Immutability of God

On New Year’s Day 2020, New South Wales and Victoria jumped north by 5.9 feet. No, you did not miss an earthquake. The change is being made to fix a 5.9 foot inaccuracy that has crept into the GPS coordinates, caused by Australia slowly drifting north. Australian GPS was last updated in 1994, and the entire country has moved nearly six feet since then.

Australia sits atop one of the fastest-moving tectonic plates in the world. It moves about 2.5 inches north-east every year. “That’s about the speed your hair or fingernails grow,” says NSW Surveyor General Narelle Underwood.

In the days of paper maps that tectonic drift did not pose a real problem. That meant Australia could get away with the slight inaccuracy that has crept in since the coordinates were last set in 1994. But paper maps have gone the way of the dinosaurs; we use GPS now. And GPS notices. That's because GPS satellites precisely locate you on the surface of the Earth. Effectively the coordinate you have from your GPS has already moved 5.9 feet.

Add in the inaccuracy of GPS itself – it is accurate to about 16 feet – and that explains why you can sometimes open Google Maps and discover yourself trapped inside a building or drowning in a lake.

The project is handy for the average person, but its real value is in the future. Driverless cars, for example, need precise GPS data to know which lane they are in, and driverless tractors need to be able to get right up to the fence line without plowing it down.

Possible Preaching Angle: Everything on earth changes, including the mighty continents. But for believers there are three crucial foundational things that will never change: God doesn't change, His Word doesn't change, and His promises do not change. These are settled forever in the heavens.

A business professor quoted in the Wall Street Journal noted how Gen Z is craving stability in the midst of anxiety.

Not long ago, a friend who teaches a communications course at a Midwestern business school asked me to speak to her class. Her instructions were invitingly wide: “Just tell them about your career.” And so I did, trying to hit all the points that might be relevant to students about to enter the job market.

When I was done, my friend opened the floor to questions and, much to my excitement, a line formed at the mic. Then came the first question: “You’ve had such a long career,” the student said. “Could you please tell us how you’ve avoided burnout? Like, what do you do for self-care?” As the student sat down, so did about half of the other students in the queue, signaling their question had been taken.

I’ll spare you my answer, but perhaps you can guess it. I am of the generation that thought work was what you did, even when it was hard. You pushed through. Burnout wasn’t an option. Self-care is what you did when you retired.

She goes on to quote a survey which asked 1,800 new graduates what they wanted most from their future employers. The overwhelming majority—85%—answered “stability.” High pay and benefits also ranked high. The desire for “a fast-growing company,” on the other hand, garnered only 29% of the vote.

The US has long ranked high among the world’s nations in its level of religious belief. But the Pew Research Center examined just what 80 percent of Americans actually mean when they say they “believe in God.”

Here’s what its survey of more than 4,700 adults found:

56% of Americans believe in God “as described in the Bible.”

97% God is all-loving

94% God is all-knowing

86% God is all-powerful

God determines what happens in my life…

43% All of the time

28% Most of the time

16% Some of the time

6% Hardly ever

6% Never

Talking with God…

56% I talk to God and God does not talk back

39% I talk to God and God talks back

Singer-songwriter Sandra McCracken writes:

We’ve been shopping for a new home. It’s tiring and exciting, a roller coaster of emotion for all of us. My young son, for example, is sentimental about every tiny imperfection in our 90-year-old house. I tell him, “It’s time for a new season.” But looking into his eyes, I feel as though I’m looking into a mirror. I was change averse, too, when I was young. I still feel small sometimes. And in moments like this, I don’t want to let out the sails. I’d rather stay put.

The sooner we make peace with the fact that we are on a journey of perpetual change, the sooner we can move in close to the God who is unchangeable. His constancy proves him over and again to be our one steady hope.

Creation itself offers us a hopeful picture of change. We welcome change each quarter in the renewal of the seasons, each transition appealing to our senses. Scripture is full of God’s faithful refrains about hope—rather than fear—in the midst of change: “Lord, be gracious to us; we long for you. Be our strength every morning, our salvation in time of distress” (Isa. 33:2).

