#05 "I the Lord will not be changed"

[AI translation] So begins this prophecy, "I the Lord will not be changed!" It is as if God is responding to something with these words. As if the people were reproaching God for changing. That He is no longer the same God He was in the days of the believing fathers, when He parted the Red Sea before the people, when He paved the way in the wilderness, when He fought with His people in miraculous battle against all manner of enemies, when He led His people from victory to victory, or when He defeated Goliath through David. They look back to the most glorious days of their historical past, when the presence of a covenant God among his people was so very tangible, and compare their present situation with it. Oh, what a change between past and present! What remains of the old glory? Behold, they are now in the worst possible condition! Day after day they have to fight again and again for their very existence. And not only that: the harvest is bad, the locusts are destroying the fruits of the earth, a real national scourge! Does not all this misery prove that God is no longer the same as he was? Has he grown old, has he grown lax, has he taken the reins from his hand? Lo, even God himself may have changed! So the despondent people wept.And to this bitter accusation God replies, "I the Lord will not change"! (verse 6a) He once revealed himself, "I am He who I am!" (Exodus 3:14) He is the great and eternal "I am". So He is an unchanging reality. It is not "I Was" - once upon a time, in the biblical age, in the glory days of the ancients - but "I Am", so I am the same today, Who I was and always will be, Who I am. Unchanging is His mercy and grace. And though He may keep His children on a meagre diet, and though He may lead His servants on a short rope, though He may judge His people and send them plagues, He is unchangeable in His goodness. As our hymn says, 'I the Lord will not be changed'. It is well for every complaining heart to come to terms with this fact once and for all. It is well that every soul, dizzy with the wild whirl of events, with adversity and shocks, should acknowledge that there is a fixed point, an unshakable power, an eternal constancy: the Lord, who never changes. If his glory and his power were true in the past, they are true in the present; if he declared a thousand years ago, "I will not forget thee." (Isa 49:15c) and that "Thy keeper shall not slumber" (Ps 121:3), then it is literally true today!
So the problem is not that God has changed, but that you have not changed!" says the prophet. This is what our basic verse means in a more precise Hungarian translation. You complain that I have changed, and I complain that you have not changed, unfortunately you have remained the same. I do not need to change, but you do! For you have departed from my statutes from the time of your fathers and have not kept them. Let no one delude himself that he does not need this particular "change", so he can remain as he was born. For since the fall of Adam and Eve, all men have been born outside of paradise, that is, in a form of life and condition of separation from God, and therefore needing, as Jesus so urged, to be born again. He must be born again into the kingdom of God by the Holy Spirit, because whoever is not born again by the Spirit cannot enter the kingdom of God: that is, for him there is no salvation.
Therefore the prophecy continues, "Return unto me, and I will return unto you, saith the Lord of hosts." (verse 7b) Notice how the Old Testament embraces the New Testament here: Malachi almost extends his hand to John the Baptist and Jesus. One of the last calls of the Old Testament is a warning to man, "Repent" and the New Testament begins with these very words, "Repent!" That was the very first message of John the Baptist, of Jesus: "Repent!" And this is God's very first message to all people: repent!
No exception! There are no born-again believers or born-again pious people who do not need to repent, who would enter the kingdom of Christ, the kingdom of salvation, without repenting. If there were an exception, then the Lord would have expressed Himself accurately, and would have detailed this important issue of who should be converted, and who need not be converted, for without it, their case is all right! But since He did not specify it in this way, but said it in general, and repeats it over and over again, "Repent," it means that all must repent! When the people heard this call to "repent," they asked with indignation, "Repent of what?" That's what a lot of souls are still saying word for word today. Yes: repent of what? I am not such a great sinner, leave me alone with this eternal repentance. All one hears in churches nowadays is repentance! Some circles are making a sport out of conversion. Our sober Reformed faith does not like such sectarianism! Isn't that how the question "what shall we repent of" sounds? Maybe the accusation is true, maybe there are indeed many abuses of conversion, maybe there are many so-called converts who claim to be converts and discourage others from conversion rather than attract them. Maybe the lives of many believers are very bad advertisements for conversion: all this has not freed you from the need to be converted yourself!
Convert to what?" you may ask. Do you know who asks this question, which the people asked Malachi, "what shall we repent of"? Those who are so ignorant of themselves and of God's holiness, righteousness, law, that they find nothing in themselves to repent of, and to repent of. They ask this who are pure in their own eyes, who have become quite insensible to their own sins, who have been so far separated in their imagined goodness and virtue from the Lord that they no longer feel this distance, they no longer feel pain, because they are not even aware of it! Therefore they take it almost as an insult when someone says this to them: Repent! Does not your soul protest, as we have read here, 'Repent of what, why should I repent?' Dost thou know what is the chief proof that thou also must repent? That your soul protests against it!
