She has some age on her, so I call her sometimey.
I love SUVs, so when we bought a new car I decided to keep driving the one my wife and I had driven for the last three years: a 2002 Ford Explorer with around 250,000 miles on the odometer. I say around because the odometer is sometimey. It only lights up once in a while.
The air is also sometimey. About a year ago, it decided it would stop coming out of the top vents and blow only out of the bottom and dash vents. Rather than a cool upper body, I now keep cold feet. Then one day, I heard the mechanism open and suddenly air came from the vents it was supposed to. Four weeks later, it started coming from below again.
And then there's the windows-all electric. They, too, are sometimey. Sometimes they lower and raise as they are supposed to, sometimes they lower but won't raise, and sometimes they won't do either. Turning the car off and re-cranking it sometimes jump starts them. At other times, opening the door to a certain spot does the trick.
In spite of the sometimey parts on my car, I still love her. She's been good and is still in good mechanical working order. I've just learned to put up with her sometimeyness.
But I don't care to serve a God who operates the same way. And, fortunately, He doesn't. After delivering His people from Egyptian slavery, God guided them consistently with a pillar of cloud during the day and a pillar of fire during the night.
God's guidance of His current people mimics His guidance in the old days. He is the same and never changes. I may come across incidents recorded in the Bible that seem to imply God changes, but that is only me trying to understand God from a human perspective. God doesn't change His plans, character, or eternality.
What seems like change falls under the term sovereignty. In human time, it may appear God has changed, but whatever it is was already in God's mind from the beginning.
Most importantly, God won't change His mind about salvation, forgiveness, and eternity. Once we accept Him, we are His. Period. He won't take back the forgiveness of our sins He freely gave.
When you can't depend on anything or anyone else, you can always depend on God.
John Stuart
Knoxville, Tennessee, USA
