Here’s a tough question that you may or may not have wondered about: can God change his mind?
This is one of those philosophical puzzles, like, “Can God make a rock so big that he cannot lift it?” If God is all powerful, then he must be able to do anything. So, can he defeat himself in a physical way, like making a rock so big he cannot lift it? Or can he defeat himself in a moral sense by changing his mind, meaning that he once was wrong about something, and is now right, or vice-versa. As philosophical questions, they are nonsensical. The basic form of them is, “Can God deny himself?” It’s more of a trick than a serious inquiry.
But there is a practical side to the question. What about when men repent and God relents of the disaster he intended, like in Jonah 3:10 or Joel 2:12-19? Or it goes the opposite way in Genesis 6:5-6, before the flood, when God saw the wickedness of man and “regretted that he had made man on the earth.” It seems from our perspective that God changed his mind and that he still does whenever men repent. Changing his mind does not negate God’s foreknowledge. God knew he would change his mind, and then he did. The change is not really in God, but in man. When man sinned, God stayed the same, but man came under his wrath. Whenever men repent, God stays the same, but men come under his favor, not that we do anything to save ourselves, but God reconciles us to himself through Christ. God is the same, but from our perspective, he is different, because our relationship to him has changed.
The other practical part of this is the moral question. Can God change his mind about what is right and what is wrong? The world says that men are evolving and morality must change in order to keep up. What about God? He once said, “You shall not murder” (Ex. 20:13; Deut. 5:17). Could he arbitrarily change his mind and now say that it is okay? What about adultery? Does God’s definition need to change to keep up with humanity?
I recently heard someone pose this as a philosophical problem. If the answer is “yes,” that God can change his mind concerning morality, then God is not perfect and morality is arbitrary. But if the answer is “no,” then there is an objective morality that even God must submit to, meaning that he is not sovereign over everything.
This is a trick. Morality is not beneath God in the hierarchy. It is not something that he arbitrarily decided. Nor is it above him as something that he must submit to. Morality, or “goodness,” flows from him as a manifestation of his nature.
The chief virtue, which summarizes the entire Law, is love. “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16). So love is neither something that God learned or must submit to, nor is it something he invented. Love is something that God is. It is his nature (or part of his nature).
Furthermore, love is the summary of the Law (Rom. 13:9-10). The inverse of this, which is also true, is that Law (i.e., the commandments) is the expansion of love. The Law parses out what love is and how we are to love. And in this way it reveals part of the nature of God to us.
So God cannot and does not change what is right and wrong, not because morality is above him, but because morality, or “goodness,” proceeds from his very being. To change right and wrong would be to deny himself.
This means that we have a dependable God. His Law does not change, so we can always trust it to guide us rightly. And his promises in the Gospel do not change, so we can always trust that “he is faithful and just to forgive us” (1 John 1:9).
The peace of Christ be with you all,
Pastor Dan Antal