In today’s remarkable episode (Exodus 32: 1-14) Moses gets God “to change his mind” from giving up on the Israelites after they fashioned a golden calf when it seemed that God was absent. Other biblical instances of God’s mind being changed include: Jeremiah who quotes the LORD saying “I will change my mind about the disaster that I intended” and in Jonah we also have a clearly relenting God.
So why so much emphasis on an unchanging God? Is it that any change in God would be seen as an imperfection?
But in the Bible God’s greatest perfection is love. Now, when has a lover ever been unaffected by the beloved? Moses calls God’s attention to what is most characteristic of God’s very nature – commitment to humankind. Thus, God is persuaded to change his mind. The gospels will go so far as to state that God’s identification with the outcast leads God to suffer the repression they suffer. Thus in the Bible change is not an imperfection when it occurs for the love of others.
What about us?
Jonathan Barker