Doves On Distant Oaks

An Unchanging God

In 1986, A movie came out called Hoosiers. It's a sports movie about a small-town basketball team in Indiana that could only field five players. But with those players, and another super-player who joined later, the coach took them all the way to the state championship in Indianapolis against a superior big-city team from South Bend. They ended up winning the state championship.

There was a moment in the film when the team arrived at the huge basketball stadium in Indianapolis. The first thing the coach had them do was to begin measuring the court. The lines on the court were exactly the same as the court they played on. The height of the net was the same. Everything about the court was the same, regardless of how big the building and the world seemed to have become.

If we were to apply the metaphor of that basketball court to the Bible, there are those who want to make the court smaller so we don't have to run as much. They want to lower the basket so that points are easier to score. In fact, they want to make some baskets count and others not. On a regulation basketball court, this is irrational. Why then do we allow it in our interpretation of the Bible and God's laws.

That is grocery-store faith. Believers walk the aisle and select what they like about the Bible, rejecting what they don't like. That's not how God's Law works. Either all of it is applicable, or none of it is. One can't pick and choose which laws we choose to follow and which we can ignore.

Lots of folks also like to say the laws of the Bible have changed because modern circumstances have changed—that those laws are archaic and don't fit our times. They offer up the explanation that truth changes over time. But the hard reality is that truth is truth and never changes. It may be hard to find underneath all the debris, but new evidence only unearths new facts, not new truths.

Punishment for disobeying laws may have changed due to modern circumstances—no one advocates stoning adulterers anymore—but the truth that adultery is against God's Law has not, nor ever will, change. The dispensation of grace my have ushered in a new form of punishment—delayed punishment until Christ's return. That's why Jesus said he had not come to change the law, because it's precepts were inviolate. No, we don't stone anyone anymore, but if sins remain un-redeemed without belief in the Savior who covered those sins with his blood, then there will most certainly be a punishment.

Our conclusions about the truth may have been wrong, but the underlying truth cannot change. God is, and will always remain, the same.

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.

– Matthew 5:17-18

Keywords: God, grace, Law, Truth

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