The Highway Forums General Discussion Open Forum Free Will of Christians/non Christians

And what immediately comes to my mind are some of the verses in Scripture where God seems to have a change of heart.

The Bible teaches us that God enters into manifold relations with man and, as it were, lives their life with them. There is change round about Him, change in the relations of men to Him, but there is no change in His Being, His attributes, His purpose, His motives of action, or His promises. The purpose to create was eternal with Him, and there was no change in Him when this purpose was realized by a single eternal act of His will. The incarnation brought no change in the Being or perfections of God, none in His purpose, for it was His eternal good pleasure to send the Son of His love into the world. And if Scripture speaks of His repenting, changing His intention, and altering His relation to sinners when they repent, we should remember that this is only an anthropopathic way of speaking. In reality the change is not in God, but in man and in man's relations to God. It is important to maintain the immutability of God over against the Pelagian and Arminian doctrine that God is subject to change, not indeed in His being, but in His knowledge and will, so that His decisions are to a great extent dependent upon the actions of man; over against the pantheistic notion that God is an eternal becoming rather than an absolute Being, and that the unconscious Absolute is gradually developing into conscious personality in man; and over against the present tendency of some to speak of a finite, struggling, and gradually growing God. (Systematic Theology, Louis Berkhof, p. 59)

Of course, it is after the manner of men that the Spirit speaks, when He attributes to God at any time repentance or a change of mind at all. And doubtless He speaks of God after the manner of men continually. For there has been far too much said in the way of accounting for, and explaining, and justifying such an expression as this: “the Lord repented that he had made man;” or “repented of the evil He thought to do;” far too much on the idea, or as countenancing the idea, that this expression needs a vindication peculiar to itself it is not so. It needs no more to be vindicated than a thousand expressions in which God, putting on the person of a man, speaks to us as from the position, and as with the feelings of a man, in order to make His own mind and heart intelligible to us. We are ever to guard against assigning human imperfection to God. But we are equally to guard against assigning to Him such a character or nature as would render living, intelligible, friendly intercourse between Him and His people impossible. But impossible utterly, all such intercourse must be, if I may not speak to God in the same forms, and phrases, and feelings in which I would offer a request, or state my case to a fellow-man, though of course with unreserved submission and unlimited adoration of the Almighty and Holy One of Israel. My adoration unbounded; — my surrender of myself to God unreservedly; — these are tributes to the searchless glory of His Godhead which I may not withhold, and yet profess to worship Him. Nevertheless, with these 1 must be allowed, m condescension to my weakness, to ask God to be “attentive to the voice of my supplication:” to “behold and visit me;” to “stretch out His hand” for my help; to “shine upon me with the light of His countenance; “to “awake;” to “arise;” to “draw near;” to “come and dwell with me.” All these expressions and requests are after the manner of man. I must be allowed to spread out my sorrow and my trial before Him, precisely as if my design and expectation were to work upon His feelings, and move and induce Him in His pity to deliver me. I must be allowed, with Hezekiah, to spread out the threatening letter before Him, as if the very sight of it, held before the throne in my hand, were to make a deep impression on God’s heart, as it implies an artless and sincere expression of the helpless anguish of my heart. I must be allowed to “fill my mouth with arguments,” and make every appeal to God to move in my cause which its urgent and clamant case suggests. And all the while, believing that His counsel is formed from everlasting — that His counsel shall stand, and He shall do all His pleasure — that He is of one mind, and none can turn Him — believing this, and adoring, I am not to concern myself about how this can consist with my weakness, which cannot rise beyond finite forms of expression, and desire, and address, and expectation. Rather I must in this matter lay aside things too great for me, and seek to have my heart as a’ weaned child.

For it lies at the foundation of all intercourse between God and man that God should Himself address us, and permit us to address Him, in expressions suited to our weak capacities and conceptions, rather than dictated by what were suitable to His infinite glory and search-less being. Does it then follow that in thus condescending unto the weakness of our nature, He does injustice to His own, — or misrepresents it? That does not follow. God can speak of Himself after the manner of man, and what He thus speaks may yet be worthy of God. And when the proof of this is sought, let it be found in the glorious fact, that God made man in His own image; and in the fact, still more glorious, that One who was in the form of God, and thought it not robbery to be equal with God, was found in form and fashion as a man. Did Godhead and humanity in the one person of Emmanuel jostle, disagree, hamper or misrepresent each other? God forbid. The man Christ Jesus is the brightness of the Father’s glory. His tears over Jerusalem, while as God He had eternally decreed and foreseen its destruction, were no misrepresentation of the very love wherewith the Godhead is affected in even handing over the impenitent to everlasting hell. The surprise, astonishment, and grief with which the man Christ Jesus listened to Peter denying Him, — and which He expressed in His ever-memorable “look,” — were no contradiction to the fact that the same one person, the eternal Son of God, knew from everlasting that Peter would deny Him. And so, if we would behold the endless and searchless glories that seem to withdraw the eternal Godhead for ever from our knowledge, or be convinced that, in ever-blessed perfect harmony with these, there are in the same Divine Being affections of grace, and tenderness, and condescension, admitting us more nearly and profoundly to His love and friendship, than the capacities of any human friend for love and intercourse ever could admit us, let us be-take ourselves evermore to Him who is “God manifest” — God most manifest — ” in the flesh.” He “showeth us the Father, and it sufficeth us.” O Thou that didst “command the light to shine out of darkness, shine in our hearts, and give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ”! (2 Cor. iv. 6). (Jonah, Banner of Truth, pp. 291-293)