Scripture: Exodus 32: 7-14 Exodus 33:1-23

Sermon: How Open Are We to the Openness of God?

Topics: Attributes, Change, Questions

Preached: May 20, 2001 pm communion service, Woodlawn.

Rev. Mike Abma

GENESIS 32: 7-14

7 The Lord said to Moses, ‘Go down at once! Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely; ⁸they have been quick to turn aside from the way that I commanded them; they have cast for themselves an image of a calf, and have worshipped it and sacrificed to it, and said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” ’ ⁹The Lord said to Moses, ‘I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are. ¹⁰Now let me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; and of you I will make a great nation.’

11 But Moses implored the Lord his God, and said, ‘O Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? ¹²Why should the Egyptians say, “It was with evil intent that he brought them out to kill them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth”? Turn from your fierce wrath; change your mind and do not bring disaster on your people. ¹³Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, how you swore to them by your own self, saying to them, “I will multiply your descendants like the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it for ever.” ’ ¹⁴And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.

This is the Word of the Lord

Thanks be to God

INTRODUCTION

First, I better begin with an explanation of this evening’s sermon title: How open are we to the Openness of God? That term, the Openness of God, refers to a new way of understanding God that is being written and promoted by a number of well-known and fairly well-respected evangelical theologians. It is a hot topic in theological circles and has been featured on the cover of the latest Christianity Today magazine (May 21, 2001). What these theologians are arguing is that our traditional understanding of God is too distant, too transcendent, too unchanging and controlling. They believe this is more of a Greek philosophical picture of God than the God presented in the Bible. The Openness of God theologians want to affirm that God is all-loving and all-powerful on the one hand. Yet they want to emphasize those kinder, gentler qualities of God:

that he is a relational God, the God who interacts with us,

that he is a responsive God who hears our prayers and acts accordingly,

that he is a God of goodness and love who is far removed from the evil and wickedness that happens in this world.

GOD AND TIME

So how do the Openness of God theologians portray this kinder-gentler God?

The greatest single shift they make is the shift in God’s relationship with time. Openness of God theologians say that God knows the past and the present fully. But God does not know the future. And why should he, they ask? The future doesn’t exist yet, so why should we expect him to know something that doesn’t exist. Thus the term, Openness of God. God is open to the future. Since God doesn’t know the future, God is a risk taker – another key image of God. What happens is the combined result of what we do and how God responds to what we do. In the Openness of God paradigm, God neither foreknows nor foreordains.

As you may be sensing, this is a very different way of viewing God and his providence.

What this means is that where the traditional attributes of God – that he is eternal, unchangeable, infinite, almighty as confessed in the Belgic Confession article 1 – are being replaced by other attributes. The openness of God theologians emphasize that God is loving, wise, and extremely resourceful. God has the goal of redeeming all creation, heaven and earth. But since we have a way of continually frustrating that goal, God must be extremely resourceful. God must be able to change from Plan A to Plan B very quickly so that we are still on track to achieve his goal of redemption.

The places in the Bible the Openness of God theologians point to the most, then, are those places that talk of God repenting or relenting or seemingly changing his mind based on how his people are acting. The Openness of God theologians point to those places in the Bible and say:

“Look, there is a clear example of the relational God we are talking about, the God who responds to us. There is a clear example of the resourceful God we are talking about, the God who is able to adjust his plans depending on what we do.”

A THEOLOGICAL SOPHIE’S CHOICE

And then the Openness of God theologians do something that makes all of us Christians from a Reformed background squirm a little. They present an either/or scenario. It is either this relational, responsive, resourceful God we Openness of God theologians are presenting who doesn’t know the future or it is the all-controlling, unchangeable, God who has the future all figured out so there isn’t a thing we can do to change it.

We can either have the traditional sovereign God who is the author of the “sovereign bullet” that mercilessly killed Roni Bowers and her seven-month old daughter Charity, or we can have the God of openness who didn’t see the bullet coming and is as shocked and grieved as we are.

I am not exaggerating here. Let me quote John Sanders, one of the Openness of God spokespersons: “

Since you believe that God cannot change in any respect, cannot be affected by us in any way, and that God meticulously controls everything that happens, you have to say that every evil that occurs is part of God’s plan and that each and every evil is for the good. (Christianity Today May 21, 2001, p. 43)

The Openness of God theologians also will not take mystery for an answer. Either God knows and is responsible or he does not know and is not responsible. You cannot say that God foreknows and foreordains and under the cloud of mystery say God is not responsible. Mystery becomes another word for contradiction. Again, to quote Sanders, “A contradiction by any other name is still plain nonsense.”

PROBLEMS WITH THE CHOICE

Now let me tell you that I have spent much of this week up to my neck in doctrinal matters. You see, what the Openness of God theologians are actually doing is dragging up some old heresies and putting them in modern clothes:

there was the Pelagian heresy that Augustine had to fight;

there was the Arminian battle which was answered by our Canons of

Dort

there were the Process Theologians of the 1960’s that we really didn’t have to fight – they sort of fizzled out because they were left with a God not worth worshipping – in the terms of Woody Allen, they ended up with an under-achiever.

All these battles were challenges to the sovereignty of God.

All these battles were to avoid “synergism” — that’s a term I know Richard Muller likes to use at the seminary. It means that our salvation and the redemption of creation is somehow a cooperative effort between us and God rather than the full, free, gracious gift that it is.

