Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Does God change?

I the LORD do not change (Malachi 3:6).

During the day, the sky is blue. At sunrise and sunset, the sky often looks red. During the night, the sky is black. Of course, the sun doesn’t change—the light coming from it is always the same. The atmosphere that we breathe doesn’t change either; its chemical composition remains constant. So if light doesn’t change and the air remains the same, why does the sky change colors?

It has to do with the angle of light passing through the atmosphere. In science class, you saw how a prism can split light into different colors; the air above us works the same way. During the day, the light of the sun goes through earth’s atmosphere at an angle that emphasizes blueness. At sunrise and sunset, the angle of the sunlight is different, and red becomes the dominant color. At night, our part of the earth faces away from the sun, and without light coming down from above, we can see the blackness of space.

St. John writes, God is light; in him there is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5). In Malachi God says, I the LORD do not change. God is like the sun—a never-changing source of light. So why does He seem to change? Sometimes you can almost feel His love coming down on you; other times He seems far away and uncaring. Sometimes everything in your life is working beautifully; other times it seems like nothing is going right. Why does God’s constant love seem so inconstant?

In reality, it has to do with changes in our lives. Sometimes we are looking towards God; when this happens, His love shines down on us directly like the sun at noon, and everything is a peaceful shade of blue. But there are also times when God is not our primary focus; instead, we travel a path that deviates from His. Then God’s light hits us from an angle like the light of dawn or dusk; our lives are painted with the red glow of conflict. Red is a color of warning; there are many times when God has to make it clear that we are heading in the wrong direction. And there are times when we turn our backs on God completely, choosing our own ways over His; when we refuse to look towards His light, all that we see is the blackness of evil and despair, like the sky at midnight. It is not God who changes; how we see Him is greatly influenced by the direction of our lives.

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