Immutable

"How come you doctors don't give shots any more?"  The old man grumbled at me.  "I remember back in the old days, Dr. Manship would give me a big, old shot of Penicillin and I'd be good as new in a couple of days!  Those old doctors could teach you young fellers a thing or two about medicine."

I shrugged.  "The problem is that the bacteria have figured out Penicillin.  About the only things it works on these days are Strep Throat and Syphilis -- and you don't have either of those things."  I didn't say it, but of course, one of the biggest reasons why bacteria figured out Penicillin was that older doctors gave way too many shots of it.  Use an antibiotic enough and it stops working.

Medicine is constantly changing.  When I came out into practice we didn't give shots of penicillin (I'm not quite that old, although my kids think so), but we could use antibiotics like Keflex (cephalexin) for skin infections.  Unfortunately, sometime four or five years after I started in Paoli, we reached the place where more and more skin infections were caused by Staph bacteria and the term "MRSA" entered the popular vocabulary.

While there are antibiotics that cover Staph, cephalexin isn't one of them and therefore it isn't going to work for skin infections for the foreseeable future.

It is the same in all of life.  It doesn't matter what field you work in or who the people are you work with, things are changing every day.  Changing to meet those demands is part of what it means to be human.

God, however, is immutable.  That is to say, in more every day language, He does not change. 

To some, this may smack of a stodgy old man who isn't willing to accept that the Universe around Him isn't the same as when He grew up.  We've all met folks like that and they aren't necessarily enjoyable to be around as the regale those around with stories of what it was like in the good old days. 

When I hear that God is unchanging, it speaks to me not of stubbornness, but of sufficiency.  The Lord of the Universe is so far ahead of everyone else that He does not need to react to the details of the moment, He has already factored them in and knows where and what the present is leading to.  God does not change because He does not need to change.

This is a blessing, for while we can't meet every need or deal with the transitions within our work or family, God is never taken aback.  He is always sufficient for the events we face.

When we are not enough for life's circumstances,

God is.