“Changing God’s mind”??
I’m currently reading through Deuteronomy (and using Christopher Wright’s fantastic commentary as I go, which, if you don’t have it, I HIGHLY recommend!).
In chapter 9, we come to Moses’ retelling of the infamous Golden Calf incident and the Israelites’ continued disobedience…to the point that God literally declared that He was going to wipe them out and start all over with Moses (9:13-14)!
Yet Moses does something that has been pondered by theologians for millennia…
I lay prostrate before the LORD those forty days and forty nights because the LORD had said he would destroy you. I prayed to the LORD and said,
“O Sovereign LORD, do not destroy your people, your own inheritance that you redeemed by your great power and brought out of Egypt with a mighty hand. Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Overlook the stubbornness of this people, their wickedness and their sin. Otherwise, the country from which you brought us will say, ‘Because the LORD was not able to take them into the land he had promised them, and because he hated them, he brought them out to put them to death in the desert.’ But they are your people, your inheritance that you brought out by your great power and your outstretched arm.” (Deuteronomy 9:25-29 NIV)
Moses interceded on behalf of the people, begging God to change his mind and not cast them off forever.
And it worked!
Now I had stayed on the mountain forty days and nights, as I did the first time, and the LORD listened to me at this time also. It was not his will to destroy you.
“Go,” the LORD said to me, “and lead the people on their way, so that they may enter and possess the land that I swore to their fathers to give them.”
(Deut 10:10-11 NIV)
What?!?
God, as many proper theologians constantly remind us, is unchangeable, immutable, impassible, sovereign and has decreed all things in detail from the beginning of time, hasn’t He??
How can Moses get God to change His mind?
I mean, if God knew Moses was going to pray for this and that He would relent from destroying Israel, then why declare that He was going to do so in the first place? Doesn’t this make God a liar??
It’s passages like this one that make me love studying the Old Testament.
Whenever we think we have God figured out, whenever we think we have our Systematic Theology and our Greater Catechisms all lined up nice and neat, passages like this come along and poke holes in our theological constructs.
The God of the Hebrew Bible cannot be tamed into an impersonal theistic philosophical concept.
He is alive.
He is PERSONAL.
Does that mess with your idea of how a self-respecting God “should” act?
Too bad.
According to Scripture, it’s how He did act. And that is what I find so fascinating about the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus.
But, what sense can we make of God acting in this way?
How can Moses’ intercession really result in God relenting from His stated purposes in punishing Israel’s rebellion?
Wright offers the following comments on this section of the text that are well worth pondering:
The text purports to lay before us a genuine encounter between Moses and the God of Israel in which history meshed with prayer in a meaningful way…Both God and Moses appear to be behaving straightforwardly. there is nothing in the text to suggest that God’s anger was overdone for mere effect; no suggestion that God’s threat was a bluff intended to secure a hasty repentance. Psalm 106:23 indicates the critical nature of the event: the threat of destruction was real. Likewise , Moses took God’s words with utmost sobriety. His reaction to the divine wrath was not a patronizing dismissal of authority, “You can’t be serious!” Rather, he recognized that this was a sincere threat that could be countered only with appeal to prior words and actions of the same God. The paradox is that in appealing to God to change, he was actually appealing to God to be consistent–which may be a significant clue to the dynamic of all genuine intercessory prayer…just as God involved Abraham in the “consultation” prior to the judgment on Sodom and Gomorrah (which also led to intercession, though with a different outcome, Gen.18:16-33), so here God pauses and makes the divine will “vulnerable” to human challenge.
The fact is that, far from human intercession being an irritating but occasionally successful intrusion upon divinely prefabricated blueprints for history, it is actually an integral part of the way God’s sovereignty in history is exercised. That does not totally solve the mystery, but it puts it in proper biblical perspective. God not only allows human intercession, God invites it (in later biblical texts God also commands it), and builds it into the decision-making process of the heavenly council in ways we can never fathom.
Intercessory prayer, then, flows primarily not from human anxiety about God but from God’s commitment to relationship with human beings…Moses was not so much arguing against God (thought doubtless it felt like it), as participating in an argument within God (a tension expressed in Num.14:17-19). Such prayer, therefore, not only participates in the pain of God in history, btu is actuallly invited to do so for God’s sake as well as ours. This is a measure of the infinite value to God of commitment to persons in covenant relationship. God chooses in sovereign freedom to link that divine sovereign freedom to human prayer.
Wright, Deuteronomy, pp.139-140
Read over that quote a few more times and let it sink in, because the idea behind it is one of the most profound theological concepts of all time and has implications for not only doctrinal issues like freewill/predestination/sovereignty/etc., but also for how we pray to the God of the universe.
Go ahead, reread it. I’ll wait…
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What kind of God do we actually find in the pages of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament?
A God who allows Himself to be challenged by those He loves.
A God who works all things for the good of those who love Him.
A God who is faithful to His promises…even when that means changing His mind.
If that makes us uncomfortable, so be it. But it’s the God Jesus claimed to worship, love, and embody.
We do well to do likewise…regardless of how much it may mess with our theology.
Blessings from the Dojo,
JM
Categories: Biblical Theology, Blog, Hebrew Bible, Theological issues
JM,
I sent you an email response to the awesomeness of this! Thank you so much for posting it.
This shows are relationship with God as both powerful and personal. It enhances the very depth of who God is and what He is like. It increases our love and trust of Him. It makes HIm both approachable and unsearchable.
Glorious and wonderful!
by Olatunde on Apr 30, 2012 at 11:46 am