Infidel Objections to the Bible, Answered. No. 3.
With whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. James i, 17. For I am the Lord; I change not. Mal. iii, 6. I, the Lord, have spoken it; it shall come to pass and I will do it. I will not go back, neither will I spare, neither will I repent. Eze. xxiv, 14. God is not a man that he should lie, neither the son of man that he should repent. Num. xxiii, 19. And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. Gen. vi, 6. And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil that he had said he would do unto them, and he did it not. Jonah iii, 10. The objector also brings up the following passages to show that God is changeable: 1 Sam. ii, 30, 31; 2 Kings xx, 1, 4–6; and Ex. xxxiii, 1, 3, 14, 17. But if the reader will examine the context of the passages quoted, he will generally find them sufficient to explain themselves, and show in what respect God will not change, and on what condition he changes his dealings with the children of men. God in his actions is governed by certain principles, from which he will not swerve. In this respect he is absolutely a changeless being. One of these principles is, that he will punish wickedness, and reward righteousness. But this very principle renders it possible for men to put themselves into different relations to God, and so receive at different times different dealings at his hands. God has plainly laid down the principle on which he acts in this respect in Jer. xviii, 7–10: “At what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, and to pull down, and to destroy it; if that nation, against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them. And at what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to build and to plant it; if it do evil in my sight, that it obey not my voice, then I will repent of the good, wherewith I said I would benefit them.” The reader will see that in all this there is no change on the part of God; all the change must be with man, and by that change he puts himself into a different relation to God, who at all times acts according to the same unchangeable principles. On this ground the supposed contradictions urged by the skeptics, are easily and reasonably explained. On the repentance of God, mentioned in Gen. vi, 6, Kurtz' Sacred Hist., p. 55, has the following appropriate note:— ““It repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth.” (Gen. vi, 6.) Repentance implies, first, a painful consciousness that the result does not correspond to the design, and, secondly, an ardent desire to be able to annul the past, and to commence anew. So far, a certain analogy may be traced between the divine and human repentance. They differ essentially herein, that the perverse result is at no time and in no mode occasioned by God, and that he always possesses the means to annul the past, and to commence anew. In this instance, he arrested the course in which the creatures of his hand proceeded, by the judgment of the Deluge, and commenced anew in Noah, as the second ancestral head of the human race.”