In line with the humility of the earth, we have the opportunity to start over with every sunrise. We open ourselves to God’s greater redemption as we see that “he has made everything beautiful in its time” (Ecc. 3:11). Letting go of our old ways is an act of humility, trusting that when a tree is carefully pruned, it bears more fruit than before.

Author Thomas Friedman writes of the rapid changes society has experienced:

If [a 1971] VW Beetle had undergone as many changes to its power and speed as has occurred to computer microchips, today that Beetle would be able to go about three hundred thousand miles per hour. It would get two million miles per gallon of gas, and it would cost four cents! Intel engineers also estimated that if automobile fuel efficiency improved at the same rate as [microchips], you could, roughly speaking, drive a car your whole life on one tank of gasoline.

Possible Preaching Angle:

In a world that's changing as rapidly and as unpredictably as our own, it's reassuring to know that God and His word remain the same from generation to generation.

On a September afternoon in 1870, a party of nine explorers, eight army escorts, and two cooks made its way by horseback along the Firehole River in an untamed corner of Wyoming. Their task was to explore the mountains and valleys of an ancient volcano crater, an area known for geothermal activity. Nathaniel P. Langford, a member of the expedition, later recalled what met their gaze that September day:

Judge, then, what must have been our astonishment, as we entered the basin at mid-afternoon of our second day's travel, to see in the clear sunlight, at no great distance, an immense volume of clear, sparkling water projected into the air to the height of 125 feet. "Geysers! Geysers!" exclaimed one of our company, and, spurring our jaded horses, we soon gathered around this wonderful [sight]. It was indeed a perfect geyser … It spouted at regular intervals nine times during our stay, the columns of boiling water being thrown from 90 to 125 feet at discharge, which lasted from 15 to 20 minutes. We gave it the name of "Old Faithful."

Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park earned its name for the predictability of its eruptions. It's still predictable today. In Langford's day, the only way to witness Old Faithful was to travel to Wyoming, a trip requiring expense, difficulty, time, and danger. But today anyone with Internet access can watch the geyser erupt in real time.

Bill Gates, the personal computing pioneer and billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, said in an interview that he regrets the decision to make the keyboard combination "Control-Alt-Delete" central on Windows computers. The key combination served as a command both to log in to a computer and force it to quit if it froze up. It was a confusing task for first-time users, and for most people would require two hands to execute.

"If I could make one small edit, I'd make that a single key," said Gates at the Bloomberg Global Business Forum in New York. He had made a similar statement back in 2013 at a Harvard University event. "We could have had a single button. But the guy who did the IBM keyboard design didn't want to give us our single button." Apple's Mac computer have always logged in with a single click. Yet, Gates also conceded, "I'm not sure you can go back and change small things in your life without putting the other things at risk."

Potential Preaching Angles: While the co-founder of Microsoft may regret some of his design decisions years later (even some of the most iconic in the era of personal computing), we can rest assured that God has not and will not ever second guess his design of creation. Each and every one of God's children is fearfully and wonderfully made-and they will remain that way.

For many artists, part of the joy of creating beautiful artwork is that others can continue to experience it for years to come. However, this could not be further from the truth for Calvin Seibert, a New York artist who makes art out of a rather "impermanent" material-sand.

Although the materials with which he works may be commonplace, the artist's finished works of grand, majestically intricate sandcastles are far from ordinary. Seibert has been crafting his sandcastle masterpieces since he was a child, but for some reason doesn't seem to mind their short lifespans. "It could collapse right now," he told journalists. "You gotta be [okay with it]." He doesn't even do anything to try to make money from them. "I want to do something all the time and be creative," he said. "And if nobody ever knew about it, I'd still be building a sandcastle."

Potential Preaching Angles: We may often be reminded of how small and fragile our earthly bodies are in this life, but God promises that each one of us has been "fearfully and wonderfully made." Furthermore, the "impermanence" of our earthly flesh will one day be replaced with eternal bodies from which the Creator's original beauty will not fade.

As the NBA gears up for the playoffs (right on the heels of college basketball's March Madness), there was an interesting article about one thing about basketball that hasn't changed since James Naismith invented the game in 1891—the floor of a basketball court. The first game was played on a floor of hard maple. According to an article in The Guardian, "Maple flooring is harder than red oak, black walnut, or cherry flooring, and its tight grain made it easier to clean and maintain. … The maple floor also turned out to be the perfect surface for dribbling a basketball."

