Home  > Short Studies  > Comfort in an unchanging God (Ps 102:25-27)

As people, places and events continually pass through our lives, change itself can seem the only certainty. Sometimes we see these changes as for the better, sometimes for worse, but there is always an inherent instability that change brings by its very nature.

As we get older, we recognize its effect on us even more. We may visit the places in which we grew up and find them unrecognizable, transformed by the progression of time. We may see the former location of a home, school or business that we remember from our younger days and note that it is completely gone, as if it never existed. We wonder if anyone will know that it ever was there once we are no longer around to recall it. We think back to the people that were important to us in our lives from our childhood onward, and how they have come and gone, and still continue to. We remember the good times and the bad, the fellowship and coming together for a purpose that due to changing circumstances no longer exists. Time as they say, marches on and nothing in life stays the same.

It can be a destabilizing and disheartening thing if we look only to the fleeting experiences and acquaintances we have in this life to anchor us. While we may welcome change at certain times, we eventually seek consistency in our environment and circumstances to glean some sense of security; unfortunately there is little if any consistency to be found in this temporal world.

There is however a constant, immutable foundation upon which we can anchor ourselves, in whom there is no change or shifting shadow, and that is the one true God. The knowledge that there is something eternal, unalterable and perfectly reliable is a comfort to us amid the unrelenting change we experience in life. Immutability is something that is difficult to comprehend and foreign to the natural universe, but God transcends nature. Certainly He is incomprehensible, but the idea that He is unfailing and constant is something that we can appreciate and take comfort in. Contrasted with the ever-changing creation, He alone is from everlasting to everlasting, and ultimately the only consistency we can count on.

Of old You founded the earth,
And the heavens are the work of Your hands.
Even they will perish, but You endure;
And all of them will wear out like a garment;
Like clothing You will change them and they will be changed.
But You are the same,
And Your years will not come to an end. — Ps 102:25-27

The greatest blessing of all is that our eternal and infinite Creator, in an act of pure mercy and grace, assumed human form as Jesus Christ to redeem us—His fallen but special creation. It was Jesus, the eternal Word incarnate—through whom all things came into being—who paid for that reconciliation with His shed blood. By that act, the unchangeable God granted His everlasting life and fellowship to all those who respond to His call. Christians have the assurance that they will not be scattered in the maelstrom of a changing universe and forgotten with the passage of time, for God Himself has secured them eternally.

The things of this world are certainly not the same yesterday and today and forever, but the fact that Jesus is anchors Christians, because we know that the salvation we have in Him is just as steadfast. It is a blessing that brings with it a peace and comfort that the changing and unpredictable world in which we live can never provide. May everyone who receives His call to life respond to it with saving faith.

Scripture Alone • Faith Alone • Grace Alone • Christ Alone • To the Glory of God Alone
Most scripture quotations taken from the New American Standard Bible® (NASB)

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