What is conversion? A change of direction. Often not a change of life itself, but a change of direction in my life. Not a change of my actions, but a readjustment of all my actions to a new direction. A new beginning: at Calvary, at the cross of Christ. A new way: whose name is Grace. A new goal: the glory of God. A new destination: eternal life. This is the new direction of life we have been talking about. It begins at the cross: with a penitential falling away, and purification at the feet of the Saviour we have come to know, and from there it proceeds along the path of grace, reflecting the glory of God, to eternal life! Into this new direction of life must once with self-conscious decision and resolution be entered by all who would be saved. But once set in this direction, he must also orient himself again and again every day until he reaches the final destination. That is why the call to "repent!" is addressed to all people without exception! To repent means to be on the way to the destination. So it does not mean that the converted person now becomes a sinless person, oh no. He remains a man on the right track, full of faults, shortcomings, weaknesses, troubles, miseries, failures, sins and punishments, but miraculously through all these he is still on the path of grace towards the final goal! Because God never changes, because He remains faithful even when we become unfaithful to Him, because He is true to His word.
This is what everyone should remember now when the Lord says: "Return to me and I will return to you." And this is the other half of the sentence that is important. The emphasis in our conversion is also on God coming to us. The more important part of my conversion is what God does, not what I do or fail to do. The reason it is possible for me to convert to God at all is because He converts me: He turns to me, takes an interest in me, seeks me out. He comes after me, He comes before me, He loves me, and He has already done all this in Jesus Christ. See and love Jesus Christ as the God who comes to you, as the God who turns towards you, as the God who takes your place and replaces you in the atonement for your sins. "Return to me, and I will return to you, says the Lord of hosts" - well, then, return all the way and all the more to the God who has returned to you, let your heart and soul, your whole being, turn to him, open to him like a flower to the sun, open to the God who turns to you, to Jesus Christ!
So God calls you to turn towards him, to convert, because he wants to give you gifts, blessings, abundance. He is waiting to open the windows of heaven over you, as He says in this Word, and to pour out His heavenly blessing so abundantly that you may henceforth want for nothing, so that your life may be an abundant, victorious life: a life rich in love, peace, goodness, faithfulness, service, as befits a rich child of God! Yes, that is what the Lord is waiting for. And the reason He does not, the reason He has not yet opened the channels of heaven, is because I am not ready to receive His blessings.
A terrible accusation is made here in the Word: "You... have deceived me" (verse 8). It is horrible even to think of man stealing from God. Isn't it terrible to rob a church or steal the church's money?! That's what comes to mind. But how do we steal from God?" we ask, just like Malachi's contemporaries. "With tithes and offerings", God answered them. This then meant that the people were taking for their own use what should have been God's alone. They were using up assets, clothing, animals, money in their own household that they should have dedicated to God in tithes and offerings. They have taken from God what belongs to God. And that is what it is today: taking back for ourselves, for our own use, what is due to God.
If we take this Word even a little seriously, we are horrified to find our hearts, our souls, our lives, our pockets full of such stolen goods. Think of the time, the money you owed the Lord but didn't give Him. Think of the testimony you have failed to give, the ministry of love you have not fulfilled. Or think, for example, of how all the glory, all the honor we keep for ourselves or give to someone other than God is a theft of God's glory and honor. We do not take this seriously until we are called to account for the many debts we have accumulated. I have seen a man on his death-bed trembling because, as he said, he had not given to God what was God's, and all this stolen property was now at once weighing terribly on his soul!
"Bring in all the tithes into my storehouse... saith the Lord of hosts" (verse 10): It happened once at a meeting of an African Christian congregation, where the participants were making their offerings in coconuts, that when they carried the basket around for this purpose, they came to a little boy with it. The little boy said to those carrying the basket, "Hold it down! When they held it lower, he encouraged them: 'Lower still! And when they had put the basket down to the ground, he got into the basket, saying, "I give myself to Jesus!
What you put into the basket, you have given up, you have irrevocably given to Jesus, it is all His, henceforth, the Lord will do with it as He wills! Well, then, put thyself into the Lord's hands in this way, and try the Lord with it, "if he will not open the channels of heaven, and shower blessings upon you in abundance"? Can you imagine what would happen to you if you could give yourself to the Lord in this way? The world would be silent at the sight of what God can do through the life of a man devoted to Him! For God will not deny Himself, He will keep His promise and open the channels of heaven above you. He does not deceive or steal as we deceive Him. Even when we are unfaithful, He remains faithful. For He is the Lord who never changes!
Amen.
Date: 11 September 1949.