Ever Ancient, Ever New
one
The Perfect God Doesn’t Change
We’re learning about God in these meditations, not just learning about what He’s done for us, but who He is in Himself because when you really love somebody, you want to know more about them. And one of the most important things to know about God is that He is unchanging. This is due to the fact that God is all-Perfect
We can infer from His Perfection that He’s unchanging, or immutable. He’s infinitely stable, utterly reliable, the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
But why can’t the all-Perfect God change?
Well, let’s start by thinking about the nature of change. What happens when something changes? A thing that changes is always gaining or losing some property or characteristic. But if God is all-perfect, then all His properties or characteristics are perfections. In which case, for God to change would mean either that He was gaining some perfection (in which case He wasn’t perfect to start with) or that He was losing some perfection (in which case He didn’t remain all-perfect).
What’s the takeaway?
The takeaway is that because God is, by nature, all-perfect, He doesn’t change. There’s nothing for Him to lose, and there’s nothing for Him to gain. He’s literally perfect just the way He is. And we can count on Him staying that way.
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God as Eternal
If God is unchanging, that also means He’s eternal. He’s completely outside of time. That’s because time and change go together.
We measure all changes in terms of time. We say, “How long did that take?” We measure all time in terms of change. We figure out how much time has passed by looking at changes in the position of the sun or changes in our clocks or watches. So time and change are coextensive, where you find one, you find the other. By the same token, where you don’t have one, you don’t have the other.
Consequently, because God is changeless, He’s also timeless.
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God as Outside of Time
When we say that God is “eternal,” we don’t just mean He’s been around forever and He’ll last forever, as though He had an infinite past and will have an infinite future. We mean He’s outside of time altogether.
As created things, we have a very limited capacity for experience. We can only have our experiences piecemeal, in little bits, divided up over time. First we have this experience, then that experience, then the experience after that.
God’s experience is much richer, much more intense than that. He doesn’t dilute His experience by stretching it out over time. He has it all at once, sees everything at once, has every thought, makes every choice, watches every outcome all at once. TIt’s te sudden and immediate concentration of everything.
Sometimes people think of eternity as boring, but it isn’t. It’s infinitely more exciting and powerful than anything we could imagine. We can only deal with reality in pieces but it is God’s supreme joy to deal with everything all together, in all its richness.
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God as Present to All moments – it’s all happening right now
One of the best ways to imagine the goodness of God’s experience is to remember what it was like when we saw our favorite movie, or heard a hilarious joke, or read our favorite book, or saw our future spouse “for the first time.” Maybe as time wore on, we got more familiar with those movies or books or jokes, or even with our spouses. But that first time, it was so good!
Now the Eternal, unchanging God is right now seeing everything in the whole history of the universe. He sees the creation. He sees Christ born and grown-up and dying and rising again. He sees the rise and fall of the empires and civilizations. He sees the end of the world, and the judgment of the nations, and the resurrection of the dead, and celebration of Heaven. These are all present to him, just like whatever you’re looking at right now is present to you.
The point is that God is seeing all these things for the first time. Because God isn’t in time, every facet of reality is fresh for Him, every facet of creation, and every one of His children is fresh, is new. None of it is boring or stale. None of it has grown familiar over time, because He doesn’t exist in time.
Therefore, He delights in the world, and in you, as much as He did when you were first made. To Him all times are as one and the world He made is as lovely as ever it was.
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Beauty ever ancient, ever new
St. Augustine, in his classic work, The Confessions, called God “The Beauty Ever Ancient and Ever New”. This is perhaps the best description of God’s Eternity that any theologian has ever written.
We may say that God is ever Ancient, He is stable, immutable, unchanging. He always was and He always will be. There must be something permanent about beauty. It’s one of the solid, reliable, timeless things. But there has to be something new about beauty too, something fresh. It can’t just be the same old thing
And God is never the same old thing. God isn’t just the oldest thing around. Something old is something that’s been around for a long time. God has been around for no time!
God is the God of new things, the God of surprises. God is the God who sees everything at once, who delights in everything that He is and everything that He has made as though it were for the first time.
If we could live like that, reliable, stable, grounded, and yet appreciating the goodness of everything as though we were seeing it for the first time, then that would be good preparation for Heaven.