We talked last week about remembering and imitating the faith of our leaders. For the Hebrews, some, maybe most, of those leaders were now gone, likely having been martyred for their faith. The reality is for all of us that our pastors come and go, and some of them fall into sin. We’ve seen that happen far too often among pastors we have respected and loved lately.
Not only will our leaders change, but the religious landscape around us will change. All of us who are older know that our culture has gotten “worse and worse” (2 Tim. 3:13). So Jesus’ unchanging character not only encourages them in the midst of losing good leaders but also admonishes them to stay true to the faith and not follow “diverse and strange teachings” (Heb. 13:9). If Jesus does not change, we should be wary of any new teachings.
“Jesus Christ” was the center of the message that the leaders had preached to these hearers (cf. v. 7). That message and its Hero is what this writer had urged his readers not to abandon. The leaders had preached the Word of God to these readers, and that preaching culminated in Jesus Christ.
All the changes that we face is why it is so important to keep our eyes and trust on Jesus Christ. Everything, and I mean everything else changes. Some of those changes upset us. That is why it is so comforting that “Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever” (Heb. 13:8). So we need most to follow our real Leader, Jesus Christ our Lord.
In the midst of this ever-changing environment, it is good to remember that there is one thing that never changes — and that is Jesus Christ! He was in the past exactly who He is in the present and precisely who He will be forever! That’s why Hebrews 13:8 says, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, and today, and forever.”
Here, the very same Old Testament Scriptures and wording that describe God the Father’s immutableness are applied directly to Christ (cf. Psalm 102:27 and Hebrews 1:12; Isaiah 48:12 and Revelation 1:17).
The later admonition to “obey your leaders and submit to them” (13:17) may imply that some in the congregation have not transitioned well from the first generation to the present leadership. If any were troubled over the loss of those who once shepherded them, they must realize that their great shepherd is and always will be with them: “Jesus Christ is the same [ho autos] yesterday and today and forever.” The OT citations showing the Son’s divine superiority to angels at the start of this sermon included Psalm 102:25-27, in which the Son is contrasted with the created heavens and earth: “They will perish, but you remain. . . . You are the same [ho autos], and your years will have no end” (Heb. 1:10-12).
The created order’s mutability has touched his hearers’ experience in the death of their shepherds, but the divine Son, Jesus Christ, remains “the same,” unchangeable and eternal. That divine Son has become the incarnate Son, has undergone temptation and suffering and death, and has emerged triumphant “by the power of an indestructible life” (7:16) to become and remain a “priest forever, after the order of Melchizedek” (7:17). If the death of trusted human shepherds has contributed to the hearers’ weariness and faintheartedness, they must realize that they have a “great shepherd” whom God “brought again from the dead” (13:20). He “always lives to make intercession for them” (7:25) and keeps his word, promising, “I will never leave you nor forsake you,” which he expressed in other words to his awestruck disciples after his resurrection: “I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:20). (ESV Expository Commentary).
Some of these readers might have experienced Jesus while he was still alive, but for most of them they had no first-hand experience with Christ. But the Jesus seated at the right hand of God is the same Jesus who walked on earth and the same Jesus who will come again for us.
Everything around us changes. We humans change most of all. Our moods sweeten or sour, our ability to work lessens as we age, we age and fall ill and eventually we die. Jesus does not. He always lives and is always the same.
Yesterday Jesus “offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death” (5:7). Today he is a high priest before the Father who is able to sympathize with our weakness because “in every respect [he] has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (4:15). And forever this same Jesus “always lives to make intercession for them” (7:25). “Our priest is eternally the same and eternally contemporary. We need not fear opinion changes or mood swings in Jesus!” (R. Kent Hughes, Preaching the Word: Hebrews, vol. 2, 228).
But what does that mean? What does it mean to say that Jesus is the “same” no matter what time or season it is? This is what theologians call “immutability.” That is, God does not change in His essence (character), His will or His plans or His promises. There is no variableness, no “shadow of turning” (James 1:17) in Christ.
“[Immutability] means that, being perfect, God cannot and does not change. In order to change, a moral being must change in either of two ways. Either he must change for the better or he must change for the worse. God cannot get better, because that would mean that He was less than perfect earlier, in which case He would not have been God. But God cannot get worse either, because in that case He would become imperfect, which He cannot be. God is and must remain perfect in all His attributes” (James Montgomery Boice, Minor Prophets, Volume 2, p. 600).
