at the logic of the passage. “You are the same, and your years have no end. The children of your servants shall dwell secure.” Do you see the logic? It’s crystal clear. “You are the same,” “Your years have no end,” therefore, “Your children shall dwell secure.” Do you see the logic? The logic is, God, You are immutable. You are unchangeable. Therefore, Your children can dwell secure. And then God Himself says it in Malachi 3:6, right? “I am the Lord, I do not change, therefore you are not consumed.” In other words, the psalmist testifies to God’s unchangeability and God Himself reminds His people of His unchangeability and the deduction that is drawn from that is, we are secure and we will not be consumed because God’s character does not change – He is good all the time. He’s not good one day and indifferent the next. He is not good one day and unconcerned in His providence about your wellbeing the next. His character is the same. You can bank on it. And His promises are the same.
And by the way, if you look at Psalm 102 verse 28, it’s really clear that the psalmist is thinking about the promises of God to Abraham. Look at the language. “The children of your servant shall dwell secure; their offspring shall be established before You.” So whatever this affliction is that the psalmist is experiencing in Psalm 102, it’s not just individual. It seems like there is a national calamity going on, which makes him wonder, “Lord, is there a future for Your people?” And the answer is, “Lord, You don’t change and therefore Your promises don’t change and therefore Your promises will be fulfilled. And since You promised Abraham a seed that he would be the father of a multitude of nations, and therefore it’s going to happen. It may look bad for us right now as a people, but God’s promises are going to come true because His purposes do not change.” He doesn’t think, “Well, I think I’ll do this. No, I think I’ll do that.” No. His purposes are unchangeable because He is unchangeable. And so the psalmist is pushing us into the unchangeability of God as the source of our comfort and our stability going into the new year.
How do you know that you can be confident? How do you assuage your anxieties about the uncertainties of what is coming? Some of you may be facing impending changes that you know. In other words, you know those changes are coming. They may be health changes. Just a few weeks ago, I got a letter from a guy I went to seminary with and he has been caring for his wife – he is a graduate of the Naval Academy, he was a Delta pilot, he was a ruling elder in his church, he felt called to Gospel ministry, he went to seminary, and then went back and has been in the Atlanta area for the thirty-something years since seminary. And I know his family well – a wonderful, godly family. And his wife was diagnosed with early dementia just a few years ago and he has been caring for her in the home. It’s just been a beautiful thing to see this man just care for his wife, wait on her hand and foot. But finally the doctors came to him a few weeks ago and said, “You can’t do this anymore. She’s got to go into a memory care unit because you can’t be around her 24/7 and now she is at the point where she is actually a danger to herself.” And this just killed him. This absolutely killed him. He knew changes were coming. He didn’t know when they were going to happen or how they were going to happen, and my guess is, he probably even put out of his mind the possibility that he would have to put her in a memory care unit. But the change came. So how do you prepare yourself, even for the changes that you kind of see coming? The unchangeability of God.
And have you ever thought about how often we sing about this? This is why it’s so important for you to memorize some of these hymns and songs that we sing together. Have you ever thought how often we sing about this? So you’re singing, “Before the Throne of God Above,” Charitie Lees Bancroft’s great hymn, and of course, you know, that song, you think, mostly it’s about how we can stand with assurance before God because of what Jesus has done for us in the Gospel. We are going to be accepted by God because of what Jesus has done for us. But listen to what Charitie Lees Bancroft sneaks into that hymn. She says, “The great unchangeable I AM, the King of glory and of grace.” Did you see what she did? She sneaked in the doctrine of the unchangeability of God. He’s always the King of glory and of grace because He is the great unchangeable I AM. That’s wonderful, Biblical theology. She is doing exactly with Exodus 3 what Moses was doing with Exodus 3. She’s reminding us that our God does not change. He is always the King of glory and of grace.
Or, if I heard him quote it once, I heard him quote it a million times. Brister Ware loves Henry Francis Lyte’s song, “Abide With Me Fast Falls the Eventide.” And because Brister Ware quoted it so much, I memorized it! And you remember the sentence, “Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day.” That’s beautiful, but it’s poignant too, right? The days are long but the years are short. Life passes by quickly. “Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day. Earth’s joys grow dim, it’s glories pass away. Change and decay, in all around I see. O Thou that changest not abide with me.” Did you see what he did? He said, “Everywhere I look – change and decay. But You don’t change. You don’t change. So while I am facing change and decay everywhere I see, You, the Lord, the great I AM, the one who changes not, abide with me.”
Or, when we sing, “Immortal, invisible God only wise. We blossom and flourish as leaves on the tree and wither and perish, but naught changeth Thee.” Nothing changes You, God, because You are unchangeable. Or even when we are singing, “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.” “Great is Thy faithfulness, O God my Father. There is no shadow of turning with Thee. Thou changest not, Thy compassions they fail not. As Thou hast been, Thou forever wilt be.” And then of course that’s sort of riffing on both the truth of Psalm 102 and Malachi 3:6 and James 1:17.
