In God, everything that is unchangeable is revocable by Himself!

“If we deny Him, He also will deny us. If we do not believe Him, yet He remains faithful; He cannot deny Himself.”

The implication of this is what I stated above, that is, in God, everything that is unchangeable is revocable by Himself.

And why?

Because when we deny Him, everything He says to us is unchangeable until we repent, until a change in our minds changes what was previously unchangeable in God — for repentance causes Him to revoke all that would be unchangeable before.

So, in God, whatever is unchangeable is revocable by Himself!

To me, this is the only possible way of reading the Scripture and seeing so many prophecies that are absolute in their utter, tragic predictions suddenly turn into something like, “Behold, in those days they will seek me, and I the Lord will have mercy on them”.

Very often, what precedes this “existential” revolution in God, what precedes this Frivolity of God before such previously utter words of judgment, is something like: “I the Lord say: The voice of the bridegroom and of the bride will never more be heard in you; there will be no more feast days, nor dancing, nor your solemn celebrations”.

However, God can’t resist when He meets repentance. He is totally vulnerable to the human brokenness. He is like Hosea, who welcomes Gomer. He is like the Prodigal Son’s Father.

And why?

Because He is like the Son before his Father’s love for the world: He gives Himself to the Father.

He is like the Father in His Love for the Son: He lays Him down to the world.

He is like the Son in His love for the Father: He satisfies the Father for the world.

In Him, we are all sons in the Son. In this way, in the Son we have our own presence before God.

This is to be in Christ. This is to be inhabited by and to inhabit God. This is to inhabit the intimate environment in which anything in God is only unchangeable until repentance brings about its revocability as a decision of the God who can’t deny Himself when we no longer deny Him neither in our hearts nor with our mouths.

God is not frivolous. But if in Him Mercy triumphs over Judgment, it’s because in Him whatever is unchangeable is revocable in view of men’s repentance, bringing about something that in the Old Testament, in a psycho-anthropological language, is called “God’s repentance”: “…and the Lord repented of the evil which He had spoken against them…”

The Faithful God repents in view of the human repentance!

And as He can’t deny the one who confesses Him with his/her mouth and heart, then whatever He said would be unchangeable changes all of a sudden, in the twinkling of an eye, at the sound of the Trumpet of Grace. In this way, what was unchangeable is revoked by the Law of Love, which overcomes any Irrevocable Law only for death and punishment.

The God who commands us to repent and ask Him to forgive our debts — debts that, if not forgiven within us, become the cancers of our beings —, by stating that we are to pray to Him like this, manifests the very principle of His nature, namely: In God, everything that is unchangeable is revocable by Himself!

And as the gifts of God and His calling are irrevocable, we get to know that even what is unchangeable will be saved from its unchangeableness. For, in this case, the judgment itself doesn’t change, but as the defendants’ hearts change, so does the verdict.

And since repentance is a gift of God, is Grace, whoever is of God will forever be His, because it’s God who makes the Law of Revocability the One Unchangeable Law, for it’s a Law of Grace. He Himself grants us the repentance that will revoke whatever has been affirmed as Unchangeable against us.

The Unchangeable is like love as described by Brazilian poet Vinicius de Morais: It’s everlasting while it lasts. While repentance doesn’t come!

But the mercies of the Lord are from everlasting to everlasting!

Believe and live!

In Him, who is Unchangeable in His ability to Change in order to Remain Unchangeable in love,

Caio
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From the original: “O ‘CONFLITO’ DE DEUS É A NOSSA PAZ!”

Translated by F. R. Castelo Branco | February 2007

Most Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, Modern King James Version.