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One of the questions challenging many Christians today is, ‘Does God change his mind?’ It arises from the challenge of Open Theism, the idea that the future is ‘open,’ even to God. The question addressed in Greg Boyd’s book, God of the Possible, is put this way:

‘If the future is indeed exhaustively settled in God’s mind, as the classical view holds, why does the Bible repeatedly describe God changing his mind?’ God of the Possible, p.11

You may have heard someone say, ‘God doesn’t know what I will do tomorrow because I haven’t done it yet.’ In other words, God doesn’t know the future, or at least doesn’t have an exhaustive knowledge of it. This is the open theist’s answer to Boyd’s question; God doesn’t know, which is why he changes his mind.

There is an analysis of Open Theism, its history and philosophy, on the Reachout website. I want to address specifically the question,’Does God change his mind?’

The argument is made that God does change his mind, as evidenced for example in the account of King Hezekiah (2 Kings 20). If you recall, ‘Hezekiah became sick and was at the point of death,’ and God told him through Isaiah, ‘Set your house in order, for you shall die; you shall not recover.’ (v1)

‘Then Hezekiah turned his face to the wall and prayed to the LORD, ‘Now, O LORD, please remember how I have walked before you in faithfulness and with a whole heart, and have done what is good in your sight.’ (2,3)

The LORD replied, ‘I have heard your prayer, I have seen your tears. Behold, I will heal you….I will add fifteen years to your life.’ (5,6)

According to Greg Boyd it was this story that began his journey into questioning the classical view of Divine foreknowledge. But is God changing his mind here? Could there be another way of understanding this account?

Nothing New

Solomon was correct when he said, ‘What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun’ Ecclesiastes 1:9

Socinianism was a 16th century. Nontrinitarian Christian belief system with roots in the Anabaptist movement. It was developed by the Italian Renaissance humanists and theologians Lelio Sozzini (Latin: Laelius Socinus) and Fausto Sozzini (Latin: Faustus Socinus), uncle and nephew, respectively. They denied the deity and preexistence of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity.

Notably, they denied the foreknowledge of God for the same reason open theists today deny it; they were more concerned for the free agency of man than for the sovereignty of God. Theirs was a rationalistic view of the world, and since God’s foreknowledge made no sense to them in light of their understanding of free will they rejected the idea. Nothing new under the sun indeed.

It is worthwhile stopping to consider the language used in Open Theism to address these questions. It is the language of time. Greg Boyd writes about the future being ‘settled in God’s mind.’ This is misleading since it suggests that God has decided the future. Of course, in many instances, he has, after all he is God.

However, is foreknowing the same thing as definitively deciding on the future? If God knows the decision you will make, is that the same as God robbing you of the freedom to make it? The only way you can answer in the affirmative is by making God subject to time, which is contingent, part of the created order.

If God knows now what you will decide then it is decided for you, so the argument seems to go. However, God is not contingent, subject to time, to the created order, he knows now a decision you are yet to make, but he hasn’t necessarily dictated that decision.

He Has Said and Will he Not Do?

You might remember the story of Balak, the king of Moab, (Numbers 22&23) who summoned the prophet Balaam, instructing him to curse Israel. When Balaam prayed God said in no uncertain terms, ‘You shall not curse the people, for they are blessed.’ (22:12)

Through a series of sometimes comical episodes, every attempt on the part of Balaam to curse Israel failed miserably. Balak urges him to pronounce a curse and Balaam replies, ‘How can I curse whom God has not cursed? How can I denounce what God has not denounced?’ (23:8)

Balak says to Balaam, ‘Please come with me to another place, from which you may see them. You shall only see a fraction of them and shall not see them all. Then curse them for me.’ (23:13)

It’s as if Balak thinks God needs persuading. ’Look how numerous they are! Can’t you see the size of the problem?’ Balaam’s reply is illuminating:

‘Rise Balak, and hear; give ear to me, O son of Zippor;

God is not a man that he should lie,

or a son of man, that he should change his mind.

He has said, and will he not do it?

Or he has spoken, and will he not fulfil it?

Behold, I received a command to bless;

He has blessed, and I cannot revoke it.’ (23:18-20)

James, in the New Testament describes God as, ‘the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.’ (James 1:17) This is a reference to the created order, night becoming day, shifting shadows caused by the movements of the sun and moon. God is not like anything in the constantly changing created order.

Yet we are to believe that, like a son of man, God does change his mind. That there might be a shadow of change due to changing circumstances, change in light of what he will learn tomorrow that he didn’t know today. He doesn’t exactly command the process, but instead is captive to it.

Jonah’s Resentment

We can learn something from the story of Jonah. What is important here is not the great fish that swallowed him up, it is God’s purposes not being frustrated, whatever man tries to do. Jonah is called by God to preach a message to the people of Nineveh (1:1), but Jonah has other ideas, and he flees from God (1:2-4) who handles the situation with consummate ease; as though he knew what Jonah would do? (1:5-22:10)

Jonah finally goes to Nineveh and preaches the message:

‘Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!’ And the people of Nineveh believed God. They called for a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them.’ (3:4,5)

Jonah, however, is not impressed, ‘O LORD, is not this what I said when I was in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love…’ (4:1-3)

Jonah knew this would happen because he knew the character of God, a God of grace and mercy. God acted according to his nature, in accord with his foreknowledge, he didn’t react according to circumstances.

Hezekiah’s Fate

To insist that God changed his mind in the case of Hezekiah is to presume to know God’s mind in the first place. To insist that God’s word to Hezekiah concerning his impending death is the final word on the matter because that is all we know of God’s mind from Scripture is presumptuous.

The problem here is the open theist’s inability to intellectually deal with the idea of a constant, unchangeable God having a dynamic relationship with his creation. The idea seems to be that, to engage with a dynamic creation, God must be dynamic, subject to change, reacting and not acting.

You may have heard the argument that the church’s ‘classical’ view of God’s constancy, his unchanging nature, is drawn from Greek ideas of God and not the Bible. Immutability, to the Greeks, meant immobility, sterility, a God who is inactive.

The God of the Bible is active and dynamic, as these stories illustrate. He is not static but he is stable, his nature is never compromised, his decisions, his purposes, are not affected by unanticipated circumstances. What we are seeing in Scripture is an unchanging God interacting with a changing world. How does that work? Am I God to know this? What I do know is:

Balaam reminds us that ‘God is not a man that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind.’

James reminds us that with God, ‘there is no variation or shadow due to change.’

God declares, ‘For I the Lord do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed’ Malachi 3:6

These are clear and unequivocal statements from Scripture concerning the immutability and aseity of God. As the late R C Sproul put it, ‘God is not on a learning curve.’ He is self-existent, doesn’t change, doesn’t depend on anything outside himself. At the same time, his relationship with his creation is dynamic in a way that doesn’t compromise his unchanging nature.

To the open theist this is an unsatisfactory answer. To the traditionalist it is a biblical answer. Our picture of God must come from what the Bible clearly tells us, not from our interpretation of a Bible story whose elements we know only in part. What was in the mind of God when he spoke to Hezekiah? We may think we know, but we cannot possibly assume that the part of the story we have is the whole story.

The open theist is a creature of time who is desperately seeking an eternal perspective that we cannot possibly have, at least not this side of eternity.