So it is no surprise that "the NCAA said the official courts for both the men's and women's Final Fours were made of 500 trees of northern maple carefully harvested from the Two-Hearted River Forest Reserve in Michigan's Upper Peninsula."

And the NBA follows suit. All of the courts "but one NBA team are composed of hard maple; the Boston Celtics, who play on a red-oak parquet floor, are the exceptions. Hard maple offers the most consistent playing surface, but it also provides 'bounce-back,' or shock resistance, to lessen fatigue on players' knees and ankles."

Possible Preaching Angles: Some things have lasting value, even infinitely beyond maple floors—like God's Word, or the glory of God.

Alas, the Monopoly thimble is no more. Back when the iconic board game was introduced during the Great Depression, players could choose from a variety of game pieces, including the top hat, boot, iron, racecar, and dog. Parker Brothers, the creators of the game, have cycled game pieces in and out over the decades, "retiring" dated pieces in favor of more relevant ones. Recent years have seen the company host online polls where fans can vote to keep or replace the current pieces. The practice has gained popularity across the internet, and has resulted in the death of the iron, horse and rider, and now the thimble-icons of a bygone age, replaced by ideas promising to be more exciting and certainly less "old-fashioned" to modern generations. Its replacement has yet to be determined, but could take the form of a cell phone, computer, or even jet.

Only time will tell how long the few remaining original pieces will last in our ever-evolving world, but until then, we can all bid the thimble a warm and nostalgic goodbye.

Potential Preaching Angles: Some things need to change and die, going the way of the thimble. Other things—like the Word of God, the truths of Scripture, the core of the gospel, etc.—do not change even when they are no longer as popular.

In his sermon “Big God, Little God” John Ortberg said:

Many years ago I was walking in Newport Beach, a beach in Southern California, with two friends. Two of us were on staff together at a church, and one was an elder at the same church. We walked past a bar where a fight had been going on inside. The fight had spilled out into the street, just like in an old western. Several guys were beating up on another guy, and he was bleeding from the forehead. We knew we had to do something, so we went over to break up the fight. … I don't think we were very intimidating. [All we did was walk over and say,] "Hey, you guys, cut that out!" It didn't do much good.

Then all of a sudden they looked at us with fear in their eyes. The guys who had been beating up on the one guy stopped and started to slink away. I didn't know why until we turned and looked behind us. Out of the bar had come the biggest man I think I've ever seen. He was something like six feet, seven inches, maybe 300 pounds, maybe 2 percent body fat. Just huge. We called him "Bubba" (not to his face, but afterwards, when we talked about him).

Bubba didn't say a word. He just stood there and flexed. You could tell he was hoping they would try and have a go at him. All of a sudden my attitude was transformed, and I said to those guys, "You better not let us catch you coming around here again!" I was a different person because I had great, big Bubba. I was ready to confront with resolve and firmness. I was released from anxiety and fear. I was filled with boldness and confidence. I was ready to help somebody that needed helping. I was ready to serve where serving was required. Why? Because I had a great, big Bubba. I was convinced that I was not alone. I was safe.

If I were convinced that Bubba were with me 24 hours a day, I would have a fundamentally different approach to my life. If I knew Bubba was behind me all day long, you wouldn't want to mess with me. But he's not. I can't count on Bubba.

Again and again, the writers of Scripture pose this question for us: How big is your God? Again and again we are reminded that One who is greater than Bubba has come, and you don't have to wonder whether or not he'll show up. He's always there. You don't have to be afraid. You don't have to live your life in hiding. You have a great, big God, and he's called you to do something, so get on with it!

We can actually learn a lot about some of Satan's strategies in spiritual warfare by studying the military strategies of some of the warriors of old. In his book Head Game, author Tim Downs writes:

Psy-ops stands for Psychological Operations, a form of warfare as old as the art of war itself. An early example of this can be found in the battle strategies of Alexander the Great. On one occasion when his army was in full retreat from a larger army, he gave orders to his armorers to construct oversized breastplates and helmets that would fit men 7 or 8 feet tall. As his army would retreat, he would leave these items for the pursuing army to discover. When the enemy would find the oversized gear, they would be demoralized by the thought of fighting such giant soldiers, and they would abandon their pursuit.

