Numbers 23:19 — God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? Or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?

Sometimes, Myra and I get into some tricky theological debates. They can happen in odd places. Like the other day. We were in the car, and the topic of God’s unchanging nature came up. That’s a really tricky subject to wrap your head around.
There are times in the Bible when it looks like God does change — or at least that He changes His mind. There was that business with Abraham when it seems like they negotiated over whether Sodom should be destroyed or not. Did you notice, though that in the end Sodom did get destroyed?
Then there’s one of my favorite stories. I love Jonah. I can tell that story end-to-end. One of the pivotal moments is when the Ninehvites repent, and turn from their wicked ways. We read, “And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not.” (Jonah 3:10 KJVA) — What’s going on?
God does not change … he knows what’s going to happen. He knows what we are going to do. There are no surprises in His world.
As we were talking an odd idea occurred to me. It doesn’t “explain” this stuff, but perhaps it might describe it a bit …
Did you ever see a gamebook? It’s a kind of book that makes the reader part of the story by letting him or her make choices. Depending on the choices, the story goes along different paths by telling the reader to go to particular pages or paragraphs. The thing is, the reader doesn’t know what’s going to happen — and the author does, or at least knows all the possibilities.
Comparing Almighty God to an author, and a gamebook to all of history is a bit of a trivialization of course. And, unlike human authors, God knows the path that each of His “readers” will eventually take. Our paths are set “according as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will.” (Ephesians 1:4-5 KJVA)
It’s just an analogy — a rough attempt to wrap my head around an idea that’s really to big for me. I do it quite a lot, to try to explain to myself the mysteries of this faith that has overtaken me …