When we say that Jesus is always and ever the same and that he never changes we aren’t thinking of immutability in the way we apply that term to the Rock of Gibraltar. The Rock of Gibraltar is a very real place off the southwestern tip of Europe on the Iberian Peninsula, was known in myths and history as a solid, stable entity that could not be moved.
John MacArthur has written: “Immutability does not mean that God is static or inert, nor does it mean that He does not act distinctly in time or possess true affections. God is impassible—not in the sense that he is devoid of true feeling or has no affections but in the sense that His emotions are active and deliberate expressions of His holy dispositions, not (as is often the case with human emotions) involuntary passions by which He is driven.”
God is solid and stable, like a rock, and we can depend upon Him in any and every circumstance. But rocks don’t have sense or feelings. Jesus is alive and feels and thinks and responds to circumstances.
Jesus Christ did “become flesh” (John 1:14) but did not cease to be God. God is willing and able to be reconciled to former enemies through the cross (Romans 5:10; 2 Corinthians 5:18-19).
The Greek word for the “same” emphatically states that Jesus Christ is unchangeable! What good news this is in a world where things are changing at lightning speed! Jesus Christ is the one Person we can depend on to be the same, regardless of the time or the spirit of the age. We don’t need to refigure who Jesus is, what He thinks, or what His message is, because He is the same — and everything He represents is the same — yesterday, today, and forever!
The word “yesterday” is the Greek word exthes, and it depicts all time that ever was up until this present moment. It describes the past. The word “today” is the Greek word semeron, and it means today or at this very moment or this current age. It depicts the present. But in the Bible when the words “yesterday and today” are used in one phrase, as they are used here, it also portrays continuity.
The words “yesterday and today” are an Old Testament expression to denote continuity (see Exodus 5:14; 2 Samuel 15:20). So here we find that Jesus isn’t one way in the past and another way in the present. Whoever He was in the past is exactly who He is in the present. There is continuity in Jesus Christ!
Therefore, if you discover Jesus of the past, you have also discovered Jesus of the present, and you have discovered Jesus of the future, because He is continuously the same. The word “forever” in Greek means into all the ages of the future. This phrase depicts all future time to come, including all ages that will ever be known. Hence, it describes the future.
I don’t know about you, but I am so thankful that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for all future ages! With all the sweeping changes happening in the world right now, I thank God that Jesus isn’t one of them!
Who He was in the past, in the Gospels is the same Jesus who is present with us today and will be with us forever!
There is no “before” or “after” with God, as there is with us. There’s no “He used to be like that, but now He’s like this.” There’s no such thing as “the Old Testament God” as opposed to “the New Testament God.” He was good, He is good, and He always will be good. And the same can be said about His power, His wisdom, His love, and so on.
Another way to talk about God’s immutability is that whereas you and I are always “becoming,” God is always “being.” We’re always traveling; God is already there and has always been. We can develop or deteriorate, grow or decay, progress or regress. But with God, there is no room for improvement. He has always been, and always will be, utterly and delightfully perfect in every way. One theologian puts it like this: “All that is creaturely is in [the] process of becoming. [The creature] is changeable, constantly striving, in search of rest and satisfaction, and finds this rest only in him who is pure being without becoming.”
So when we talk about Jesus never changing, we mean, first of all, that His love towards us does not change. There is no “loves me, loves me not.” Whom He loves, He loves to the end (John 13:1). His love for you doesn’t rise and fall like a thermometer. It doesn’t change toward us because we fail Him, rather His love changes us.
William E. Sangster, a Methodist leader, suggested that if you nail your heart to people, they will move and change, but if you nail your heart to Jesus, as the Bible says, He is, “the same yesterday and today and forever.”
Now, understand that God loves different people in different ways. God “loved the world” (John 3:16) and provides the possibility of salvation. God loves His own children in a different and deeper way. He also loves someone who obeys Him (John 15:14) and who is a cheerful giver (2 Cor. 9:6) in a different way. We could say for those who belong to Jesus Christ God’s love towards us is unconditional, or maybe better said, “contra-conditional.” He loves us even though we are sinners.