But you know, doctrine doesn’t preach too well. In fact I may have lost half of you already. And when it comes to defending God’s knowledge of the future – his foreknowledge and foreordination of it – why, we often avoid that topic. We know it will get us in trouble the way arguing whether Rehnquist should have been the commencement speaker at Calvin College this year will get us in trouble. So we would rather not talk doctrine. We would rather not defend predestination or the way our catechism portrays providence because we know, if pushed, we will have to play the mystery card. We will have to say there are certain things we do not know or understand.

THE BIBLICAL NARRATIVE

But what we do know is this.

We have the Bible. And the Bible is not doctrine, per se. The Bible is a story. The story has two main characters: God and his creation, God and his creatures. This story has a beginning and an end. This story has an author, who is the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega. He is the author of what was, what is, and what will be. How exactly he is the author of this story and how we are yet human creatures able to make free decisions is a mystery to us. How God is the author of this story and yet how God is not responsible for evil because God can only be the source of goodness, not evil, this too is a mystery. But before we get sidetracked with these mysteries, let’s go back to the basics, which is the story. What we do know is God is the author of this story and the story comes first. Doctrine comes second.

We worship the God of this story. And the God we worship is not cold, distant, or an all-controlling God. He is a God of passion and compassion. He is a God who will do everything to hold his people in a covenantal embrace. He is a God who can get angry but also a God who can be hurt. All these things come into play in the story of the Golden Calf.

The portrayal of God in this story of the Golden Calf is the picture of God the parent. Israel, this child God has led out of Egypt, has already started chasing after other god’s. They couldn’t wait for Moses to come down from the mountain, so they make a golden calf, just in case. And God is understandably angry. But he is angry with an anger that all loving parents know.

Remember Bill Waterson’s comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes, his stuffed tiger. Well, in one of those strips, Calvin is at the zoo with his parents. His parents tell him to stay on a bench. When they turn around, Calvin is gone – they can’t find him anywhere. The last frame has Calvin’s father saying, “Being a parent is wanting to to strangle your kid and hug them at the same time.”

That is how God is portrayed in these chapters.

On the one hand he wants to obliterate disobedient Israel. But on the other hand, he loves them and he wants to find a way to hug them in his covenantal embrace once again.

Moses plays the role of mediator on the mountain. He is the Christ figure in this passage. He intercedes for Israel. He is willing to lay down his own life for his people. Even when God suggests starting all over just with Moses, Moses says, no way, these are Your people!

MORE QUESTIONS

This brings us to the whole question of God changing his mind in this story.

We are told God decides not to obliterate all his people.

We are told God decides not to abandon his people but to continue to go with them.

Does this mean God changes his mind?

The thing about questions is once you start asking them, they reproduce like rabbits, or in the case in our household, gerbils. The question “Does God change?” spawns other questions:

if God is all-knowing, couldn’t he foresee their worship of the Golden Calf?

if he is all-powerful, couldn’t he have prevented their worship of the Golden Calf?

if God says he is going to destroy everyone one minute then relents the next, isn’t he an arbitrary God?

if God says he is going to abandon his people one minute then relents and sticks with them the next, isn’t he a fickle God?

The one consistent answer we in the Reformed community have given to all these questions is that God is a covenant God – he is a promise making and promise keeping God. Though rightfully angry, it is his promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that keeps Israel alive. It is his promise to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that causes him to stick with his stiff-necked people.

DOES GOD CHANGE?

So does God change?

Well, let me give you a classic Yes and No answer.

Yes he does but it is always in the direction of grace and of covenantal faithfulness. That is the pattern of God’s changes in the Bible.

Whether it is keeping Abraham from sacrificing Isaac his son

or allowing Hezekiah to live fifteen more years (2 Kgs 20).

or disappointing Jonah by not destroying Nineveh,

or relenting of his anger and not destroying Israel in our passage this evening,

When God changes, it is in the direction of grace.

And this grace costs him something — it costs the pain, the anguish, the heart-ache of sticking with a stiff-necked and sinful people. But God is a faithful God.

So on the one hand, yes, God changes. But on the other hand, in a real sense he does not change. Because the changes are in the direction of his grace, then even his apparent change is in the direction of his changelessness. In other words, even his change affirms the unchangeable character of God’s faithfulness.

This is the unchangeableness of God – that he is steadfast in his love:

The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God,

Slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness,

Maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness and sin…

COVENANTAL MYSTERY OF GOD

This is the unchangeableness of God – that he is sovereign. There is no manipulating God. Notice how even in this story which portrays God changing in a sense, there is still the strong theme of God’s sovereignty: God will do what God will do!

I will have mercy on whom I have mercy.

I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.

This is the God we worship – full of sovereign, grace, mercy, and love.

This is the God we worship – the God who holds our past, our present, and our future;

This is the God we worship – who from the foundation of the world,

from the story’s very beginning, knew us, and loved us, and chose us to be his own.

And so we say that God changes and yet he does not change.

We call that a mystery, part of the covenantal mystery of God’s love.

But Openness of God theologians don’t call it a mystery. They call it a contradiction. And to them, all contradictions are simply another word for nonsense. It makes no sense. And God must make good sense.

But we are not people who believe in good sense.

We are people who believe in a good God.

We are people of faith.

We are people who believe the foolishness of the cross.

We are people who believe, as Paul wrote the Ephesians, we have been chosen by God and have been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will (Eph. 1:12).

But we readily admit there is a glory to God that is beyond what we can see.

A wisdom of God beyond what we can know.

Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face;

Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

Until that day, I rest my heart, my soul, my body, my strength and my prayers in the hands of God Almighty, who, through Jesus Christ, holds my past, my present, and my future in his covenantal embrace.