Satan likes to play head games with us, too, often leaving us demoralized by fear or doubt. We assume Satan is bigger or greater than he really is. And the quickest way to thwart our Enemy's psy-ops is to gaze upon the greatness of our God.

Years ago, the world's most complicated clock was displayed for the first time in the town hall in Copenhagen, Denmark. It took 40 years and a million dollars to build. The clock was accurate to two-fifths of a second every 300 years. The ten faces of that clock told the time of the day, the day of the week, week of the month, the month of the year, the year of the century, and tracked the movements of planets and suns for 2,500 years. There were parts in the clock that would not move for 2,500 years.

But there was something disturbing about the clock: it was not accurate. It lost two-fifths of a second every 300 years. How did they know that? That clock in the town hall in Copenhagen, Denmark, was measured against the clock of the universe, with all of its myriad parts, from atoms to suns to planets to stars. But that clock is so accurate that every clock on Earth is measured against it.

In C. S. Lewis's children's series, The Chronicles of Narnia, young heroine Lucy meets a majestic lion named Aslan in the enchanted land of Narnia. Making a return visit a year later, the children discover that everything has changed radically, and they quickly become lost. But after a series of dreadful events, Lucy finally spots Aslan in a forest clearing, rushes to him, throws her arms around his neck, and buries her face in his mane.

The great beast rolled over on his side so that Lucy fell, half sitting and half lying between his front paws. He bent forward and touched her nose with his tongue. His warm breath came all around her. She gazed up into the large wise face.

"Welcome child," he said.

"Aslan," said Lucy, "you're bigger."

"That's because you're older, little one," answered he.

"Not because you are?"

"I'm not. But each year you grow, you'll find me bigger."

"Much of the history of Christianity has been devoted to domesticating Jesus—to reducing that elusive, enigmatic, paradoxical person to dimensions we can comprehend, understand, and convert to our own purposes. So far it hasn't worked."

Jayne O'Conner said, "I grew up thinking that someone was watching over me. I feel a little less watched over now." She was talking about the Old Man of the Mountain, a 40-foot tall natural outcropping of granite ledges in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, which looked like the profile of an old man.

Two hundred years ago Nathaniel Hawthorn wrote a famous story about it: "The Great Stone Face." The image was on New Hampshire license plates and quarters and about a million souvenirs; it was the official state emblem. Sometime on May 1 or 2, 2003, in a heavy fog, the 700-ton face fell. It broke apart and slid down the mountain in the dark.

Steven Heath, one of the residents of nearby Franconia Notch, said, "It's something that has been a part of our lives forever. At first it was disbelief. No one could believe he came down. It's like a member of your family dying."

Another man said, "I'm absolutely devastated by this. It makes you wonder if God is unhappy with what is going on."

There are times when it seems the most dependable, reliable presence in your life disappears into the fog in the middle of the night. The next morning, that "mountain" you've depended on is gone, and "it makes you wonder if God is unhappy."

But the Bible teaches again and again there is only one Rock that will never crumble: "Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today and forever."

It is fitting and right to sing of you, to praise you, to thank you, to adore you in all places of your dominion. For you are the ineffable God, inconceivable, invisible, incomprehensible, existing forever and yet ever the same, you and your only-begotten Son and your Holy Spirit. You brought us into being out of nothingness, and when we had fallen, you raised us up again. You have not ceased doing everything to lead us to heaven and to bestow upon us your future kingdom. For all this do we thank you and your only-begotten Son and your Holy Spirit - for all the benefits of which we know and those of which we are ignorant, for those that are manifest to us and those that lie concealed.

We thank you also for this sacrifice, which you are pleased to receive from our hands, even though there stand before you thousands of archangels and myriads of angels, Cherubim and Seraphim, six-winged and many-eyed, borne aloft on their wings who sing, proclaim, cry out, and chant the triumphal hymn:

Holy, holy, holy, Lord of Hosts! Heaven and earth are filled with your glory. Hosanna in the highest! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest!