Our Immovable and Ever-Changing God

When my son was working out the creation story in his little mind, trying to apply color to a concept that should never be seen in black and white, he asked me, “If God made the universe, what made God?” Not knowing the answer, I came up with a response that I hoped would make him scratch his head: “God made God. Go ponder that while you pick up your toys.”

I’m like my son (or he is like me), trying to apply reason and logic to something that is beyond reason and logic. One of the questions I often ponder that I may never find an answer to is this: Does God change? As my faith evolves and changes, does God also change? Is God the boulder in the river that I crash up against? Is God the steady and constant sun, moving through time with precision and predictability? Or is God the restless weaver who is constantly moving, spinning, creating, unraveling, creating beauty out of chaos?

James likens God’s goodness to the life-giving sun. “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, who does not change like shifting shadows” (James 1:17 CSB). Always steady and set in its path, it is not the sun that causes the shadows in life, but our moving and changing. However, we sometimes forget that God is the source of light, and we try to make things or people our source of goodness. We hold up leaders and public figures and then hide in their shadows. Sometimes we even hold up something as reverent as the Bible and use it to cast a shadow on others. Instead of using it as a filter of justice and mercy, we use it as a weapon to keep the love of God hidden from those we don’t deem worthy.

We rush through life like a river, ebbing and flowing, sometimes flooding everything around us, sometimes almost dried up. While we constantly change, Christ is the bottomless spring that feeds the river, giving us life while allowing us to carry it wherever we see fit. We pound against the immovable rock of our Creator, demanding knowledge, and allow our course to be altered one way or the other by the rocks in our way. How we interpret God’s Word can affect our paths. The river will change and split off into new rivers, but the spring that feeds us eventually leads to the ocean. No matter the path we take, be it a raging river or a calm stream, even if we dry up and can only make it to the ocean by becoming rain, we will still make it to the ocean.

The hymn “Restless Weaver” by O.I. Cricket Harrison pulls on my sensibilities that our Creator, like creation, is ever-changing and working to make all things new:

Restless Weaver, ever spinning threads of justice and shalom.

Perhaps God can be moved. Just as the river slowly changes the stone it rushes around, maybe the heart of God can’t help but change as it slowly inches the arch of history towards justice; making alterations to the tapestry to accommodate our failures and accomplishments. Are justice and mercy from a God who is immovable and unchanging even possible?

We are in such constant need of forgiveness and mercy that the fabric of humanity shimmers with their threads. If God sent galaxies spinning into space for billions of years and created the smallest cell in my body, then surely the same God is weaving and reweaving justice into our broken world, encouraging us to take up the loom.

So, is God the steady sun that warms my face, the immovable rock that I break myself against, or the restless weaver who makes beauty out of the mess we create? If God created God before there was God, perhaps immovable and ever-changing are one and the same.

Stephanie Clinton is a writer and blogger but more importantly, a wife and mother to two little boys. In her free time (if there is any) she can be found wiping snotty noses and volunteering in her community and school. Learn more about Stephanie along with her passion to encourage women and lighten their load at www.hugskissesandsnot.com.

Photograph © Kazuend, used with permission