Let your eyes take a peek at James 1:17. “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow.” Do you see what that song is doing? It’s saying my comfort, my peace, my hope, my stability comes from the fact not that things don’t change here, not even that things work out for the best. Because though it is certainly true that God makes all things work together for good, for those who love Him and are called according to His purpose, there are lots of short term things that happen in our lives that are not good in and of themselves. And sometimes those short term things have lasting effects. You know, there are losses that you never forget in this life. And though you know God’s ultimate good, those losses are sometimes so, so painful. So our security doesn’t come from sort of being glass-half-full people about the troubles in our lives. It comes from the unchangeability of God, His character, His purposes, His promises.
I heard from a PCA pastor just this morning who has a friend from high school who lost a son. And she has rejected the idea of the sovereignty of God because of the loss of her son. She says, “There is no good in the loss of my son, therefore God must not have been able to control that.” And she is going to try and find a way of getting comfort apart from the sovereignty of God. I can tell you how that will come out. I can tell you how that will come out. When you lose confidence in the providence of a good and sovereign God, you’re not too many steps from just walking away because the unchangeability of our God is the bedrock of our confidence.
Now, the psalmist and Malachi and James push us all to the unchangeability of God, but there is another thing I want you to see here as well. This is a truth about Jesus. This is a truth about Jesus. Turn with me to Hebrews chapter 1. And in Hebrews chapter 1, you are going to see the very verses that we have just read from Psalm 102 verse 25 to the end of the psalm, you are going to see those very words quoted by the author of Hebrews. Look at Hebrews 1, beginning in verse 10:
“You, Lord, laid the foundation of the earth in the beginning, and the heavens are the work of your hands; they will perish, but you remain; they will all wear out like a garment, like a robe you will roll them up, like a garment they will be changed. But you are the same, and your years will have no end.”
Now notice that there is the quote – you’ve heard that before because we read it a few minutes ago – but look at how he introduces it. Look at verse 8: “But of the Son he says…” The psalmist is saying that that statement about God is true of God the Son. And therefore, in Hebrews 13 verse 8, he will say this – “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever.” In other words, what is true about God – God is eternal, God is unchanging – is true of God the Son. “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever.” The Savior does not change. And that’s our hope. Whatever comes in 2022, that will not change. “Jesus is the same yesterday and today and forever,” and you can be confident, if your trust is in Him, you can be confident no matter what comes, because He doesn’t change.
Jamie prayed for this in the pastoral prayer. He prayed that we would trust in Jesus in this year to come. That’s kind of my application for this sermon in one sentence. We need to trust in Jesus for this year to come. We always need to trust in Jesus, but one reason we can trust in Jesus is He does not change. People change. People change. They can stab you in the back. They can let you down. They can surprise you in a bad way. Not Jesus. Not Jesus. He’ll never ever let you down. And that’s what the author of Hebrews is doing when he quotes this psalm in Hebrews 1:11 and 12. He’s saying, you know that eternal, unchanging God that the people of Israel trusted in over six or seven hundred years ago when they wondered what their future was? Those things are about God the Son. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. You can bank on it.
On January 1, 2013, nine years ago yesterday, I didn’t know that I was going to be asked by the Board of Trustees of Reformed Theological Seminary to be the chancellor. And just months before, less than a year before, I had sat down with Ralph Kelley, who was one of the candidates for the Executive Pastor’s job, and he looks across the table and he says, “You going anywhere?” And I said, “Okay, look, you don’t leave First Presbyterian Church to just go somewhere, right?” So my dear friend, Derek Thomas, who is just a few years older than me, has just gone to First Presbyterian Church, Columbia. That’s the only other church I could ever see me going to. So, no, I’m not going to be going there. And Mike Milton, the chancellor of RTS, is like three years older than me and he’s been the chancellor for like five months now, so I’m not going to be going there. So, “I’m going to be here, Ralph.” And sometime in January, Richard Ridgeway came to me and he said, “Mike Milton, our chancellor, has a debilitating illness that we fear is going to require his medical retirement.” “Wow, I’ll pray for you about that, Richard.” No idea on January 1st of 2013 what was going to hit me by that summer.
And I posted that morning, January 1, 2013, I posted these words from a friend of ours – John Ross, Free Church of Scotland minister, wonderful man, had published this. He said, “A new year is at hand. We cannot tell what it will bring. If it brings peace, how thankful we all shall be. If it brings us continued struggle, we shall remain undaunted. Why? Because of the unchangeability of God.” And then he quoted King George VI’s Christmas address to the British Empire from December 25, 1939. So you’ll remember in, what, September 1939 the Nazis invade Poland. By mid-December of 1939, the British Navy has engaged with the German Navy. By early the next year, the world will be at war and Winston Churchill will be the Prime Minister of Great Britain. They didn’t know what was coming. Storms of war were on the horizon but they didn’t know what was coming. And King George quoted that beautiful little poem by Minnie Haskins called, “The Gate of the Year,” in his Christmas broadcast, just a little phrase from it. She says, “I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’ And he replied, ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand in the hand of God. That shall be better than light and safer than an unknown way.’”
Is that good? Oh, that is so good! Got no light to offer, but I’ve got an unchangeable God. Will that do? Will that do? Put your hand into the hand of the unchangeable God who you can see in the face of Jesus Christ. Trust Him, and that will be better than light in the darkness. Let’s pray.
Heavenly Father, grant us faith and saving faith to trust in Jesus as He is offered in the Gospel, and then to trust Him for the whole of our life, even and especially the unknown. We ask these things in Jesus’ name, amen.