The Puritan Thomas Adams takes his love back into the past before the worlds began. He writes:
“Much comfort I must hear leave to your meditation. If God preordained a Savior for man before He had either made man, or man had marred himself—as Paul to Timothy, “He hath saved us according to His own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began” (2 Tim. 1:9)—then surely he meant that nothing would separate us from that eternal love in that Savior (Romans 8:29)” (Thomas Adams, The Immutable Mercy of Jesus Christ).
Secondly, God’s promises do not change. Isaiah 40:8 makes the point: “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.” He will always be faithful to keep His promises no matter how seemingly impossible it may be. “There is many a believer who forsakes God, but there is never a believer whom God forsakes” says Bob LaForge.
When God’s people departed from Him (in the Old Testament biblical accounts) all the more emphasis was put upon His faithfulness, so that the only hope of His wayward people lay not only in His grace and mercy but also in His faithfulness, which stands in marked contrast with the faithlessness and inconstancy of His people (Gaspar Hodge).
“God is true. His Word of Promise is sure. In all His relations with His people God is faithful. He may be safely relied upon. No one ever yet really trusted Him in vain. We find this precious truth expressed almost everywhere in the Scriptures, for His people need to know that faithfulness is an essential part of the Divine character. This is the basis of our confidence in Him” (A. W. Pink, The Attributes of God). As Spurgeon says, “God writes with a pen that never blots, speaks with a tongue that never slips, acts with a hand that never fails.”
Consider God’s faithfulness to His promises: We learn that all things do work together for good (Rom. 8:28). We learn that God will never leave us nor forsake us (Heb. 13:5). We learn that nothing will separate us from the love of Christ (Rom. 8:35). We learn to walk by faith and not by sight (2 Cor. 5:7). We learn to trust in God’s character and not our circumstances. We learn no detail of our life is outside His loving purpose and sovereign control. We learn His solution far surpasses our most creative imagination. We learn God is often closest when we least feel His presence. We learn Hebrews 10:23 which calls us to “hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful.”
Thirdly, His presence is always with us. To say that Jesus is unchanging and always the same means that there never has been a time in the past and never will be in the days ahead when his assurance to us in the Great Commission will prove false. You will recall that in Matthew 28 Jesus said, “And I will be with you, even to the end of the age.”
So here in v. 8 he tells us that we need never fear that we will wake up one day and God will be gone, vanished, having left us to ourselves. We know this will never be the case because Jesus Christ who is God is the “same” yesterday, when he first made that promise, as well as today when I need him to be near and close by to me, and in the days and weeks and years ahead when my life starts to fall apart.
When we face difficulties, we sometimes forget God’s past faithfulness. We see only the detours and the dangerous path. But look back and you will also see the joy of victory, the challenge of the climb, and the presence of your Traveling Companion who has promised never to leave you nor forsake you.
I’m sure most of you are familiar with the poem Footprints in the Sand.
One night I dreamed I was walking along the beach with
the Lord. Scenes from my life flashed across the sky. In
each, I noticed footprints in the sand. Sometimes there were
two sets of footprints; other times there was only one.
During the low periods of my life I could see only one set of
footprints, so I said, “You promised me, Lord, that you would
walk with me always. Why, when I have needed you most,
have you not been there for me?”
The Lord replied, “The times when you have seen only one set
of footprints, my child, is when I carried you.”
This is the consistent reason, throughout Scripture, why we have no need to fear. After the death of Moses, God encouraged Joshua, the new leader who would lead the children of Israel into the covenanted land, “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go” (Joshua 1:9).
What a precious promise.
What this means most of all for us and for our author’s first-century readers, is that everything else may change and does change, and only Christ can be depended upon. Our trust in him is therefore a confident trust, for we know that he will not, indeed cannot, change. His purposes are unfailing, his promises unassailable. It is because the God who promised us eternal life is immutable that we may rest assured that nothing, not trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword shall separate us from the love of Christ. It is because Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever that neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, not even powers, height, depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom. 8:38-39)!
No matter what lies ahead in this always-changing world with its drifting continents and fading suns—no matter what the seas may bring, we must sustain ourselves with this double-focus—remembering those who have gone before and focusing on Jesus Christ, our eternal, unchangeable contemporary. Those who truly do this will navigate the roughest seas.
Grace Still Amazes 